 Dora Thornton is one of senior curators in the British Museum and is curator of Renaissance Europe. Dora has undertaken several major projects for the British Museum including a mammoth catalogue of the Museum's Italian ceramics. Many of you may have been four years ago now to the British Museum in 2012 when there was a marvellous exhibition on Shakespeare and his world which was curated by Dora and Johnston Bate. Dora also has, I hope, a good fortune to be married to me which is very nice. Tom Thornton doesn't have that. Tom is a rising star in the world of architecture. He's been working for the last five years for Stanton Williams which is one of the best known names in modern architecture in Britain and beyond today. Stanton Williams were one of two architectural firms very heavily engaged in the project which Tom and Dora are going to be talking about today, the other being Purcell, Miller, Triton. They are going to talk about the redispray of the Wadston Bequest in a new dedicated gallery at the British Museum. This is a very special project in three ways. The first way is that normally in museums whenever you're trying to do an exhibition or put on a gallery or refurbish something you spend your time rattling a very big begging bowl and it's very hard work raising the money. Fortunately because this was a project in collaboration with the Rothschild Foundation that for once wasn't a problem. The second way in which it's special and I think you'll see this very much from the talk is the astounding quality of the treasures in the Wadston Bequest which Baron Ferdinand Rothschild left to a nation. And thirdly and perhaps most importantly I think I hope you all agree with the end of this talk that the outcome of this project was very, very special indeed and it's something I hope we'll all want to rush off to Brunsbury to enjoy if you haven't already been to it. So Dora and Tom. Well thank you very much Jeremy it's not very awful I get introduced by my husband and it's a very nice thing. Good afternoon and I hope you can hear us at the back if at any point you can't please wave your arms around and that will respond as well as we can. It's a great privilege to be here to talk about a new gallery for the British Museum for the Wadston Bequest which as Jeremy said is funded by the Rothschild Foundation and which opened in June last year. We're going to give a rather different kind of talk about the gallery because we're here as curator of the project and the gallery and as project architect to give you some kind of insight into the working, the creative process of making a gallery. It was a very happy collaboration over three years between our two organisations and funded by the Rothschild Foundation and we're very pleased to give you some sort of insight into that process. What we hope will come out of it is that you will have a much better understanding of what it takes to create a free public permanent gallery in one of our great museums and perhaps that will enhance your experience of visiting not just the Wadston Bequest Gallery but other galleries in Britain and in London. So that is what we're aiming to do today. Of course we're only two of the ten interlocking teams that it took to make this gallery. I think we were on each of the teams at the time. So ten interlocking teams involving people with very very different skills and experience, all of them extremely valuable. So I hope that gives you some immediate sense of just how complex and how intense this work has been over three years and it's going to be great fun to share some of our insights with you. So first of all the Wadston Bequest itself. I'm not going to talk very much about the objects, the collection or its history because it's not that kind of talk but I hope you will go and see the gallery. At the moment it is however shut while we do conservation checks on some of the objects. It will reopen on the 1st of February so please don't turn up at the British Museum as a result of this talk and find it shut until the 1st of February when it reopens. This is just one snapshot of the first case that you see in the new gallery as you enter the room and it's really just there to show you that we've tried to arrange the collection as a sculptural whole. It's there to show you the richness and the variety of these incredible objects which are all medieval or Renaissance with some 19th century fakes and forgeries involved as well. Which really do I think as a whole give you an insight into the fashioning, the self-fashioning of a new dynasty in the 19th century. I'm sure you all know that the rise of the Rothschilds from the Frankfurt Ghetto to become bankers to the world within two generations of the 19th century is one of the classic rags to riches stories and the collection really does give one a sense of what that is and what that means. As soon as the Rothschilds made any money they started to invest in art but they lived with the art that they collected and every single piece that they owned had a political and a social life within their mansions. And we want to give you a sense of that as we go through the tour. Baron Ferdinand left us this extraordinary collection, the Waddesley request, at his death in 1898 according to the terms of his will and it's always been on permanent public display in the British Museum. He named it after his neo-Renaissance mansion, Waddesley Manor, which is still to be visited as a wonderful living Rothschild creation. It's run by the Rothschild Foundation on behalf of the National Trust and perhaps many of you have visited if you haven't I really recommend it to you. On the left you see an 1897 photograph taken of Baron Ferdinand in the last year of his life sitting in one of the classic rooms at Waddesden, the Baron's room, surrounded by the kind of luxury to which he was accustomed with his dear dog Poupon at his feet. He's surrounded by 18th century British portraits of reigning beauties and 18th century French furniture. This is the kind of way in which he lived at Waddesden. On the lower right you see Waddesden as it's still to be visited today as you walk across the lawn towards the entrance. But within his mind as a collector and within the interiors at Waddesden, this collection, the Waddesley request, had a very particular role and a very special kind of display. He arranged a special room for it, the new smoking room in 1896 and the last two years of his life it was displayed there. So you have to imagine these objects seen through reeds of cigar smoke in the smoking room at Waddesden. It was a near Renaissance interior, the only one at Waddesden and he called it his Renaissance museum. I think he long intended it to come to the British Museum afterwards as a kind of museum collection. And it's very different from all the other rooms in the house in being an Renaissance stage set for a certain kind of corporate entertaining. And you see on the right one of the cases as he arranged it at Waddesden, he would have unlocked these patreons. He had a key on him and he would have unlocked these patreons and taken out for you, the elite visitor, one of the objects and shown it to you and told you its story. So you have to imagine him as the curator of this collection. Someone who arranged his collections aesthetically, we'll talk about that as we go along, and who really was the person who curated