Co-creating sensory galleries where visitors can experience daily life over millennia

What has life been like in Shropshire from prehistory to the present? Audiences challenged us to create new galleries where they could investigate this question using all their senses.

For this interpretive masterplanning project at Shropshire’s flagship county museum - which included the development of a British Museum Partnership Gallery - we came up with a concept centred on universal lived experiences. We tested it with visitors through an immersive, accessible temporary exhibition that was also a live lab for visitor feedback.

Supported by our rigorous strategic planning, the result is an ambitious new vision for the museum with a clear roadmap for how to make it a reality.

We started with audiences. Through a study of community needs in the county and analysis of existing visitor data, we identified a set of target audiences. We then ran co-creation sessions with relevant community groups.

Participants told us that they want people-centred stories about everyday life in local places and to experience those stories through multisensory, interactive exhibits.

We came up with an interpretive concept that responded to these audience wants by asking ourselves the question, ‘What have people always done in Shropshire that we still do today?’. Through content and collections research, we came up with a set of universal experiences that are as relevant to visitors as they were to people living in the county 2000 years ago, and these became our gallery narratives.

This translated into a design approach that foregrounds the sensory aspects of these daily lived experiences through sound, touch, scent and sight. Design and content both bring the outside into the galleries, evoking Shropshire’s rural and urban landscapes.

Having come up with this fresh interpretive approach, we needed to test it with visitors. So we put it into action through a temporary exhibition that was also a live lab with visitor feedback mechanisms built in throughout.

The result was Sun & Fire: Life and Death at the Dawn of History – a multisensory exhibition inviting visitors to imagine what it might have been like to live in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Through immersive sound, lighting and scenography, the exhibition evoked the ancient Shropshire landscape, and objects were interpreted through tactile, sound and scent interactives.

Visitor responses to Sun & Fire were overwhelmingly positive, and the feedback captured through the exhibition informed developing plans for the new galleries in real time.

Over just seven months and with a modest budget, we delivered the interpretation, design and build of this exhibition, from initial concept to install.

By placing sensory experience at the core of the concept for the Sun & Fire exhibition, we applied an approach we call ‘intrinsic accessibility’ – accessibility that is baked into the narrative, design and fabrication of experiences from the outset. The resulting mix of tactile, sound, scent and visual elements across the gallery gave all visitors a ‘way in’ to imagining life in ancient Shropshire, supporting both physical and intellectual accessibility.

Based on positive visitor feedback, this approach will be taken forward into the development of the new permanent galleries.

Alongside the interpretive masterplan, we delivered a full set of spatial proposals to create a more flexible visitor flow, enhanced accessibility, and sustainable income streams and operations. We commissioned surveys of the museum’s Grade II and II* historic buildings to underpin this work.

Through a detailed collections review, we also designed an accessible, volunteer-driven documentation project that will uncover fresh stories and objects for inclusion in the new galleries while tackling the existing backlog.

Following a robust feasibility study through which we established the funding and phasing requirements of this major redevelopment, the Council and Barker Langham are now using these proposals to raise funds for the next stage, ready to go from reimagining to remaking.