Stephen Coates
speaker
150 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 14 May
Stephen Coates’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A vast space, absolutely full of all creatures, great and small.
One of the big misconceptions I think that people have about museum collections in storage is that they're just things waiting to go on display.
You know, those poor museums don't have space for that stuff in the galleries.
It's not about that.
The collections behind the scenes, in inverted commas, are here for research.
That's what they're all about.
Principal curator of mammals, Richard Sabin, is part of a team preparing to move one of the greatest scientific collections ever assembled.
Tens of millions of specimens, some microscopic, others bigger than buses.
Fragile, precious, even extinct examples from every corner of the globe.
Some are millions of years old.
They'll be going to a new state-of-the-art store and research centre near Reading, a town outside London.
This is something that you can only do with research collections like this once, possibly if you're crazy, twice in a lifetime.
This facility is old, it's crumbling, it's deteriorating and it's not suitable, it's not fit for purpose.
I'm Stephen Coates, and for the documentary from the BBC World Service, we've been to visit the store as preparations get underway.
They're amazingly lifelike.
Some of them even seem to be looking back at us with bright eyes.
Maggie White is the collections move preparation manager, organising a team of around 50 specialists, conservators, engineers, project managers and logistics experts who work alongside the curators.
The last time these specimens were moved was 30 years ago when they arrived in the current store.
Technology has moved on since then.
Every piece of string, paper, foam wrapping, everything that touches the animals should be archival grade.
Showing 21–40 of 150 · page 2 of 8
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