Western Range Planning Communications Consultant

Scope as published

The British Museum brings together the history of humankind, all cultures of the world spanning millennia. It connects us to our past and to each other. It is a place where everyone is welcome, where many voices meet to understand, and to question what brings us together and what separates us. It is a place of exploration and a place of inspiration. The collection that the Museum holds in trust for the world is of unparalleled breadth, depth, beauty and significance. A truly global resource, free and available to everyone. The Museum's role is to enhance and make accessible the collection through research, through interpretation, through display, through lending, and to share what it learns, as well as the process of learning, with others. With this matchless position comes a responsibility to ensure that this work can continue, ensuring the collection is cared for and accessible for generations to come, and that the Museum remains a centre of excellence and is continually relevant into the 21st century. The physical manifestation of the British Museum in Bloomsbury is iconic. It comprises almost an entire city block in one of the most intricate and established parts of central London. It is a treasured national icon within a conservation area that is, in itself, emblematic of the Capital. The Museum has an internal floor area of over 100,000m2, within a footprint that is packed with a diversity of buildings; the estate is Grade I listed, with perimeter properties that are listed Grade II. Each part of the Museum contains, iconic, often sizeable and irreplaceable items from the collection, and each is visited by many thousands of people, every day. Space on the site is both limited and precious, especially in terms of gallery spaces. The original quadrangle was designed for 100,000 visitors per annum, a figure that was already far exceeded in the 1850s. As it stands, annual visitor numbers to the Museum now regularly exceed six million. Today, there are heightened security requirements and a fundamental need to ensure inclusivity and access, as well as enabling intuitive wayfinding, addressing dilapidations, and creating an environment where people can connect with the collection, and by doing so, with each other. The Western Range Programme focuses on a substantial part of the estate that is in urgent need of both repair and re-imagining. This offers the Museum an opportunity to make a statement of its future intent, through reimagined galleries, new state-of-the-art storage facilities and engaging contemporary architecture, in juxtaposition to the highly significant and already celebrated listed buildings on the site. A multi-disciplinary design team led by Lina Ghotmeh Architecture has been selected to deliver the Western Range programme which is currently at the end of RIBA Stage 2 in the design process. Despite appearing as a single entity, the Western Range comprises a miscellany of 10 separate buildings which have been added to Robert Smirke's original Grade I listed Museum; as a result, the exact extent of the red-line boundary and phasing for this project is dependent on a number of interlocking considerations. The proposed project outline can be seen in the attached documentation. In the region of 15,000m2, it accounts for almost 15% of the floor space within the Bloomsbury site, in a warren of inflexible and static rooms. Further, recent surveys indicate that the existing building fabric and infrastructure are in a state that is below modern expectations. It comprises around 7,500m2 of gallery space and currently houses the Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece (including the Parthenon Sculptures), Rome, and Ancient Assyria and Middle East collections, along with 4,500m2 of back-of-house collection storage. The delivery of the Western Range redevelopment will take place within a complex and highly sensitive operational environment, requiring construction works to be carefully planned and coordinated alongside the ongoing ac…

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