When the National Maritime Museum’s spectacular atrium space, Neptune Court, reopened it marked the culmination of our remodeling and reinterpretation masterplan to render the space, its objects and the wider collection more legible and accessible.

To achieve this, we had edited, made new selections and reinterpreted the large objects in the space – from ships’ badges and figureheads to actual vessels. These were then used as springboards into the surrounding permanent galleries, through positioning and adjacencies, making the links between them visible from every level.

We gave careful consideration to how these objects ‘read’, depending on the angle from which they are approached – one of Neptune Court’s difficulties as an exhibition space is that it can be accessed via multiple levels and entrances.