Wellcome Collection, London
Refurbishment of a venue that explores the connections between medicine, life and art
London’s Wellcome Collection has such a strong programme of temporary exhibitions and public events that it is often easy to forget its permanent galleries.
The darkened rear staircase and confusing hotel-like landings used to act as a psychological barrier to revisiting the Medicine Man and Medicine Now galleries.
All this has changed with the renovation of the Wellcome Collection, which took longer than planned to complete but finally opened in February.
The scheme brings together the exhibition spaces and library to make the collection feel like a properly visitable museum for the first time since the venue opened in 2007.
One of the major changes is a much celebrated and photographed new staircase in the entrance to the collection that opens up and links the Medicine Now and Medicine Man galleries, the two temporary exhibition galleries and the transformed Wellcome Library Reading Room.
The beautiful new spiral staircase may be the widely reproduced image of the reopening but it is the venue's Reading Room that is the real triumph.
Inspired by the insatiable curiosity of Henry Wellcome – the pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector who founded the Wellcome Trust – the Reading Room is a highly interactive space, with hundreds of books available to read.
There are also puzzles, high-quality reproductions of works from the library, stereoscopes, board games and other activities. These are surrounded by prints, paintings and objects from the collection.
A well thought-out space
On paper, this sounds like a typical kids’ zone that you might find at the end of a traditional museum exhibition, but this is far more than a selection of tatty books, blunt pencils and empty “take me” activity boxes.
There are staff on hand, labelled “ask me”, to help steer visitors through the cornucopia of activities on offer and the space is furnished with comfortable chairs, cushions and even a theatrical replica of Sigmund Freud’s famous couch – the perfect spot to leaf through the volumes on Freud on offer.
Great thought, and presumably expense, have been put into the fabric and the design of the space and activities. The soft furnishings are upholstered with a print of Dorothy Hodgkin’s insulin sketches. Visitors can take, interpret and display inkblot charts (ET holding a gun riding a crocodile, clearly).
Many of the activities and beautiful reproductions are housed in yellow boxes, mimicking archive boxes and wrappers. There are also gloves and magnifying lenses on hand, which makes it easy to believe that you have been given unrivalled open access to the library proper.
Judging from my recent visit, the Reading Room seems to be successful in its intentions. The space was full of visitors either taking a break from the galleries by browsing a book, students with laptops revising using the materials on offer and families learning and drawing together inspired by topics such as pain, faith and identity.
The challenge in the ensuing months and years will be to keep the high-quality consumables restocked and the books, games and other available activities in order to maintain the fresh and polished feel of the newly opened Reading Room.
Perhaps it’s a comment on recent trends in interactive museum design but the space feels hugely innovative, exciting and participative, with scarcely a touchscreen, web portal or QR code in sight. It will be surprising if this model of going back to the collections with plenty of analogue pursuits in a comfortable space won’t be replicated by other museums.
With so many distractions on offer, it’s almost easy to overlook the carefully selected collections on show but the Reading Room displays serve as a history of the Wellcome Collection itself.
Objects, prints, drawings and paintings collected by Henry Wellcome himself sit next to contemporary sculptures, screenprints and additions to the collection that regular visitors will recognise from recent temporary exhibitions.
The juxtaposition of books and objects subtly brings into balance the fact that Wellcome wasn’t just a prolific collector of things but also a bibliophile. One of the books openly available within the space is the Reading Room Companion, a guide to the “diverse curiosities” on display.
Even though it is freely available online, the lavish, hard-copy volume will no doubt find itself on many a museum geek’s bookshelf.
Another initiative to move visitors through the spaces is a selection of free leaflet-led tours around the collection. These cleverly take people through all of the permanent galleries and one of the temporary galleries, highlighting key objects in a theme.
Assuming these are updated with every temporary exhibition there will be a new way to make links across the collection almost every visit.
Public engagement
Away from the public galleries, the £17.5m refurbishment has increased the capacity and usability of the building, focusing on a more-of-the-same approach for the Wellcome Collection’s already strong public engagement through research model.
The new Hub is a space for interdisciplinary residencies to generate research and public engagement, and a youth studio complements the forum and auditorium spaces.
The facilities and space at the research library have been expanded and improved with open-access shelving for those who require a more focused environment than the Reading Room.
Hoping to replicate the success of the always-full ground-floor cafe is the new Wellcome Kitchen, catering to visitors who fancy more than a quick bite.
All in all, it is a traditional yet revolutionary refurbishment – “bigger, bolder, brighter” was the lead line of the press release. It may still be the temporary exhibitions and events programme that will tempt visitors to come back, but it’s the enlightened permanent galleries and facilities that will make them stay.
