- Inaugurated as the Hawking Building, the innovative collection management facility provides a sustainable and publicly accessible new home for world-famous Science Museum Group Collection;
- Over 300,000 historic items were carefully moved into the new facility, from a toy duck used by scientists to identify landing sites on a comet to a 1.3-tonne Sno-cat, the first vehicle to complete a motorised crossing of Antarctica and hundreds of items from Professor Stephen Hawking’s office;
- Regular guided public tours, school trips and researcher visits now enable unprecedented public access to the collection, with visitors invited to walk among towering objects and glimpse behind the scenes of a working museum store;
- Creative response to the collection and its new home by acclaimed artist Bedwyr Williams published to mark the opening of the Hawking Building.
Today, Friday 11 October, marks the culmination of the £65 million One Collection Programme with the public opening of the Hawking Building, a vast and innovative facility where the Science Museum Group is caring for the nation’s science collection. Over 300,000 historic objects have been carefully studied, digitised and moved into the new purpose-built building at the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire, which is now open for guided tours, school and research visits.
The first behind-the-scenes public tours of this building begin today, with tour dates in 2025 now available to book, allowing visitors to get up close to the Science Museum Group’s world-class collection of objects from science, technology, engineering, and medicine. Led by an expert guide, visitors on the guided tours will encounter incredible, world-changing objects in their new home and discover their stories, while also enjoying stunning views of this vast facility and seeing Science Museum Group staff at work caring for the collection.
The facility has been inaugurated as the Hawking Building, in recognition of the lasting impact of Professor Stephen Hawking’s scientific research and public engagement, and his long-standing relationship with the Science Museum Group.
As a child, Hawking drew inspiration from regular visits to the Science Museum. Much later, he lent his communication devices for display, gave lectures and debated Nobel Prize laureates in the museum, and even served as a guide for a day. In 2021 the extraordinary contents of Hawking’s Cambridge University office were acquired for the nation by the Science Museum Group through the UK Government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme. More than 1,000 objects, including his communication and mobility equipment, have since been studied and cared for in the Hawking Building, with staff and researchers uncovering the everyday and extraordinary stories within them.
Sir Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive of the Science Museum Group, said: ‘I am thrilled to announce the Hawking Building as the name for this remarkable home for the world-famous objects in our care. Having been inspired at the Science Museum as a child, Stephen became a great friend to the Science Museum Group and this is a fitting way to celebrate that life-long relationship and our acquisition of the extraordinary items from his office that will inspire others for generations to come.
‘The first public tours of the Hawking Building mark a significant milestone in the transformation of how we research and share our internationally significant collection with the world. Thanks to generous funding and support from HM Treasury and DCMS, more than 300,000 historic objects have moved to this state-of-the-art facility that sets new standards in environmentally sustainable collections care.‘
Sir Chris Bryant, Museums Minister, said: ‘The Science Museum Group brings the darkest depths of the ocean and the furthest reaches of space to the public's finger tips, inspiring visitors across its five museums. There’s nothing as inspiring as when you see a child mesmerised by the appliance of science.
‘I’m delighted that the Hawking Building has opened so that even more of the Science Museum Group's marvellous collection can educate and entertain, while offering the public a peek behind the curtain of how this great institution brings the world around us to life.’
Tim Hawking said: ‘As a family, we are delighted that the Science Museum Group has chosen to name this magnificent new facility the Hawking Building. We are so grateful to the Science Museum Group for taking such good care of the Stephen Hawking collection and ensuring that his work and legacy as a scientist, disability advocate and technology pioneer will be accessible to visitors to their museums nationwide.’
The Science Museum Group created the Hawking Building, its new collection management facility at the Science and Innovation Park, thanks to funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and from HM Treasury as part of the £150 million Blythe House Project, which saw collections from the Science Museum Group, the British Museum and the V&A moved from Blythe House in west London into new facilities.
The Hawking Building enables the Science Museum Group to better store, conserve, research and digitise our unique collection, while also improving the process of displaying items across the Group’s five museums. As the Hawking Building opens for guided public tours, school and research visits for the first time, it will revolutionise public access to the Science Museum Group Collection, ensuring these historic objects continue to inspire future generations.
Public access
- Public guided tours
- Select days from Friday 11 October – Friday 15 November 2024
- Recommences on select days from Friday 7 March 2025
- Ticketed: £27.50, Concessions and local residents (Postcode beginning with SN1, SN2, SN3, SN4 or SN5): £16.50, Ages 7-12 go free
- Ages: Strictly ages 7+, recommended age is 12+
- Tickets on general sale from 11 October 2024
Offering a behind-the-scenes look at a working collection facility, these regular public tours will invite visitors into the heart of collection care at the Science Museum Group. Led by an expert guide, visitors will encounter hundreds of world-changing objects in their new home at the Science and Innovation Park.
Visitors will walk among hundreds of large objects—including a Spacelab 2 X-ray telescope carried into orbit by the US Space Shuttle Challenger —and explore shelving containing objects from Stephen Hawking’s office. The guided public tours will take visitors from objects that explored the stratosphere to machines that plumbed the depths of our oceans.
From Monday 14 October, the Hawking Building will host local schools for a week of education visits. These groups will enjoy a live science show about forces, delivered by the Science Museum Group’s Explainers, and take part in a hands-on forces workshop, perfect for Key Stage 2, in an outdoor learning space then explore historic objects from the Science Museum Group Collection in the Hawking Building. More school visits will be available for 2025 and to find out when these become available, educators should sign up to the newsletter.
