032 PROJECT 1


Above Visitors are welcomed into the museum space by an illuminated wall of quotations from Wordsworth’s work


Above right The slate and rust tones used in Gallery Four were inspired by the local Easedale ironstone


PROJECT INFO


Client Wordsworth Trust wordsworth.org.uk


Museum refurbishment architect Purcell purcelluk.com


Introductory film Nick Street streetfilms.co.uk


Sound designer Carolyn Downing carolyndowning.co.uk


Lighting designer DHA Designs dhadesigns.com


Project manager / QS Appleyard & Trew appleyardandtrew.com


Exhibition contractor The Hub thehublimited.co.uk


Armour systems Armour Systems armour-systems.com


Interactive elements (Wordsworth/model) Unusual Projects unusualprojects.uk


Landscape consultant OPEN Architects op-en.co.uk


Exhibition, interpretation and wayfinding, and branding


Nissen Richards Studio nissenrichardsstu


Graphics contractor Leach weareleach.com


Slate signage Gordon Greaves Slate gordongreaves.co.uk


M&E (basebuild) Max Fordham maxfordham.com


Structure (basebuild) Civic Engineers civicengineers.com


Basebuild contractor Parkinson fparkinson.co.uk


Display mounts Colin John Lindley Showcases


AV hardware DHD Service


pictograms to communicate elements such as visiting times, walking distances, closed areas, and rain- and sunshine-friendly paths. Slate, from local supplier Gordon Greaves Slate, is used for the signage, with the writing etched and ink-filled. The choice of natural materials, also used in the architecture and landscape design, allows the project to ‘melt’ into the landscape, Nissen explains, while internally the exhibition design takes on a range of its hues, such as the rust colour of local Easedale Ironstone. An ink-stained pattern provides a backdrop to the logo, bringing the materiality of writing to the fore; this print is also used at a larger scale across exhibition surfaces.


Space has been opened up across the site by Purcell, and the museum extended carefully in a tight plot to maintain views to the landscape and across the site, also making a coherent whole of the different buildings and increasing legibility between them. The architects converted the old museum shop into a cafe, moving the shop to the museum space, and a new ofice and accessible learning space was created to be used for presentations, discussions and workshops. The significant level changes across the site posed some challenges for the landscaping too, and OPEN’s work included rationalising and reworking steps and ramps to ensure accessibility throughout.


Nissen Richards and Purcell worked together to choreograph new visitor routes across the site. The main entrance opens to the shop and ticketing area before visitors reach the new double-height museum space, where they are greeted by quotations from Wordsworth’s work, written on a full-height light wall. Visitors then watch an immersive introductory film by Nick Street, before entering Dove cottage – an interpretational approach that introduces visitors to the cottage by showing it full of life. The Grade I listed cottage itself is treated as a living museum, but the approach, as director Pippa Nissen explains, ‘...was not to replicate the original state, but to intimate and evoke its past history’. While original furniture remains, later incongruous pieces were removed and new furniture commissioned from local craftsmen with specialist historic knowledge. Dorothy Wordsworth was also a prolific writer, and her celebrated Grasmere journals are full of stories of their life that were used to inform an object-based treatment of the property. This ‘wonderful resource’, as Nissen explains, ‘has been combined with film and sound design commissions to suggest a lived-in and humble home, where extraordinary writing took place’. ‘Traces of life’ are designed into the display, through crumbs left on a plate, an open book or a chair left at an angle. As Elin Simonsson, head of interpretation at Nissen Richards Studio, explains further, ‘the concept is


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