and looked after the display. So he had a very, very special role within his own mind at Waddesden. What do you do with a collection like this when it comes into the public domain in a public museum? Well it's been on display since 1898 in a series of galleries. In the 1970s we put it on the first floor and that is the old display that we've now taken apart and created on the ground floor of the British Museum. That really happened because Lord Rothschild approached Neil McGregor, the director of the British Museum until very recently, their old friends and thoughts between them that it was a good time to remake and reinterpret the collection. It was also a good moment because a very suitable space was available on the ground floor of the museum. We'll talk about that in a minute. So we went through the process of appointing the architects to work with us on this project and we had a competition and Stanton Williams architects emerged as the winners of that competition. So we started work at the end of 2012. In order to appoint the architects we prepared a custom brief and I wanted to just create one sentence out of that which I think gives a sense of what the gallery was aiming to do. How to create a sense of wonder and connection to both the craftsman who made the objects and the people who collected them. And that's where Stanton Williams came in so I'll hand you over to Thomas. For us this was a really good opportunity. It was our first chance to work as a practicator. Can you hear me now? For us this was a really good opportunity. It was our first time as a practicator working in the British Museum and of course with a very enlightened cultural funder at the Rothschild Foundation. As Doro said and Jeremy also it was about two and a half to three years of very intense work and Paul Williams, the director of the campaign myself really enjoyed the collaboration that we had with the British Museum team and those of Watson Manor. I think some of you may find it a little bit surprising to find architects involved in this particular very detailed exhibition display work. So we'll give you a little brief introduction to our practice. So Stanton Williams architects based in Angel were about a hundred of us and we work in a huge range of projects from housing to research and education buildings. But at the core of what we do is cultural projects. So our director Paul Williams before sitting at the practice has a long distinguished career already as an exhibition designer. Alongside buildings is the on the top left here which is the Sainsbury's plant science laboratory in Cambridge which was the Stirling Prize a few years ago. You also see things such as the bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy on the top right and just note that the Jacometti exhibition at the Portrait Gallery which was on very recently. And we work on a whole range of other museum projects as well currently working on the refurbishment and extension of the Musee de Bilzart in Nogt. And the reason why exhibitions and galleries are so interesting to us is that they're very immediate, very experiential projects. They give us a chance to test out ideas which we can then apply in our architecture in a much more condensed time frame than we would normally do in a building. We're looking at the same ideas of how light acts in the space, how people move through a space and different thresholds containing details and all these ideas from the exhibitions that feed back into our larger building projects. An exhibition on a gallery space is always a compromise really between the objects and the space in which they sit. So every exhibition and gallery project we're looking at is a very simultaneous process, working both outwards from the objects to understand their own display needs, how they can be shown, and inwards from the space in which they will be situated to understand how that space may be repurposed for its new use. So this process is constantly going back on itself, retesting ideas that we looked at earlier and trying to work out if things have worked out properly. We're working at every different scale simultaneously, from the scale of these small objects, those of the display cases, the room, the interpretation of all the ones. I think one of the things we very much want to get across is that you don't have a concept or a brief or a search or something like this which you then hand over to the architects and they come up with a scheme and they just slot the objects in somehow. That's not how it works at all and that's the most important thing I think we want to convey is how closely we've had to work together with these 10 interlocking teams to make the whole thing grow organically to create a new gallery space. So as Dora said, the brief was really about trying to look at objects like the initial brief we had and so we spent a long time with Dora and her team at the museum trying to understand every object. And I think when you handle a real object you have that wonderful vantage point of being able to look at its minutiae from every angle and really appreciate all the detail. As soon as that's put in a display case that really immediately compromises that object because your possible viewpoints are immediately fixed or reduced depending on where it sits in the case. So in these initial weeks and months we're really spending a long time trying to understand with the curator of our team what do you really want to see about each object? Is it, for example, an inscription on the rim of a cup? Is it the form of the object? Is it a bit of the material then? So we really want to understand very carefully so that we can position each object to its optimum position. We also have the really good opportunity to understand how the old display works. So on the right here you see the previous gallery which is in the upper level of the gap of the museum and understand what wasn't working about the lighting, what wasn't working about the different materials and also what did work. I think for us, and for many people, I think the wasn't request when you first come across it is quite a bewildering array of objects. There's a huge range of different materials, different object types of sizes and weights and on top of that there's a whole range of different narrative stories. There's not a simple story which can be drawn out from them and additionally all the different conservation requirements, so different relative humidities in which things can be displayed or light levels. So for us this was a big challenge and working with Dora to understand what was the story of this gallery, what were we trying to get across when people see it. We were learning very, very fast from the objects, working together to accumulate all the different sorts of data that were required in order to work out these compromises that Tom mentioned of how to display things to their best advantage so you can see them, understand their scale, get a sense of their history, relate them to other objects and also conserve them properly. Of course, the close work with Dora, her team and those at Watson Manor really helped us understand this collection. So on the left hand side here you see an image from contemporary Baron Ferdinand's day of how they were displayed in the smoking room at Watson Manor. I think one of the first things you can see from this is that the