Neptune Court Re-display

The re-display of the National Maritime Museum’s spectacular atrium gallery, Neptune Court, aimed to make the space, its objects and the wider collection more accessible, particularly for visiting family audiences.

How can we re-interpret a Museum’s largest objects to thrill and engage visitors on arrival and reveal the significance of our shared maritime history? The project to redisplay the National Maritime Museum’s spectacular atrium gallery, Neptune Court, aimed to make the space, its objects and the wider collection more accessible, particularly for visiting family audiences. Working with Real Studios, we introduced new object selections and reinterpreted the large objects in the space – from ships’ badges and figureheads to actual vessels.

The interpretation placed each object in context: the lamp to the lighthouse, the propeller to the ship, the engine to the steamboat. We commissioned a series of short films, animations and gallery interactives to enable visitors to contextualise these objects in their original settings, engage with the people who once made or used them and enable children and adults alike to learn playfully.