Picture caption: Interior shot of The British Museum, showing part of the Great Court’s glass roof. Picture credit: Gareth Gerrard on Unsplash.
This year the British Museum will finally be replacing their white, plastic-covered security sheds with something more befitting the Greek Revival architectural style seen in the columns and steps of this institution.
The museum has submitted a planning application for two pavilions, and the structures are expected to be completed this spring, assuming Camden Council grants permission. Designers Studio Weave won a competition to design the new welcome pavilions and landscaped gardens.
The designers have taken inspiration from the museum’s architecture, with the Architects’ Journal describing the design as using “a palette of timber, glass and natural stone, with a scalloped inflection to the roofline that recalls the fluting of the columns that wrap their way around the museum’s outer walls”.
The northern entrance will be reconfigured internally, to integrate better with Montague Place and improve accessibility. The southern entrance forecourt will be opened up to the public and visitors.
With a record-breaking 6.5 million visitors passing through the museum’s doors in the last year, the replacement of the ugly plastic sheds is long overdue. Queueing can be a problem, which is understandable with approximately 3,500 people per hour passing through the entrance at the busiest times.
In the planning application, the design team states that “visitor flow will drastically reduce queuing at both entrances”, referring to the Great Russell Street and Montague Place entrances.
The improved visitor flow won’t just be down to the reconfiguration of the entrances and the new pavilions. The museum plans to open their gates earlier in the morning, so that people can enter the forecourt before the museum opens, rather than blocking the narrow Bloomsbury pavements with lengthy queues.
Studio Weave is working with Wright & Wright Architects, Webb Yates Engineers, Tom Masse Studio and Daisy Froud.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan OBE, Director of the British Museum, said: “As the most visited building in the UK, and one of the top three most visited museums in the world, first impressions count. With the visitor welcome pavilions we’re striving to create the most inspiring greeting possible for the 6.5 million people (and counting) from across the nation and around the world who come through our doors each year – whether it’s their first visit or fifteenth, aged 5 or 95.”
The new visitor welcome facilities are part of the museum’s masterplan, which includes the construction of the British Museum Archaeological Research Collection (BM_ARC) near Reading. This allows storage of items from the museum’s collection so that they can easily be accessed for research and study.
Also part of the masterplan is overhauling the museum’s outdated energy infrastructure to reduce their carbon footprint, and redesigning the Western Range, which is all the galleries to the west of the Great Court.
As you may already know if you’ve visited the British Museum since 2000, the Great Court sits at the centre of the museum and is the largest covered public square in Europe. It was designed by Foster and Partners, and is enclosed by an impressive glass roof, with the famous Reading Room in the middle, and the Great Court restaurant on the mezzanine floor above.
If you haven’t yet visited the museum, you may want to wait until this autumn, when the 70-metre Bayeux Tapestry – depicting the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings – will be on display. The artifact is on loan from the French, while the Bayeux Tapestry Museum undergoes renovation. This is bound to be a popular exhibition, so you’ll definitely have a chance to see whether visitor flow is working well with the new pavilions in place.
Meanwhile, if you need any assistance with the structural elements of an upcoming project, please do get in touch.
