Hundreds of historic buildings throw open their doors to the public for free this weekend. Mark Foster concludes our series on the Heritage Open Days.

HIDDEN away down one of Whitby's narrow old streets is a building that on first glimpse is entirely unremarkable.

Once the sports hall for a church, it is certainly of no great age and architecturally it is of no particular importance.

But appearances can be deceptive, for this building is the home of the Whitby Archives and Heritage Centre - and is effectively a portal into the past.

Inside can be found a wealth of material relating to the resort's history, with thousands of pictures, records and artefacts.

This weekend, the building will be among the many nationwide taking part in the Heritage Open Days scheme.

Although the centre, a charitable trust, is now home to countless items, it started in an altogether more humble fashion, with a tiny collection of just six old postcards of the town.

Writer and historian Colin Waters wanted to create a local archive of photographs and other pictorial material and donated the postcards to get it started. That was in 1983 and the collection has grown to become an invaluable resource.

It now encompasses all sorts of paper records and artefacts - including the old whalebones that for many years stood on the cliffs in the port.

To start with, it was housed in a room in the town's library, but as it continued to grow it had to move to bigger and bigger premises, taking over its present base in Flowergate in late 2001.

"My original thought was that so much valuable local material was disappearing," said Mr Waters, now chairman of the trustees.

"When people died or moved away from the area, photographs were being taken away."

The collection includes about 95,000 photographs and now has genealogy, with files on about 75,000 names. A hard-working team of 18 volunteers have the job of keeping it all under control.

Only days ago, the trust was awarded £25,000 from the Countryside Agency to record and store its artefacts using computers and CD-Roms to open up the archives to a much wider community.