Bank of England Museum
Exhibition design
Project management
3D Design
Graphic design
Case study
Enhancing permanent museum displays and creating temporary exhibitions to engage with visitors and convey the Bank’s key messages.
Working closely with the curators we have designed permanent displays and temporary exhibitions for the Bank of England Museum. We have also looked at signage, wayfinding and exhibition booklets and advertising. Below are some of the projects we have been involved with.
Felix Topolski: Drawing Debden
In 1957 the Bank of England commissioned artist Feliks Topolski to sketch everyday life at its newly opened printing works in Debden, Essex. The artist’s drawings and paintings capture the activity of people and machinery at the newly-built factory.
The original artworks are fragile, so we designed a flexible system to enable the display of small groups of originals, on rotation every few weeks. The whole set of images are shown in reproduction, along with artifacts, photographs and printing plates from the same era.
Topolski often painted using household paints on plywood panels, to echo his use of simple materials we designed the exhibition display and housings for interactives in unfinished ply with colour highlights taken from the drawings.
Original pages from Topolski’s ’Chronicle’ were pasted to the wall and plinths to give historical context to the exhibition.
Bank Note Gallery
This gallery tells the story of banknotes from the earliest paper money to the most recent anti-forgery features and was completely refurbished and redesigned to coincide with the release of the first UK polymer bank notes.
Working with Cubit3D we opened up the space to create a clean, modern gallery, preserving the original decorative ceiling feature whilst making the display wheelchair and child-friendly.
Use of new free-standing showcases and custom-built furniture make the display area flexible, and easy to adapt for future developments.
Keeping an even keel
The Museum required a dramatic piece of staging in the reconstruction of Soane’s Stock Office to communicate the role and purpose of the Bank of England.
Our aim was to streamline the display area and create a strong, themed centrepiece to an already impressive space. Initial plans for a boat concept received a very positive response. Next we brought in Russell Stewart of Cubit 3D to work up the design into a three dimensional structure.
This was to have no fixings which impacted on the fabric of the building, and power supply and security had to conform to the Bank’s guidelines. It also, of course, had to accommodate graphics and interactives which formed the display’s content. In addition we needed to incorporate Clay Interactive’s inflation game.
The solution was based on traditional boat building techniques with a free standing interlocking rib structure cnc cut from birch plywood. Using only 2d cut shapes the structure and graphics succeeding in mimicking the multiple 3d curves in a boat’s structure. The piece was beautifully realised and installed by B Scenic, who fabricated and test built in their Edinburgh workshop and delivered flat-packed to the Bank for completion.
Gold display
Following our re-design of the lift a gold bar interactive we were commissioned to refurbish a narrow corridor to create a display telling the story of gold at the Bank. As part of this project we specified an extremely secure display case for the gold bars and items on display. Graphic panels feature facts and stories about gold and the Bank’s secure vaults.
For the main wall we created a large graphic showing the inside of a gold vault. Visitors are encouraged to post their selfies taken in front of this wall using #GoldVaultSelfie. We worked with Erco to design an appropriate and energy efficient lighting scheme.
Temporary exhibitions
We have designed and installed a number of temporary exhibitions at the Bank of England museum on a wide variety of themes, from architecture to photography, inflation to cartoons.
Some of the identities for these exhibitions are shown below.
