The Science Museum goes large

To the south of Swindon, just outside the village of Wroughton (where my daughters went to school) is what's now rather grandly known as the Science and Innovation Park. This huge 540 acre site houses the Science Museum's store facility. It's also home to the museum's amazing library, where I can be seen telling the (then) BBC's Robert Peston about quantum theory - and acted as a track for the TV show Grand Tour before it stopped being a Top Gear lookalike.

Last Tuesday, I was honoured to be invited to the unveiling of the new Hawking Building a massive store housing over 300,000 items from the huge to the tiny. The scale of the building is remarkable - it really does look like one of those CGI, bigger than anything you can really imagine, store houses you see in movies. But this is for real.

Walking round is quite an experience. Unlike a modern, carefully curated museum, this is a wonderful jumble, where you might find a Dalek lurking near a submarine alongside a Glasgow tram. Not to mention a plastic duck used as a model of comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko. There is so much to see it's hard to take everything you are seeing (a tiny fraction of the contents).

Its main reason for existence isn't as an exhibition space. I was talking to one of the curators who said it is transformative for them, as they can locate any one these many thousands of objects extremely quickly - and it's all easily accessible for study or to be moved to a display.

Even though it is primarily a store, it is regularly open to the public on guided tours (see the Park's link above for visit opportunities). This being the case, my one small moan is that it would be good if visitors could, say, use an app to identify what objects are - most aren't labelled other than by catalogue number.

Congratulations to the Science Museum team for getting this amazing structure up and running, and giving more access to the public than ever before.

Images by the author.

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