Deep in basements beneath Mulgrave St, archivist Shaun McGuire winches a cog that opens towering rows of what are known as stacks – giant shelving units weighing as much as buses and holding any type of archive you can imagine. The basements are filled with these units after a 1952 blaze at a Dixon St office saw a treasure trove of government archives incinerated. Back then, archives were erratically stored around the city, and the inferno led to the creation of a national archive to safeguard the country’s records. MONIQUE FORD/Stuff Archives New Zealand holds hundreds of thousands of physical records, equating to more than 271 kilometres.