Mark Carnall is the curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, University College London
Focus on audiences
More than 8,000 people visited the Wellcome Collection during the first weekend after the completion of an 18-month, £17.5m redevelopment that has added some 40% to its public spaces.
Our building project partly answered a numerical challenge: how to cope with more than 500,000 annual visitors crowding into a venue designed for 100,000.
But the thinking behind the revitalised offer is far more than an elegant answer to that flattering problem. The Wellcome Collection 2.0 also represents a genuine attempt to evolve the venue’s core proposition, one that unfolds in surprising ways the further up our new curvy staircase visitors venture.
Since opening in 2007, the Wellcome Collection has found its niche in London’s museum scene, adding a distinctive voice to the capital’s cultural conversation.
Our aim remains to illuminate revelatory aspects of the human condition; the first post-development show presented in our ground -floor gallery, for example, was Forensics: the Anatomy of Crime (26 February-21 June).
How can one attract audiences back into a relaunched cultural venue? Not surprisingly, a double-bill of murder and sex turns out to be a winning offer.
The inaugural Institute of Sexology show (until 20 September) in our new gallery on the first floor was marketed with the saucy invitation to “undress your mind”. It unpacks key moments in the history of scientific attempts to understand sexuality.
This is a more intimate space than the grander gallery downstairs, and our attempt here has been to curate an evolving exhibition that is periodically animated by live events: a longue-durée show in which the curatorial process continues after opening.
Artist and writer Neil Bartlett, for example, has introduced a new sex questionnaire, which includes an invitation to visitors to come up with their own questions.
The most experimental new space is up one more flight of stairs – a thoroughly re-considered Reading Room. In Henry Wellcome’s original museum, this was a Hall of Statuary.
True to that part of its heritage, we have reintroduced a set of modern-day statues: a piece of a 1930s x-ray machine on one plinth, next to an embryology-inspired frock by fashion designer Helen Storey on another.
Moving further into the room, visitors reach shelves of books, drawers with board games and more tables, chairs and cushions than are commonly found in a gallery; in other words a retro but thoroughly modern library space.
And as “readers” they can browse, play and converse among clusters of culture that open up such eclectic topics as alchemy, travel, food and the mind.
Here we hope to nourish the appetites of guests who want to spend longer with us, delving into our content increasingly on their own terms.
And it is maybe in this room that we can most acutely test the success of the project, not just in terms of how closely it conforms to our own careful plans, but also in how it absorbs the unplanned and suggests new ideas and activities.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection, London
The darkened rear staircase and confusing hotel-like landings used to act as a psychological barrier to revisiting the Medicine Man and Medicine Now galleries.
All this has changed with the renovation of the Wellcome Collection, which took longer than planned to complete but finally opened in February.
The scheme brings together the exhibition spaces and library to make the collection feel like a properly visitable museum for the first time since the venue opened in 2007.
One of the major changes is a much celebrated and photographed new staircase in the entrance to the collection that opens up and links the Medicine Now and Medicine Man galleries, the two temporary exhibition galleries and the transformed Wellcome Library Reading Room.
The beautiful new spiral staircase may be the widely reproduced image of the reopening but it is the venue's Reading Room that is the real triumph.
Inspired by the insatiable curiosity of Henry Wellcome – the pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector who founded the Wellcome Trust – the Reading Room is a highly interactive space, with hundreds of books available to read.
There are also puzzles, high-quality reproductions of works from the library, stereoscopes, board games and other activities. These are surrounded by prints, paintings and objects from the collection.
A well thought-out space
On paper, this sounds like a typical kids’ zone that you might find at the end of a traditional museum exhibition, but this is far more than a selection of tatty books, blunt pencils and empty “take me” activity boxes.
There are staff on hand, labelled “ask me”, to help steer visitors through the cornucopia of activities on offer and the space is furnished with comfortable chairs, cushions and even a theatrical replica of Sigmund Freud’s famous couch – the perfect spot to leaf through the volumes on Freud on offer.
Great thought, and presumably expense, have been put into the fabric and the design of the space and activities. The soft furnishings are upholstered with a print of Dorothy Hodgkin’s insulin sketches. Visitors can take, interpret and display inkblot charts (ET holding a gun riding a crocodile, clearly).
Many of the activities and beautiful reproductions are housed in yellow boxes, mimicking archive boxes and wrappers. There are also gloves and magnifying lenses on hand, which makes it easy to believe that you have been given unrivalled open access to the library proper.
Judging from my recent visit, the Reading Room seems to be successful in its intentions. The space was full of visitors either taking a break from the galleries by browsing a book, students with laptops revising using the materials on offer and families learning and drawing together inspired by topics such as pain, faith and identity.
