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Huge historic science collection opens to public

Science Museum Group Looking down on a colourful collection of vintage vehicles, including horse cars, submarines, fire engines, cars and vans.Science Museum Group
Science Museum Group A forklift truck pulling a submarine across a grey floor with painted grid. The sub is rounded and white with a red fin on top.Science Museum Group
The ground floor contains a lot of larger objects such as vintage vehicles
Moving large objects such as submarine Vickers Tango 1 has been a big operation

The first public tours have been launched at a building housing more than 300,000 historic items from the Science Museum Group.

Visitors can now walk around the 20,000 sq ft Hawking Building at the Science and Innovation Park, located on a former RAF airfield at Wroughton, near Swindon.

The tours are the culmination of a six-year programme costing £65m to move objects from the Science Museum Group's collection into a purpose-built new home.

The collection includes an eclectic mixture of items including the first vehicle to cross Antarctica, objects from NASA space shuttles, submarines, medical devices and a unique rubber duck.

Science Museum Group Four people in front of the building entrance - three men and a woman, with 'Hawking Building' in large lettering above the glass doorsScience Museum Group
Prof Stephen Hawking's son, Tim (second from left), attended the opening of the building named in his father's honour

Named after Prof Stephen Hawking, much of the contents of his office is stored at the building.

Sir Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, said: "Having been inspired at the Science Museum as a child, Stephen became a great friend to the Science Museum Group and this is a fitting way to celebrate that life-long relationship."

There is a large floorspace for the bigger objects, with 30,000m of shelving for the rest, which includes 42,000 barcodes to identify items.

The project began in 2018, with unpacking alone taking two years, and the collection will also be open to school trips and researchers.

Sian Williams - who wears glasses, a floral shirt with large white flowers on black background and has blonde hair - looks into the camera while standing on a balcony which looks over a huge ground floor filled with vintage vehicles.
Sian Williams said only a fraction of the Science Museum Group's collection is on display at any one time

Sian Williams, programme director, said: "You could fit 600 double decker buses onto the floor of this building, that gives you some idea of the scale."

She explained that only about 5% of objects are on display at any one time from the Science Museum Group's five museums, which includes the Science Museum in London and York's National Railway Museum.

The Hawking Building includes conservation laboratories and a photo studio, which means the public can see many of the objects online.

Science Museum Group Inside a warehouse-type building, a large doorway with a forklift pulling through a yellow and brown vintage tramcar with two levelsScience Museum Group
The tallest object is a 16ft 4in (5m) tramcar from Glasgow

The tallest object in the building is a 16ft 4in (5m) tall Glasgow tramcar. The longest is a 62ft 9in (19.2m) racing boat.

School visits begin next week and 2025 tickets for the public are now on sale.

Funding came from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and HM Treasury as part of the £150m Blythe House Project, which saw collections from the Science Museum Group, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum moved from London to new facilities.

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