The National Railway Museum in York is searching for a design team to complete the redisplay and reinterpretation of the museum’s Great Hall.
Science Museum Group, which runs the National Railway Museum, has issued a tender for a team to completely re-display the 8,300sqm Great Hall as well as refresh and re-present the museum’s collections store.
The project will transform the Great Hall, which has remained mostly unchanged for more than 40 years, since the museum opened in 1975.
The tender also includes the creation of Wonderlab, a 2,300sqm hands-on gallery and learning space to inspire future engineers.
Wonderlab will allow young people to build, test and learn through activities like pulling a locomotive or exploring how fast things travel and how they move. The National Railway Museum describes it as a “unique ‘tinkering’ workshop space” that will feature live demonstrations, live shows and experiments.
Its concept is based on the interactive galleries created by the Science Museum Group at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and the National Science Museum in London.
The National Railway Museum hopes to complete these works by 2021 as the first phase of a wider masterplan.
Judith McNicol, director of the museum, said: “This is a challenging, dramatic and high-profile project which will be seen and enjoyed by millions of visitors from around the world.
“We are seeking ambitious and capable designers that can combine a sensitive approach to displaying our much-loved railway history with bold and imaginative ideas that can help redefine what a 21st-century museum should look like.”
