What's in the Pender Archive? - Hunter Living Histories

The Pender Archive represents the surviving work of three generations of Pender Family architects, based in Maitland, New South Wales (Australia) and is one of the largest and most comprehensive architectural collections in the country.

A listing of all surviving plans and specifications relating to approximately 3000 projects across the Hunter Valley Region, New England Region and beyond is here:

Pender Archive – Plans and Specifications Listing (1.2 MB PDF File)

Why are there gaps?

You will see gaps in the listings. Professor Barry Maitland and his team prepared a listing of all bundles of plans while they were still with the Pender Architects Offices in Maitland. This listing was then used as the base for our accessions when the plans were subsequently brought into University custody in the year 2000. The flattened plans were identified and allocated archive location “M” numbers.

The conservation process took many months; firstly fumigation to kill the bugs, then multiple trips to Sydney to the conservator to rehumidfy and flatten out the bundles. Unfortunately, due to the brittle nature of some of the original paper stock, some of the plans did not survive the process. We still left the entries there, but they received no “M number” to denote that they once existed, but no longer.