collection there is very clearly not trying to tell a story as such. There's a mixture of different objects, types of, together and there's a mixture of Islamic objects, Jewish, Christian, all together in one space. What's really driving this collection is what we understand it really is the aesthetic arrangement of it. Baron Ferdinand is using symmetry here to display his objects in really a sculptural form. That for us was really important. Of course, the proximity of this gallery, the ability to reach out and touch and handle the objects was really important. I think those two, this idea of the aesthetic design and also these very close to the objects were two really key ideas for us. Now this gallery at Dora set has been taken from the first floor of the museum and brought down to the ground floor of the museum. This is really important to bring it down to the main business association of the museum. It's in what's called the middle room and that was at the end of the King's Library. The King's Library was built in 1827 as one of the first parts of the British Museum. It was the King's Library then and later the British Library. When the British Library moved to St Pancras in the late 1990s, these rooms have so been repurposed into exhibitions and galleries. The middle room is the last of those to be transformed really. This is much more than just moving the collection down from the first floor to the ground floor, making it more accessible to the visitor. Because we've really changed its place within the history of the museum. It's on what is now effectively a new display spine for the British Museum, which really starts with the Enlightenment Gallery, which you see on the top right, remodeled in 2003 in the old King's Library, which really presents you with the story of how, rather like Jeremy was saying in the introduction about the Society of Antiquaries, how we have understood ourselves in our past and our past societies through the study of objects. It's something which links the British Museum very strongly with the Society of Antiquaries. This Enlightenment Gallery does that from 2003. From that you walk into the old manuscript saloon, which is the photograph on the lower right. That was remodeled in 214 as Collecting the World. It takes that story of collecting and collectors and the study of objects into the 21st century. This new room, where the Watson Bequest is, was the old reading room of Dickens and Thackeray and the Great Noddness of the 19th century. It benefits from that sense of calm and connectedness of the library room and the rather humane proportions, which we'll talk about more in a minute. You're moving through these wonderful grand humane library spaces for this new display spine, presenting the British Museum as a collection of collections. Giving this collection, the Watson Bequest, which is the only collection that has to be legally shown on its own in a named room, a completely different prominence within the history of the museum. Wonderful too, not just that sense of a new history for the Bequest, but also being able to do what Baron Ferdinand Rothschild wanted us to do in the terms of his will in 1898, which is to call it the Watson Bequest and make that connection with Watson Manor a living and meaningful thing. Obviously digital media gives you completely new way of making that connection with Watson and it's through the digital media, both in the gallery and on the web, that we've really made that connection live for the 21st century in a completely new way. Just to show you, as you walk through, this is walking through from the Enlightenment Gallery through collecting the world, you see this picture of Watson Manor backlit above the door of the gallery, which invites you into this completely new space of Watson and its collection. So along the side of all this detail of what we're looking at, the objects themselves, we're also trying to understand the space itself. So I'll store this in the middle room here. We have the fortune that as it hasn't had a permanent use since the British Library moved out, we were able to access this gallery throughout the project and we were therefore able to understand exactly how the room really functions and how it works, so understand how the daylight changes throughout the seasons and what's the day, understand the scale of the room, the proportions, of these bookcases, which line the room. And, unfortunately, I think for us, really try testing out our designs in the gallery space itself. So you'll see here on the floor, for example, we taped out the forms and showcases to understand how they fit within the space and how you might move around them. And, of course, we were able to then bring objects into the space and see again how they responded to that kind of environment and light. And we started the project then along some of those detailed object work, as we do with all our architectural projects. So we do perspective sketches and physical models, trying to understand how the space works. With these initial ideas, we're really trying to look out how people move around the space, the kind of flows you have there, so that you can have somebody standing on one side looking at as an object on a display case this side and on the other side looking at it there and people walking between them and not then be interrupted so it doesn't feel too congested. What kind of route people might take around with me. We're also trying to get this feel of the Shats camera and a bit of that kind of atmosphere really into the design at a very early stage. And a very important bit at this stage is already to understand the fit of the objects in the gallery. So we really had to make sure that the collection would fit in the space we've designed. So there's a lot of that just detail work in there already. At the beginning, a lot of my colleagues said, how can you use a large room like the middle room to display only 265 objects, which is what the Watson quest includes, but actually it's not one cubic centimetre too large by the time you've worked out the design for the gallery. And the way we work out how it fits is to actually draw every single object. So all the objects were drawn in-house over about a month and a half, some poor system drawing them for us but very well. And they're drawn in plan, section and elevation views so we can really understand every object from every vantage point. And then, by laying these out on the computer in a row, you can very quickly understand, for example, if they're set this far apart, you need 90 metres of showcase. If they're set closer together, you need less. And so there's a really quick way of understanding how those earlier design options we showed you can actually work in the space and make sure things fit. And this way of these drawings will also use with Dora and her team to understand the grouping. I think it's also important to use these as a very quick way of moving objects around seeing how they come together. It was a very interesting process for me as well because it's a completely different way of thinking about the objects in your collection. You'll notice that the red ones are lading the star objects. Obviously at the beginning, when you're faced with a collection as incredible as this, you think of every object almost as a star object. And you imagine that it will be best seen in a