If these walls could talk...

I was holding a work event today in New Register House in Edinburgh, part of the General Register Office for Scotland.

Compulsory registration of birth, death and marriage came into effect in 1855 and New Register House was built in 1861 to provide additional storage for Scotland's archives.

The main feature of the building is the central repository; the Dome (pictured). It is made of five tiers of magnificent ironwork shelving. These tiers hold over 400,000 statutory registers of all the births, deaths and marriages in Scotland since 1855, and it's still being added to every year. If these walls could talk, they'd have some interesting stories to tell!

In this picture you can see the three main tiers. Red birth volumes are on the first tier, the death volumes in funereal black on the second, and the marriage volumes in green on the third. And this is just the front of the shelving, it goes much further back - there are 6.5 km (4.0 mi) of shelving containing some half a million volumes.

It's a beautiful and fascinating building. I desperately wanted to go for a wander in the stacks, but alas, the public cannot enter the shelving areas.