The Postal Museum will be a new heritage attraction in Central London spanning five centuries with Haley Sharpe Design (hsd) confirmed as exhibition designers
Set to open in early 2017 in Clerkenwell, London, the new museum has seen hsd create an engaging visitor experience via a contemporary design solution that unpack the stories behind fascinating artefacts and present them through a variety of digital interfaces and medias as well as more traditional impactful graphics.
“It’s so exciting to see the site work start at The Postal Museum,” said Jan Faulkner, Director and Designer at hsd. “We started working with the organisation over two years ago, they had a vision of what the project needed to be, fresh, dynamic, unexpected and fun, were just a few of the adjectives used to describe the project. Without a doubt it will be an exciting new edition to London’s visitor attraction landscape and will reveal stories from one of Britain’s most remarkable and iconic services.”
The Museum galleries will deliver five interactive zones, leading visitors through five centuries of world-class curiosities, treasures and artefacts. Walking through the zones, visitors will explore how the postal service’s innovation and ingenuity changed the way we communicate forever, and paved the way for the instant, digital communications of today. At the heart of this are the people who worked for, and whose lives were changed by, this indispensable service since its introduction in the 1500s.
The Postal Museum will also be the home of Mail Rail, which hsd has also been heavily involved in – a brand new, and unique “ride” attraction transporting visitors back in time through the disused miniature tunnels of the world’s first driverless, electric railway. Through an immersive interactive exhibition, Mail Rail will literally take visitors on a journey deep under London’s streets to explore this engineering marvel and the innovation of the postal service as it strove to keep us all in touch.
hsd has recently completed exhibitions at the new Stonehenge Visitor Centre and displays for Magna Carta: Spirit of Justice, Power of Words at Salisbury Cathedral, UK. hsd is currently also working on several international projects in Canada, the Middle East and the USA, and recently opened two new galleries at the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of American History in Washington DC and are now working on completing four more this summer.