The Hawking Building also provides a spectacular research resource with historic objects from the Science Museum Group Collection available to study alongside the Science Museum’s Library and Archive collection of over half a million items. Researchers can apply to visit and see a particular object from the collection for free, hosted in-person or virtually.
The public can already discover more of the Science Museum Group Collection than ever before thanks to rapid digitisation of the collection and the creation of engaging online content. Hundreds of thousands of historic objects can now be explored through Science Museum Group’s popular online collection, one of the world’s most extensive online scientific collections. In 2018 just 5% of objects had a photograph published online; that figure is now 50%. With new objects and images published online each month, that continues to grow. Audiences can not only discover incredible objects but uncover the surprising stories behind them with engaging short films, long-form stories, a podcast, journal and online tools.
Collection moves
The complex process to study, record, photograph, digitise, pack, move and unpack over 300,000 historic objects began in 2018 and finished earlier this year.
One of the first objects to arrive in the Hawking Building in 2021 was a toy duck used by scientists to help a spacecraft land on a remarkably duck-shaped comet as well as lancets presented to vaccination pioneer Edward Jenner, and a Thomas the Tank Engine toy, made locally in Swindon. The move from the Blythe House object store in London to the Hawking Building in Wiltshire was as sustainable as possible, with packing materials minimised and reused, vehicle loads maximised and pre-planned routes used to ensure fuel efficiency.
Hundreds of larger historic objects already housed at the Science and Innovation Park – including one of four Sno-cat vehicles to be used in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctica Expedition, a record-breaking balloon gondola used to study the stratosphere, and an R.N.L.I. inshore lifeboat which was the result of the 1966 Blue Peter appeal – have also been cleaned, conserved and photographed before moving into their new home within the Hawking Building.
The colourful grid, upon which hundreds of large objects have now found their positions, was used to store objects as they were unpacked and moved to shelving units, large racking and beyond. The grid is 3,487m2; during the unpacking process it was filled and cleared three times.
Hawking building
Construction of the vast Hawking Building began in 2019 and was completed 18 months later. At 90m wide and 300m long, the facility is equivalent in size to 600 double decker buses. It features a spacious storage hall which contains 30 kilometres of shelving and a freestanding grid which enables us to more easily organise and store huge objects – from a 19.2m-long racing boat to a 5m-tall tramcar. The building also contains conservation laboratories, research areas and photography studios.
Sustainability is at the heart of the Hawking Building, which is the Science Museum Group’s most energy efficient building yet. Its highly insulated and extremely airtight design allows the stable environmental conditions needed for the long-term preservation and care of the collection to be maintained with minimal energy use. A ‘fabric first’ approach has maximised the performance of the facility’s building materials, reducing energy consumption, costs and carbon emissions. Solar panels contribute to the facility’s electricity needs, while a loading bay airlock, limited access points and smart LED lighting further reduces energy usage.
Art commission: Science Fictions And The Wrong Thing
In early 2020, the Science Museum Group, together with contemporary arts organisation Foreground, commissioned acclaimed artist Bedwyr Williams to creatively respond to the Science Museum Group Collection and its move into a new home in Wiltshire.
Bedwyr has since delved into the vast and varied collection, to produce a limited run book, Science Fictions, with contributions from writers around the country who responded to a call out to experience the collection. The book was produced alongside a film, The Wrong Thing, created with filmmakers Ewan Jones Morris and Casey Raymond, which has been published online today to mark the beginning of public tours of the Hawking Building.
Bedwyr Williams said: ‘The collection is a mix of the everyday and the fantastical. I found it hard to stop speculating about their past lives as working objects and the lives of the people tied to them: the button pressers and calibrators, the doctors and patients, the drivers and passengers. I hope people get a sense of the avalanche of emotions and memories and flights of fancy that are awoken in you when you spend time with this collection. It's a collection you want to tell people about.’
The Science Museum Group has previously commissioned and worked with a wide variety of contemporary artists including James Capper, Nikhil Chopra, Marlene Dumas, Antony Gormley, Cornelia Parker, Marc Quinn, Conrad Shawcross and Yinka Shonibare.
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Tickets to the guided public tours of the Hawking Building are £27.50. Concessions (Child aged 13-15, student, unemployed and disabled) and local residents (Postcode must begin SN1, SN2, SN3, SN4 or SN5) tickets are £16.50. Ages 7-12 go free. Strictly ages 7+; recommended age is 12+. For further information or to book tickets, please visit scienceinnovationpark.org.uk/visit-us/public-guided-tours.
Tours will run on select days from Friday 11 October – Friday 15 November 2024, recommencing from Friday 7 March 2025. Tours take place on Fridays, with some midweek dates available during school holidays.
For further information or to arrange interviews please contact Chloë Abley in the Press Office at chloe.abley@sciencemuseum.ac.uk or 020 7942 4818. Images and b-roll are available to download; a timelapse of the building’s construction and a video showing the move of the Glasgow Tramcar into the Hawking Building are available on YouTube.
About the Science and Innovation Park
The Science and Innovation Park is a 545-acre former RAF airfield near Swindon in Wiltshire. The site plays a vital role in caring for our collection, and with native woodlands, runways and one of the UK’s largest solar farms, the Park is key to the Science Museum Group’s sustainability work as well as hosting a range of research and development projects and commercial activities. At the heart of the Park is the National Collections Centre where more than 300,000 historic objects from the Science Museum Group Collection have been carefully moved into their new purpose-built home, the Hawking Building, for conservation, study and public access. www.scienceinnovationpark.org.uk. Follow on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.