To masterplan, develop and deliver a new visitor attraction and two museums at Fort St Elmo, a historic fortress in the heart of Valletta, Malta, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

TGA was part of the consortium that won a Europe-wide competition for the project, taking responsibility for the core narrative across the entire site: free-access areas, museum galleries, experience spaces, wayfinding and interpretation throughout.

Content Masterplanning | Narrative Development | Interpretation Planning | Content Development | Design Integration

“Malta's history is its geography” - this was the overarching narrative framework that we developed to guide visitors through a site of extraordinary complexity, 6,000 years of human occupation and a fortress that has witnessed five centuries of siege, occupation, conflict and survival.

The interpretive plan covered two full museums, more than fifty immersive AV experiences, curated gallery displays, and the collation and redisplay of significant historical collections.

TGA scripting every element across the site, also creating content and design briefs for each AV experience to ensure narrative coherence across a project of unusual scale and ambition.

Fort St Elmo opened in summer 2015, became a cornerstone of Valletta's programme as European City of Culture in 2018, and has since earned a TripAdvisor Traveller's Choice Award.

Managing content coherence across fifty-plus AV experiences, two museums and an entire historic site demands a narrative architecture robust enough to govern thousands of individual decisions without being revisited from scratch each time.

Narrative Direction delivers this, both as a process that brings varied stakeholders together and as a product that is the foundations of a powerful core narrative, a detailed interpretive masterplan and diverse 2D, 3D and media content.

Fort St Elmo also demonstrated something we find consistently on projects of major civic ambition: heritage sites given the right narrative foundation can become not just visitor attractions but cultural anchors, places a city builds its identity around. Valletta's designation as European City of Culture three years after opening was a clear example of this in action.

Client: Heritage Malta & The Grand Harbour Regeneration Authority

TGA: Content Masterplanning, Narrative Development, Interpretation Planning, Content Development, Design Integration

Partners: Forward Architects (Architects), Land Design Studio (Exhibition Design), Surface 3 Studio (Graphic Design), Sarner International (Media Production)