Science Museum's £75m new look

11 April 2012

The Science Museum today unveils plans for the first comprehensive redevelopment in its history - a rolling 10-year plan costing at least £75 million.

The plan will transform what the museum's new director Lindsay Sharp describes as already "the greatest science museum in the world", aimed at increasing access and appeal.

It was presented to the museum's directors and trustees in the form of a "strategic drawing" of the site and shows that only a handful of galleries now familiar in the museum will remain in their present form. The vast majority will be at the least moved or extensively modified, and in some cases will be swept away altogether.

The present Space gallery is likely to move from its present site to become a wider exhibition on cosmology next to the Flight gallery on the top floor. The Power Gallery will move, transformed into a permanent exhibition on energy and its use.

The site it currently occupies would be filled by a Great Court, described as "a more dynamic version" of that at the British Museum, centred around the existing engines which will remain.

Around them, and in the site of the Space gallery, will be food and coffee shops, cloakrooms and massively increased retail space.

Galleries that will vanish include Agriculture, which has not been significantly changed since 1958, and other, older, ones now significantly out of date.

There will be new permanent galleries on "wide themes looking at the future".

The museum also intends to introduce a purpose-built climate controlled gallery for large, worldclass touring exhibitions that cannot currently be brought to London because of their scale.

A new roof made from solar panels, will form part of a state-of-theart working exhibit. Probably reinforced by wind turbines and other technology, this will power a significant part of the museum.

There will also be areas in which exhibitions from the museum's definitive collections - ranging from the Industrial Revolution to medical ceramics via televisions - can be changed periodically.

Dr Sharp said: "This museum has never been encyclopaedic. We want parts of it to become more like a magazine so people always know there will be something new they can come back to."

However, he rejects outright suggestions that the Museum is "dumbing down", abandoning its traditional strengths or turning into a theme park.

"The first key objective is to increase the number of objects on display," Dr Sharp told the Standard. "The plans will enable us to increase those by 1,000 at any one time, and the new form of exhibitions will let us use much more than the 10 per cent of our collection that can currently be seen."

The museum needs to generate more income, he said to fund a very substantial programme of creative change. "We can be the place where visitors can ask why and how, and what does this mean for me and my children," he added. "They know they will get an answer that is objective, that is accurate, that is scientific and which is based on real scholarship. That is not going to change. We are going to reinforce that strongly.

"You have to be a Trappist monk not to realise that if you go to the Louvre, the Metropolitan or the V&A, they have more retail space than us. And if we get more than two million visitors a year, which we could, we've got to give them space to be comfortable. We want the experience to include a way of generating income to pile it back in." Material can also be borrowed from its sister museums which include the Railway Museum in York, and the Bradford Museum of Film, Photography and Television.

The new plans will take place against the backdrop of a wider plan to revitalise the museum quarter of South Kensington, in partnership with other organisations including the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the local authority and London Transport.

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