Jane Thomas has worked with the architectural collections of the National Monuments Record of Scotland since 1990. Her involvement with the records of Basil Spence's practice began in 1992 when she curated an exhibition of photographs from the archive of Spence Glover & Ferguson at the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. Her interest in architectural practice archives developed during her management of the Scottish Architects Papers Preservation Project. From 1999-2004, SAPPP catalogued and conserved almost 200,000 items from 25 archives with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In running the Collections Section of the National Monuments Record of Scotland, which encompasses architectural and archaeological material, she was responsible for acquisitions and cataloguing as well as initiating publishing and exhibiting projects that disseminate information about the Collections. She has worked almost exclusively on Basil Spence for the last six years spanning an HLF funded Project to catalogue, conserve and disseminate his practice archive and the AHRC research project. In 2007 she co-curated a major retrospective of Spence's career with the National Galleries of Scotland which was shown in Edinburgh, London and Coventry.

She has served on the executive committee of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland (as vice-chair) and the Board of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums.

Publications include:

An Illustrated Guide to Midlothian, 1995, The Rutland Press.
 
Survey of Public Collections: NMRS and RIAS' Scottish Architects' Papers, A Source Book, 1996, The Rutland Press.

Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums, 2000, RCAHMS (ed.).

'A day in the life of a young trainee architect, Hamish MacLachlan', Architectural Heritage XI, 2000, Edinburgh University Press. This included a description of working in Spence's Scottish office prior to the Coventry competition.

 

Contact Details

Email - Jane.Thomas@rcahms.gov.uk