SeaCity Gateway Gallery
Client: Southampton City Council
Project: Gateway to the World, Heritage Lottery funded
Collaborators: Urban Salon (Design), Newagle Productions (Media), Wood McGrath (Graphics), Paragon (Interactives)
Southampton City Council wanted to create a new set of museum galleries on the former old law courts and town hall site to tell a new story for the city. The Gateway gallery explores the past, present and future of Southampton as port city – a point of arrival and departure over many centuries a ‘Gateway to the World’.
Working with a team of academic consultants and community partners, TGAC developed the museum’s core narrative and used this as the foundation for a full interpretive masterplan, interactive development and scripting.
The gallery creaes a set of visitor encounters with real Southampton people from the past. Visitors engage with the personal stories of a Saxon princess, a Roman trader, a Medieval merchant and many more and they discover the ways and reasons people across time have travelled to a departed the UK - for love, for trade, for fame, for god…
The Gateway Gallery at Sea City galleries Southampton
We developed the full content for the gallery
The interpretive approach is based on encounters with people from Southampton’s past
Their lives and stories are transformed into dynamic displays and media
Bold graphics and iconography draw visitors into the narrative
Incomers from the past stand next to more recent arrivals
Today’s incomer communities had their own display area to share experience and insights
Objects from the museum collections underpinned the stories
New artefacts were put on display for the first time
The whole gallery centres around an interactive map of Southampton