Haley sharpe design to shape Liverpool museum
Haley Sharpe Design (HSD) has picked up the contract to act as lead exhibition design consultancy for the £65million National Museums of Liverpool project.
The new museum will be located at the Mann Island World Heritage Site at Liverpool’s famous Pier Head, and is expected to attract an estimated 750,000 visitors a year. Danish architect 3XN will design the building, while HSD will design half the interior exhibition space, including two of the four main galleries, Creative City and Global City.
HSD project director Dominic Sore says the plans are still in their early stages, “but I can tell you we will be using some dramatic gallery spaces, two of which include very large windows overlooking two key aspects of the city, which we will incorporate into the design. It\'s not a black box, so we have to work with the architecture.”
The museum will focus on four main themes: Port City, Global City, People’s City and Creative City. Each will draw on the heritage and character of Liverpool, and will include highlights such as an 1838 steam locomotive which ran on the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and a show experience created by Liverpool film makers, writers and artists, using local voices to tell the story of Liverpool’s history.
The gallery will also recognise the cultural significance of the Beatles, showing the original stage on which John Lennon’s first band, The Quarrymen, played in 1957.
In terms of the exhibition content, Sore says Creative City will include a range of audio-visual displays and object collections telling the story of the city’s creative history.
“It will be one of the most important social history museums of the past century,” he said. “It is of extreme importance to the people of Liverpool to tell their story.”