round, but it doesn't take much playing with the objects to realise that most of them do actually need a backdrop and a sculptural ensemble of other objects around them in order to be really seen. So that was a completely new discovery for me. I thought at first that we've got lots of cases in the round that you could walk around the objects from all sides, but actually they often look better against the right backdrop. So through all this testing and coming up with different options, we came to this basic concept. And the concept of the design was really to integrate the whole collection. It was integrating the different types of objects in the collection themselves, and also to make sure that then felt as part of the room. And the way we did this really was to line the two long sides of the walls in the room with these bronze pounds, which are floated in front of the bookcases. Into these we inserted what describes wall showcases, and then we displayed the smaller objects, such as jewellery, those with particular lighting requirements and those which have their own narrative story. In the centre of the room are the showcases. Their scale is really important. They allow us to mix large groups of the objects together, really mass them, give them a sculptural sense, and therefore start to create different links within different groups of collection. Their sort of scale and shape which leads you around the gallery then creates more pockets or rooms within the room in which we're able to pull out small wall showcases from the walls. And that allows us to show objects such as the jewellery which we wanted to see from both sides or the box with microcomics where you can really look at the minutia of the detail from both sides. The holy form relic group is a real star object that Scarry sits on its own and that helps to lead you around to the left as you enter. One thing that was interesting to note to this point really is the floor. And you'll see around the outer side of the floor there is a slate perimeter. And there was also originally two slate we discovered train tracks leading down either side of the centre of the gallery. And then in between that there was actually what turned out to be a post-war pine infill. Already at this early concept stage we were starting to look at how we might work with this because as you move around a gallery the floor is demarcated into different zones of pine and slate. It really actually quite subtly influences how you perceive the space and it starts to divide the gallery into different number of different zones. So already at this early stage we were looking at how we might make it a more unified space. We were looking at filling that central band with slate and as we carry on we decided that the whole gallery should have a slate floor with a real weighted feel to it. I just wanted to say that this is a view down into the first model that Stanton Williams made to help work out the concept and to explain to me and the patrons and the people in the British Museum how the gallery might work and what we were aiming for and it was an incredibly useful tool within the museum to persuade one's colleagues about what one was doing and to also include our patrons and stakeholders in a much more meaningful way. What Tom says about the floor you'll see later when you see photographs of the gallery with its slate floor. That slate floor creates a marvellous sense of unity but also gravity for the objects a sense of stillness and calm which is very valuable for looking into a collection like this one. One other thing to say briefly is that actually this is a cul-de-sac so it's not a through route and I think it was really important allowing people to dwell in the gallery and really focus on the objects rather than people just rushing through to the next gallery. So this is the completed gallery and I hope you get a sense of that chat's kind of feel of this glimmering mass of objects with quite a low light level to have a view out to the colonnade beyond so you can see up in those windows there you get a chance to see where you are and orientate yourself within the museum which otherwise is quite disorientating best to be. We know from our frequent visitor surveys that if people can see out onto the colonnade and know exactly where they are physically within the museum it's a very relaxing thing and it calms people down and slows their viewing because they know it's only two minutes very important. You can see here how the forms also give you a sense of a route through the gallery and how that floor where the slate floor steps up within the showcases and the whole room really feels a unified whole. These cases didn't get to that quite easily though. They began life as what we described as an angel of the North like cancer leavers so the idea that these two arms in the case would float out this is one bit of the gallery where we found actually a lot of dialogue with the Rothschild Foundation the funders were really pushing us making sure this was the best it could be. Lord Rothschild was very keen and absolutely right about this that he wanted one to walk into the gallery and take in the whole collection at first glance so you feel almost as if you were enveloped by the objects and the collection as a whole so he wanted maximum transparency of the cases and to use the full volume because these are massive cases as you'll know if you've visited the gallery. At first that was quite a design challenge and also quite a curatorial challenge because we only display objects at hip level or above for obvious display reasons but it was a really really good thing to have to work out very early on in the process. As we were being turned by this we became a very strange paradox that the larger the cases became the more transparent they became as well right here is the final design concept that we have which is this idea of a sculptural glass prism in which there are these floating back panels so actually it's entirely made of structural glass there is steel structure in the base at the top but actually holding the case up is pure structural glass which is a big design challenge these back panels the back panels themselves are offset which then starts to give you really the opportunity to display objects close up or further away depending on how they sit and also to give you really beautiful oblique views through the gallery to other parts of the collection now this opportunity to work in the room itself was really useful especially understanding the book cases and the performance panels the gallery is great one listed and so it's really important to us that everything can be put back in the same 25-30 years time when it needs to be next and so we're able to model all the bronze panels and the wall cases at full size just using cardboard in the book cases you see on the right here and the reason why these panels are floated in front of the book cases is that we're able in that 10cm zone to conceal all the cabling roots all the lighting, all the locks all those conditioning primers which are advanced to the moment in the exhibition gallery spaces and all these bits of infrastructure positioned somewhere which doesn't then need to have extra holes drilled through the book cases so it's a really important aspect of the conservation of the room and as Dora mentioned Jeremy as well this is a large