CLIENT FILE
WORDS BY PAMELA BUXTON
Charlotte Kingston, head of public programmes and communications at the National Railway Museum, discusses the plans to transform its York and Shildon sites
What is your role at National Railway Museum? I am the head of public programmes and communications. I look after what we programme at the museum and how we tell people about it. Part of my role is also being the design champion for the museum, commissioning and briefing the design teams and ensuring our masterplan and capital works are beautiful, considered and imaginative, as well as meeting audience needs. It’s a lot of fun. Te museum is undergoing fast-paced transformation, and is the most forward-thinking museum environment I’ve ever worked at.
Had you worked with architects and designers before joining the National Railway Museum seven years ago? Yes – I previously worked as a freelance curator for an international exhibition design company on numerous museum and exhibition projects in the UK and abroad. I worked closely alongside architects and as part of multidisciplinary design teams to deliver award-winning exhibitions. Stand out projects from that part of my career include the Museum of Literature Ireland, the Ikea Museum in Sweden, and Brooklands Museum in Weybridge.
Te museum has embarked on a circa £100m masterplan to transform its sites in York (National Railway Museum) and Shildon (the Locomotion museum). What is the vision for this? We’re the number one visitor attraction in York, attracting three quarters of a million visitors each year, and only 10% of these are what we’d count as railway enthusiasts. Our vision is to become the world’s railway museum, globally relevant and open for all. We are achieving this by making our museum about the past, present and future of the railways, diversifying the stories we tell, and investing in our infrastructure. In doing so, we can increase the number of people we can reach and welcome people in a manner that befits a national museum, which is not currently the case! As part of the York Central redevelopment project, for the first time, we’ll
We’re the number one visitor attraction in York, attracting three quarters of a million visitors each year, and only 10% of these are what we’d count as railway enthusiasts
be able to connect the two sides of our site with level access, and access to the site will no longer be height restricted. We’re designing our masterplan development to dovetail with the wider York
Central regeneration, a 45-hectare city centre brownfield development that will add 2,500 new homes, around one million square feet of commercial business space, a new station exit, and more than seven hectares of parkland and public realm. We’re the cultural tenants, and as the immediate area around the museum transforms over the next decade, we’ll be rising to that challenge.
What stage are you at? We are at an advanced stage in the works, having completed a new interactive gallery (Wonderlab: Te Bramall Gallery) at the National Rail Museum in York, and New Hall, a sustainable collections building at our sister museum, Locomotion. We have a ‘one museum, two sites’ ethos, and New Hall has enabled us to place each of our incredible rail
This image Central Hall will sit at the heart of the redesigned National Railway Museum site, the gateway to a transformed museum
PHOTO: FEILDEN FOWLES
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