The challenge in the ensuing months and years will be to keep the high-quality consumables restocked and the books, games and other available activities in order to maintain the fresh and polished feel of the newly opened Reading Room.
Perhaps it’s a comment on recent trends in interactive museum design but the space feels hugely innovative, exciting and participative, with scarcely a touchscreen, web portal or QR code in sight. It will be surprising if this model of going back to the collections with plenty of analogue pursuits in a comfortable space won’t be replicated by other museums.
With so many distractions on offer, it’s almost easy to overlook the carefully selected collections on show but the Reading Room displays serve as a history of the Wellcome Collection itself.
Objects, prints, drawings and paintings collected by Henry Wellcome himself sit next to contemporary sculptures, screenprints and additions to the collection that regular visitors will recognise from recent temporary exhibitions.
The juxtaposition of books and objects subtly brings into balance the fact that Wellcome wasn’t just a prolific collector of things but also a bibliophile. One of the books openly available within the space is the Reading Room Companion, a guide to the “diverse curiosities” on display.
Even though it is freely available online, the lavish, hard-copy volume will no doubt find itself on many a museum geek’s bookshelf.
Another initiative to move visitors through the spaces is a selection of free leaflet-led tours around the collection. These cleverly take people through all of the permanent galleries and one of the temporary galleries, highlighting key objects in a theme.
Assuming these are updated with every temporary exhibition there will be a new way to make links across the collection almost every visit.
Public engagement
Away from the public galleries, the £17.5m refurbishment has increased the capacity and usability of the building, focusing on a more-of-the-same approach for the Wellcome Collection’s already strong public engagement through research model.
The new Hub is a space for interdisciplinary residencies to generate research and public engagement, and a youth studio complements the forum and auditorium spaces.
The facilities and space at the research library have been expanded and improved with open-access shelving for those who require a more focused environment than the Reading Room.
Hoping to replicate the success of the always-full ground-floor cafe is the new Wellcome Kitchen, catering to visitors who fancy more than a quick bite.
All in all, it is a traditional yet revolutionary refurbishment – “bigger, bolder, brighter” was the lead line of the press release. It may still be the temporary exhibitions and events programme that will tempt visitors to come back, but it’s the enlightened permanent galleries and facilities that will make them stay.
Mark Carnall is the curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, University College London
Focus on audiences
More than 8,000 people visited the Wellcome Collection during the first weekend after the completion of an 18-month, £17.5m redevelopment that has added some 40% to its public spaces.
Our building project partly answered a numerical challenge: how to cope with more than 500,000 annual visitors crowding into a venue designed for 100,000.
But the thinking behind the revitalised offer is far more than an elegant answer to that flattering problem. The Wellcome Collection 2.0 also represents a genuine attempt to evolve the venue’s core proposition, one that unfolds in surprising ways the further up our new curvy staircase visitors venture.
Since opening in 2007, the Wellcome Collection has found its niche in London’s museum scene, adding a distinctive voice to the capital’s cultural conversation.
Our aim remains to illuminate revelatory aspects of the human condition; the first post-development show presented in our ground -floor gallery, for example, was Forensics: the Anatomy of Crime (26 February-21 June).
How can one attract audiences back into a relaunched cultural venue? Not surprisingly, a double-bill of murder and sex turns out to be a winning offer.
The inaugural Institute of Sexology show (until 20 September) in our new gallery on the first floor was marketed with the saucy invitation to “undress your mind”. It unpacks key moments in the history of scientific attempts to understand sexuality.
This is a more intimate space than the grander gallery downstairs, and our attempt here has been to curate an evolving exhibition that is periodically animated by live events: a longue-durée show in which the curatorial process continues after opening.
Artist and writer Neil Bartlett, for example, has introduced a new sex questionnaire, which includes an invitation to visitors to come up with their own questions.
The most experimental new space is up one more flight of stairs – a thoroughly re-considered Reading Room. In Henry Wellcome’s original museum, this was a Hall of Statuary.
True to that part of its heritage, we have reintroduced a set of modern-day statues: a piece of a 1930s x-ray machine on one plinth, next to an embryology-inspired frock by fashion designer Helen Storey on another.
Moving further into the room, visitors reach shelves of books, drawers with board games and more tables, chairs and cushions than are commonly found in a gallery; in other words a retro but thoroughly modern library space.
And as “readers” they can browse, play and converse among clusters of culture that open up such eclectic topics as alchemy, travel, food and the mind.
Here we hope to nourish the appetites of guests who want to spend longer with us, delving into our content increasingly on their own terms.
And it is maybe in this room that we can most acutely test the success of the project, not just in terms of how closely it conforms to our own careful plans, but also in how it absorbs the unplanned and suggests new ideas and activities.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection, London