conservation project and we were really fortunate to be working with a set of conservation architects throughout and they did a fantastic job doing things which hopefully you don't actually see a large amount of this conservation work is really about trying to make it not visible so they've replaced what were modern windows with historic ones, they've done a lot of work straighting out of a sagging balcony and also repairing the vast amount of very fragile timber work one thing which you won't see at all though is the floor structure and what you see here is what the floor structure was previously and it's a really beautiful set of really faulted arches which was probably the original idea to be a seven design but these of course were designed to hold people sitting at desks reading books and each of those large rhombite cases weighs about five tonnes so if you imagine that this structure was probably not going to hold that and so what now exists in addition to this structure so that's remained and we haven't removed it we've modified a little bit there's a separate steel structure for every showcase which is then isolated from the rest of the floor which people stand around the gallery you don't transfer vibrations from your walking into the cases that's obviously very important for the safety and security of the objects that there should be minimal vibration and then as the large rhombite cases developed so did these peninsima cases you see on the left here this idea of Rhondd which was cathedria without from the bronze panels the main challenge to me was wasn't actually the structural challenge of hanging them from a wall but actually how you display such small objects in such a large case or the minutiae of the jewellery and the boxwoods in such a quite a big case so that you can get the lighting working was a real challenge and it was only when we really worked with the display case main actress that we came up with the final solution that you'll see later on where there's a central blade of clear acrylic of which shells were cathedria but we can start to pin objects to them it's important to say that this early stage here although these look like quite simple models of the forms of the cases we're also already trying to understand where the labels go, where the lights are so make sure that already we're thinking about all of this We knew these were going to be the hardest cases to design partly because of the conservation and display needs of these very small and intricate objects and I think it was probably the most complicated part of the entire gallery scheme but we'll talk more about it and for us it was really important that the cases would be really beautiful in their own right even before these objects were put in there and they're very minimal designs because complex to the objects I think just needed a very soft background behind them for that reason the details are really critical making sure that the details of the cases served the viewing of the objects and also didn't interrupt that so for example there's no trying not to position objects with a large joint behind them which would be bisect objects and we did this in the same way we did with our building projects making full sized models of almost every single detail in the gallery so you can see here just cardboard versions in our studio looking at how the holy form reliquary would sit on a plinth with an inset label on it and this was then done in tandem with the showcase manufacturers we were working with a company called Gopio based in Milan and they were really Italian craftsmen and designers and it was great working with their director Sandro and a very strong interest was helping the work of Carl Scarfman which is also a big influence for our office so really nice to work with a company whose architectural ideas are very similar to our own and so we were designing making these mock models to design details and they would make a full sized prototype out of the real materials and there was a lot of black and forth between London and Milan trying to resolve these details there are only about two or three companies in the world that are capable of designing this complexity and scale and one of the things that we've created is this door mechanism that you see on the right hand side and that sheet of glass which is a door in the case is about four metres long about three metres high it weighs over half a ton and it was really important that everyone could get access to the full type of case for the museum team's work so it designed a complete new opening mechanism here which is inspired by how a coach door opens and in one single movement with a touch of a button that entire sheet of glass slides and pivots and ends up parallel to the shortened display case meaning that the museum team can access that case That is particularly important in the British Museum because you may have noticed if you go around the museum that objects go in and out of the cases all the time for conservation reasons for students to see things, for photography for the loans to international exhibitions and so going constantly in and out of the cases but manoeuvring the objects safely is a first requirement these cases are built to last they can't just be beautiful they must be very functional and that was very much a part of the design brief and of course also working with this at their workshop we have the whole range of materials which we can try out and this is one example where working with the doorware team to light the objects not only from the lights above them but also trying to reflect light up onto the objects we have found through our mock-ups that if you could just reflect a tiny amount of light up onto the lower side of the objects it would just lift it up a bit more life This is Paul Williams from Stanton Williams experimenting with different finishes reflect light in different degrees up against objects and it was that kind of thoughtfulness and care and meticulousness that goes into the display of each object This design has been carried on throughout the project so here we are about a week or two away from starting to install the objects the entire team is really involved at this point so Dora was down every day with myself and the others from the team I think she was practically living in the gallery at this point There's a whole range not just the case manufacturers but also the conservation architects and the team contractors working on a building as well and the store has had a whole range of interlocking teams there's a real commitment from all involved to make sure that we have the best quality and there's a huge amount of coordination making sure that everything came together I frequently had to translate from the Italian case builders to other people on the team that was fun but of course Tom and I have been talking a lot about the sculptural arrangement of the objects and the design of the cases but you also have to think about labelling all the way through from the very very beginning the interpretation for the gallery is in several layers it starts with the actual labelling of the objects which is integral to the whole design concept and it moves up to the digital interpretation which I mentioned at the outset and the sense of a visual impression of life at Wadston and the previous social and political life of these objects