Garden Museum
London
Re-opened to the public in spring 2017. The Garden Museum’s home is the Grade II Listed church, St. Mary at Lambeth.
Since their earlier revamp in 2008, the Garden Museum had developed as both a museum with a growing programme of educational events and a popular café and wedding venue. The museum really needed new educational facilities and more area for display, so a new development was designed by Dow Jones Architects, who have designed an extension within the church at first floor level for new displays and a series of pavilions in the churchyard for learning, as well as a new café and shop.
The extended first floor galleries have allowed GuM to provide thematic displays for the first time, and to include spaces for interactivity, and to showcase the Museum’s impressive collection of films and video.
The thematic displays of the galleries allowed for the development of several ‘trails’, for example, a spotlight on gardeners, and a focus on particular plants. The galleries included a special children’s area where the Museum’s collection of garden gnomes is the focus of the space, which is conceived as an attic bedroom with views through the skylights into Tom’s Midnight Garden.