Museum set · permanent · A national-standard heritage space · 2024

Tides of Trade — a heritage gallery

A permanent maritime-history gallery designed as a sequence of scenes, where the route through the room does the storytelling.

A heritage gallery lives or dies on the journey, not the panels. The curators arrived with a rich maritime story and a worry every museum team shares — that it would end up as a wall of text people skim and leave. Our job was to turn that narrative into a route, so we storyboarded the room as a series of scenes, each with its own threshold, light and reveal, and built the set to lead a visitor naturally from one to the next.

The craft demands here were exacting. Cases had to be sealed and lit without cooking the objects inside, finishes had to read beautifully under gentle gallery light, and the graphics had to be legible to a curious eight-year-old and a careful archivist at once. Our workshop is set up for this fine-tolerance work, so the plinths read as furniture and the casework all but disappears, letting each object carry its own weight.

We worked closely with the curators and conservators throughout, and zoned the design so a single chapter can be refreshed later without dismantling the whole gallery. The set has held up through daily footfall while keeping the conservation standards the collection needs — exactly the balance a permanent heritage space has to strike.