before they became public property in the British Museum and here you see Paul Williams at the top left from William's Architects working out the angle and the height of the backlit labels in those huge rhomboid cases and this is how we planned them the writing had to be to a template so I had to write to the size available we had to work out the sizes of the font that we were going to use there are all kinds of access requirements people inside the museum are very concerned about these being able to be read by different kinds of people with different visual impairments you have to think about all of those things and you have to get the design past all of those different audiences and of course the way that you group the objects affects the way you label them the way you need to label the objects affects the way you group them so it's again not a linear process and you have to keep thinking together all the time with the 2D designers as well as the 3D designers here you see Ian Cartledge wonderful 2D designers who worked on all the graphics in the gallery thinking about the sizing and the positioning of the numbering for the objects so that people can make the quickest possible relationship between the number of an object and its label it's very basic but it's actually very complex and it affects also how you position the objects very much this is really just to show you how complex some of the objects are a small box with tabernacle it's only this size absolutely must a piece of carving from the northern Netherlands about 1500 a very rare object and obviously you just can't show it permanently open like this you can't handle it and take it apart for visitors so we've done that digitally we've done that on these very small screens of which there are 6 they were planned for the very outset of the gallery I knew exactly what I wanted to do and those screens are very carefully designed into the gallery the aim, Tom will talk about more in a minute but the aim is to help you look to slow down your looking to send you back to the object understanding what it is that you'll see of course the digital display is one of the first things that will go out of place in the gallery so these are being carefully designed so from the beginning some of they are removable and basically without interfering with the design we felt it was really important given the complexity in the small scale of the objects which we're looking at that the screens themselves would be very small and subtle so therefore we've selected the smallest high definition screen available in the world and they play very subtly they only start playing when you walk past and the sensor activates them so it's really about trying to have them in the background to complement the objects they're also silent and we slowed them down five different sets of edits to slow them down enough to encourage you to slow down in your looking because everything we're doing in this gallery is to help people see and to help people look and as Alice Gombrick long ago said you only see what you already know so these films are a very important tool for helping you understand your looking and to help inform what you see and of course a large part of this group was really about trying to bring the character personality of both Farron and Ferdinand to the gallery and we felt that there was a really good opportunity in the existing book presses to do this so for example where there wasn't a bronze panel we started to incorporate quotes from Baron Ferdinand's red book and also contemporary images from Watson Manor and we found this working with college to be in the graphic design it's a really beautiful technique which is printing black and white images onto frosted grey acrylic so that gives you a bit of the atmosphere in the room It was wonderful to be able to bring Baron Ferdinand's own voice into the room in his writing on collecting he writes a lot about what collecting meant to him about his mistakes as a collector about his relationships with dealers and other members of his family and it's lovely to be able to bring those into the room and to feel that connection with him and of course a big question as to what would we do with the upper part of the gallery it's a large space and it's been a long time thinking about whether or not we should have graphics which relate to the gallery in the collection or whether we should have some contemporary art there which might in some way refer to it or do we just leave it as a library in the memory of his original use as a library and we felt that given the amount of information and complexity at the ground floor the other space should really be quite calm and therefore we re-instituted the library however of course as we went to we found this opportunity there when you go to the gallery you'll see the south end of the gallery at the upper level the books all white and that gives us a great opportunity to project the images onto this and give some context to the collection Well these are fake book backs I think you said that explicitly these are fake book backs used as a projection screen and again a lot of thought went into what the imagery of the film should be that's projected onto that screen it fades, it comes and goes it fades back into the books it comes out again and shows you gives you a very strong impression of Wadston Manor as a privileged visitor and it shows you the future King of England level the 7th as the Prince of Wales best friend Baron Ferdinand frequent visitor to Wadston it shows him sitting in a striped debt chair alongside his mistresses or playing tennis on the norms and gives you sense of the incredible corporate entertaining the elite corporate entertaining enlightened corporate entertaining of Wadston where these objects previously were and so it does that incredible thing of making that collection with Wadston and making you understand how these objects have travelled from this rather wonderful entertainment space to the modern public museum So alongside all this showcase design and all the interpretation of course is how the objects sit together I think as we knew that this is not a collection that's very unique and it's fixed so unlike a Roman collection or a Egyptian one they find a new wall of coins nothing's going to change in this collection it's not going to move anything around and with this idea of a chat's kind of feel as well it meant that we were really trying to position every object in its own unique position and the only way we can do that is to actually do it physically and so for that reason we made full sized life full life sized cut out of every single object and you see two of them here this one is for the symbols it's a good type of leaf and you can see it's the front form but also the depth of it and using these couple cut outs we were able to make a whole range of mock ups and so throughout the project we did five mock ups around mock ups in total with each different iteration of the showcase design and the couple cut outs were really critical because of course moving real museum objects is an incredibly labour intensive and a very fragile task of course Dora's team was very careful not to move the objects any more than they have to be moved and just you or I can just pick up these move them around and stick them to the back panels and very quickly understand how we can mass