Forensic artist Oscar Nilsson has recreated the face of an early Neolithic man (above). This is one of 250 artefacts on display
Alisdair Hinshelwood Director, Haley Sharpe Design, visitor centre designers
Do you expect numbers to increase? It’s never been an objective to increase visitor numbers, due to the sensitiv- ity of the site. Plus we’ve been limited with the size of the new car park we’ve been able to build. Stonehenge has been attracting around one million visitors per year, on a 70/30 interna- tional-domestic split. We expect that to rise to around 1.25 million and we’ll manage that on a timed ticketing sys- tem, so people will now have to book in advance to be sure of entry.
The visitor centre was the fi rst phase of the development. What comes next? The new centre was the main phase, and we’re now concentrating on restor- ing the natural landscape, as well as building a new exhibit of Neolithic houses in our external gallery space. We advertised nationally for volun-
teers to build them and got a great response. Visitors will be able to watch them being constructed, and when fi n- ished they can go inside – there’ll be fi res lit and replicas of the furniture and implements used at that time.
Will your role as director change now the site has opened? When all the phases of the develop- ment are complete, this role will come to an end. I’ve been working on this project since 2008 and it’s been the biggest challenge of my career to date. Stonehenge was a national disgrace,
and fi nally we’ve had the opportunity to put things right.
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How did Haley Sharpe Design come to be involved in the Stonehenge project? Through a competitive tender issued by English Heritage (EH) in 2009.
What was your brief? To work with EH to fi nd ways to express the importance of Stonehenge in its wider historical, cultural and landscape context, and to create a step-change in the way in which visitors experience this sig- nifi cant World Heritage Site.
How have you told the Stonehenge story? We’ve recreated past landscapes through virtual technology, pre- sented differing perspectives on the meaning of the Stones, and brought real archaeological objects back to the site that express human pres- ence during the prehistoric period, when Stonehenge was of most importance to our ancestors.
What are the most striking features of the centre?
One of its most compelling features is the 360-degree interactive thea- tre. Everybody wants to stand in the middle of the Stones, but clearly because of the problems with ero- sion, it’s never been possible for all visitors. Through technology, visitors are now able to do this realistically in the digital theatre.
EH commissioned a digital scan of the Stones some years ago – showing them in minute detail –
Read Leisure Management online
leisuremanagement.co.uk/digital
so we had a valuable, ready-made asset when we appointed the soft- ware company Centre Screen to develop AV for the theatre. Visitors can now travel back in time to experience three key periods of
human activity at Stonehenge.
How long does the experience take? It’s been designed so that visitors don’t have to go through the cen- tre at all – they can choose to go directly to the Stones. Once they’re at the centre, our
brief was to create a space where the key messages of Stonehenge could be distilled into a 15-minute experience – simply to manage the volume of people who visit each year. So we had to simplify messages and make them high impact.
What were the main challenges? Dealing with the conditioning requirements in a BREEAM-rated building and planning a narrative that delivered the key messages within the context of the visitor pro- fi le and numbers.
Will visitors see any ‘fi rsts’? It’s the fi rst time that prehistoric objects from Stonehenge and the surrounding landscape have been displayed in the World Heritage Site. There’s a huge amount of satis- faction in bringing these items (on loan from museums in Salisbury and Wiltshire) back to where they were left thousands of years ago.
ISSUE 2 2014 © cybertrek 2014
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