New tickets are now on sale for guided tours at the Science and Innovation Park in Wroughton, home to 80% of the Science Museum Group Collection.
Tour dates are available seven days a week through to December 2026.
Thousands of people explored the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire through guided tours in the last year, and now even more visitors can experience the collection as new dates are now on sale through to December 2026. Due to strong demand, additional weekend tours have been added as part of the daily tours.
The expert-led, 90-minute behind-the-scenes tours take visitors inside the Hawking Building, a state of the art storage facility home to a vast collection of more than 300,000 scientific, technological and medical objects from the national collection. Visitors can discover how museum specialists care for and conserve these historic objects, while enjoying stunning views of the purpose-built collections centre.
Highlights include a 1980s Cyberman costume from Doctor Who, objects from Professor Stephen Hawking’s office, a balloon gondola used in a record-breaking journey into the stratosphere, an ice cream tricycle that helped Second World War pilots. and an electric car from 1916 that was decades ahead of its time.
At almost 300 metres long and 90 metres wide, the Hawking Building is comparable in size to 600 double-decker buses. The purpose-built facility enables the Science Museum Group to store, conserve, research and digitise its unique collection. Within the 27,000m2 building there is 30,000 metres of shelving, providing a home for the tiniest and most delicate objects, along with a further 5,500m2 of pallet racking and 3,500m2 of freestanding space, which hold some of the larger objects in the collection.
The building also houses conservation laboratories, photography studios, and specialist research spaces.
The Science and Innovation Park is also a major research resource. Researchers can apply to access objects from the collection – either in person or remotely – free of charge, as well as exploring the Science Museum’s Library and Archive collection of over half a million items.
More than half a million historic objects can also be found on the Science Museum Group’s online collection, one of the world’s most extensive digital science collections in the world. Website visitors can discover these incredible objects and the stories behind them through films, articles, a podcast, journal and other online tools.
Your Comments
Be the first to comment on this article
Login or Register to post a comment on this article