the objects together It has to be said though that these are not substitutes for the real objects they're only useful if you know the objects but they are reminders of the kinds of space and the kind of object and how you have to think about it all the things that you need to think about when displaying that object what kind of amount is it going to have what kind of shelf is it going to be on what height is it going to be at what conservation requirements does it have what lighting requirements does it have and only if you know the object already can this be of use but of course moving the objects around is evolving one of the ten teams I mentioned at the beginning and it's an incredibly complex process and British Museum is doing many other things at the same time so you do need to be very organised about that and these objects certainly helped and with these mock-ups I guess what we're really looking at is the idea of a sculptural composition so as I said earlier this idea of a compromise when you position an object in a fixed location in a showcase so we're trying to understand what height they should be at how much breathing space is around them how they're grouped together and how they're lit You see me looking very concentrated and very nervous here because I'm handling some of the most fragile and important and valuable tall silver gilt spanding cups which are massive and very heavy but I'm deciding to mix in this beautiful 15th century Venetian glass which is even rarer which our marvellous lead conservator Denise Lee is holding carefully here while I get the mount for it into position and there you understand the importance of having these cutouts in order to handle the objects safely when you're mingling and matching in this way Of course I understand the lighting is very important because the mockups are really critical of making sure that the display cases are able to light the objects properly I think in particular the wall cases where we had the rock crystals and these have never really been properly lit before in the museum There's a huge complexity in them both the how each object is carved which has a different way of lighting and also the gold mounts and what you may not notice but it's quite subtly done the guy is that the cases of the rock crystals in them are the ones which have a cooler light temperature so everything else has got quite a warm temperature a warm colour of light for these ones are just cooled down and that really helps to make the crystals sing Absolutely I have to say I think that the amber we just see the base of an amber tanker that is uplifted from the base I have to say I think we've lit the amber really well and that's been a great joy to be able to do that because amber is very hard to display and very hard to see and on the left you see Paul Williams with me I'm handling one of these miniature boxwood carvings and he's angling the light into it to see what's the best angle to both to display the object and to fix the lighting so that you can really see into the depth of the carving We're using these to develop and design the cases As these mock-ups carried on of course we were really trying to understand these final positions of the objects so you see my very beautiful drawings of these chickens up there It was really one of the main things about this case was that as it was spoken every single element was pre-main factured in Italy and brought across so once it was built there was very little room for manoeuvre and everything there had to be very carefully positioned You can see here on the left for example we were marking out on the shelves how large the shelves should be around the objects and of course alongside this is a lot of dialogue with the conservation team of the museum are saying how fragile objects can be supported but also bringing in excellent mountain makers in addition to the museum's team these mountain makers made small brackets and most of the objects you see don't just sit on the shelves they have a small bracket somewhere which fixes them or restrains them holding them safely there and of course they needed to come and handle the objects too to make sure they understood how the objects behave I must say they were wonderful to work with and made it a very easy process and are very securely held and mounted in this gallery This is really just to show one of the most problematic areas of the entire display both in terms of the research and the thinking and in the actual display The jewellery is a very important part of the Wallislam request Baron Ferdinand loved jewellery he loved collecting it he also loved wearing it and there are many photographs of him dressed up in Renaissance costume with his badges on his hat a bit like the ones in the Wallislam request and so that fashion for wearing jewellery I think helps to explain how from the early 19th century the wish to collect objects fantastic jewels in the Renaissance simply outstripped the supply of the real objects and there are people in the back streets of Paris who would improve the damage of Renaissance jewellery for you or create a new one for nothing especially if it's covered with the most incredible emeralds this rampant fake this wonderful pregnant mermaid she's got, I'm holding her in my hand here she's got fantastic emeralds I think 21 emeralds all over her body cabochon emeralds and a fantastic huge cabochon emeralds for her pregnant stomach on her front but this is a 19th century object and we've been able to prove that through the research on the gallery and the book that I've written to a company that we need to display but what I'm trying to do here that's a surprisingly awkward thing is to work out the point of balance for this object and it really makes the point that handling the objects tells you so much about them in their history particularly the jewels because it helps to work out whether an object is a genuine Renaissance piece or a rather crude 19th century forgery or pastiche this one despite the fact that it looks so sculptural is rather crudely two dimensional and doesn't have a very good point of balance in other words it's not really designed to be worn it's not designed to be shown off at first we thought we'd display these jewels so you could see them on both sides and we hung them on what we thought was the right viewing height on fishing line to get the right kinds of heights that was quite a delicate procedure and here you see the finished result which Tom can explain how we did that so this idea of the cases we came to working with Gokir and Casement Patchers was that the central blade and acrylic we had down there by drilling into those we could then put a very careful, very small pins which would hold each object I think it's quite a challenge for the point of balance for every object having to be found for every single one and here you see our senior museum assistant Jim Peters one of the incredibly experienced and skilled team of specialist technicians you see him actually putting in the plastic downs into the perspective to secure every object securely that took, I think it took a day in it just to do this one case so that gives you some sense of the kinds of skills and the kinds of planning that needs to be in place Now the installation of the gallery is also a very important and really critical part with critical phase our architects