On former Royal Air Force land next to Wick Airport, a low silver building catches the Caithness light from a long way off. Its silver-anodised aluminium cladding reflects sky and sea, and small pools of water - lochans, the local word for tiny lochs - sit in the grounds outside. Inside, two collections share the same archive vaults: every paper record the British civil nuclear industry has produced since the 1940s, and the county records of Caithness, the earliest of which dates from 1589. The building is called Nucleus, and it is the strangest pairing in British archival history.
When the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority decided in the 2010s to consolidate the archive material from sixteen separate nuclear sites across Britain into a single home, they chose Caithness on purpose. This is Dounreay country. The experimental fast-reactor site at Dounreay, opened in 1957 and shut down decades ago, dominated the local economy for half a century. More than 2,000 people in this corner of the Highlands still work on its decommissioning, a project not scheduled to complete until 2030. The archives chose to settle near the work, and near the workforce. The building's establishment was projected to create 25 permanent archivist and conservation jobs, most of which could be filled by local people. The £21 million budget was significant for a region of fewer than 30,000 residents - and a recognition that hosting Britain's nuclear past should bring something to those who lived its working years.
Reiach and Hall Architects designed Nucleus, and the Architects' Journal gave them its 2017 Editor's Choice Award for the work. The complex has two parts: a two-storey concrete archive building, environmentally controlled and built to outlast its own paper for centuries, and a separate single-storey administration and public access building where visitors can use the records. Both are clad in silver-anodised aluminium - a deliberate echo of the engineering aesthetic of the nuclear industry, and a material that holds up well against Caithness weather. The grounds were designed with constructed lochans, small still pools that catch reflections and connect the building to the wider Flow Country landscape. Morrison Construction built it under a design-and-build contract. The site is managed by High Life Highland, the arms-length culture and leisure trust of Highland Council, which also runs libraries and museums across the region.
The Caithness county archive had been housed at the Caithness Archive Centre in Wick Library, but had outgrown the storage there. Its records run from 1589 to the present: charters, council minutes, correspondence, maps, photographs - the documentary memory of a county that has been a Norse jarldom, a Sinclair earldom, a fishing economy, an oil-and-gas hub, and now a nuclear decommissioning centre, all within walking distance of the same archive shelf. The nuclear records are still being centralised at Nucleus from the sixteen sites where they were originally held, and the digitisation programme by Restore Digital is making them progressively available online. Two histories share the same building: one rooted in Scottish medieval administration, the other in the atomic age. They sit next to each other in the climate-controlled stacks, and a researcher can request both in the same morning.
58.451N, 3.084W. On former RAF land directly adjacent to Wick Airport (EGPC) - effectively on the airfield's southern edge. Visible from the pattern as a low silver-clad complex with small water features and parking. Best photographed at 1,000-1,500 ft AGL. Wick Airport itself is the diversion field and primary base; coordinate with EGPC tower for any low-level photography. Caithness weather can shift fast, with sea fog rolling in off the North Sea.