were still in there I had the fortune to have a desk in the corner of the gallery about a month and a half spending every day in a museum which is a really privileged place to go and I think the museum assistant has probably fell up from my voice by now I'm saying left a bit, right a bit, up a bit, down a bit no, not quite and you can see we're still using these cardboard cutouts to position objects making sure that the zones are working well we're also still using these full size drawings especially with the pinning of the objects and you see here the museum assistant is doing something very unusual which is pinning onto vertical metal normally they pin onto sloped fabric back panels in this idea of the unity of the case it was really important that there wasn't a distinguishing to the different material onto which they go We were asking a lot of these teams and technicians because drilling and pinning objects vertically into metal doesn't allow for any error you have to be able to do it right first time and it's a laborious process and you can see on the left this is the layout of the cutlery in the collection the wonderful embellished knives spoons and forks and they're being pinned individually they're finding the right place for the pins through the paper so that they'll know exactly where to drill and this is the object that's shown on its own at the entrance to the gallery and the reason why this object's shown on its own is because it really encapsulates the story of the collection it's really about the passion that the Rothschilds had for collecting treasures of the late little ages this is the Holythorn relicry of Jean Duc de Belly in Paris in around 1390 to hold a thorn from the crown of thorns born by Christ that is crucifixion that's the story and it's a jewel, it's only about this high but on the other side of the collection of the case we tell a fascinating story about how the real object, this object which was in Vienna in the 19th century was lent or sent for repair to Simon Weininger an unscrupulous restorer who copied the original and gave back the copy to the museum in Vienna and sold the original which slowly found its way into the Rothschild collection so the story is really both about that Rothschild relationship to the great art of the middle ages and of the Renaissance but also about that relationship with the art market, the perils of collecting and the dangers of forgery in this period when the art market was really taking off in Europe so this one object tells that story and we do it through labels both sides of the case which turn the two parts of that story What you don't see here actually which only came after you've taken a photograph is a small mirror and as you see at the centre of the object is the hawk the thorn which is supposedly from the crown of thorns and as we install this one of the objects which is so fragile that we didn't really have a chance to look at it in advance as we installed it and looked at how the lighting was working we realised that we just were able to reflect a little bit of light into that central form you could really see into that space and that's one of those places where no matter how much work you do testing things out there's always something which you can come across at the last minute so we really had to be able to respond to these opportunities He did that, he put that little piece of metal in the morning as he opened the gallery and so what was raised to leave you with an idea of the sculptural design of the showcase and the objects I think so we spoke a little bit about this idea but I think it's useful to understand quite what you mean by it so this is the first case as you enter the gallery it's a real mixture of the collection so it's important for us that you get a sense of every different type of object on display so on the right hand side there's this large easy shield and that holds it's own really in the case it's a product that we feel acts as a punctuation mark there's an arc of ostrich eggs there's a lot of curiosities around that which help to lead you across to the left in between these two back panels there's large myolica vases which are a real mass to the layer I can't arrest your gaze as you enter the gallery but not only that but they also help you lead your eye further beyond so you see that right in the back of the gallery there are a couple of myolica vases there so you're already able to make connections between different parts of the gallery and also with other objects within the case there's a couple of objects which relate to the myolica vases being from Horus Walthmore to the left of that there's this writing cabinet which is one of the few places where we've displayed objects like they would have been displayed at the smoking room so showing small objects on top of the cabinet and in front of it there's these two book covers on the old gospels which are shown as though on a lectern and underneath that lectern we can see a couple of lights which we're able to shine some lights up into the writing cabinet so you can really see the detail there this reliquary or some gallery that holds its own I think especially with that light coming out glancing on top of it really has a strong presence and is able to feel that triangle at the bottom of the case and just around the corner you can spot what's a small network shell that's using this small angle the acute angle of the case to really get close to the objects these two stags above there and of course the chamber of the case something to lead you around into the rest of the gallery I think we'll just we talked a little bit about the problem of displaying jewellty given that so much of it is 19th century and not renaissance I just wanted to end by showing you a picture of the cover of the book that I wrote for the collection which I hope some of you would have seen or might like to look at it was Neil McGregor's genius I think to come up with this title a Rothschild Renaissance which I think encapsulates the nature of the relationship that relationship as I've mentioned before between the Rothschild and Renaissance as this cultural period they really wanted to understand and connect their family history with but also their relationship to the art market the sense of refashioning and remaking themselves as a family so he chose this particularly beautiful pendant which is only this big to go on the front when I pointed out that it's one of the 19th century forgeries and not one of the Renaissance originals he said but that's fine if we call the Rothschild Renaissance we can integrate the things properly I think that was a really fantastic directorial decision I think we used this image very successfully in all our marketing and merchandise and on the underground and it's certainly been something that has arrested people's attention in encapsulating the story of the Rothschild relationship to the Renaissance which is the story of this gallery now I realise that we've done an incredibly intense scamper through three and a half years of work but we really wanted to share it with you in order to stimulate any questions you may have but also to encourage you to keep in touch with the gallery look at the web page for it maybe look at the book and really just understand a little bit more what it takes to create something that is free, public and permanent thank you