The Museum of Oxford wanted a small exhibition to welcome and orientate visitors to the city, but the ambition grew into something larger and more lasting. Explore Oxford became two full galleries in the Town Hall exploring 700 years of Oxford city history, built around the museum's collections and designed to speak as meaningfully to Oxford residents as to first-time visitors. Funded by Heritage Lottery and WREN, the interpretive strategy needed to find the threads connecting a famously complex, layered and sometimes contradictory city into a coherent and welcoming experience.

Interpretive Masterplanning | Community Consultation | Research | Content Development | Design Integration

We began with community consultation, working with a volunteer research team to investigate chosen objects and conduct interviews with local people and groups, ensuring the city's own voices shaped the story from the outset. Four thematic lenses: City at Play, City at Work, City of Words, City of Invention. This gave the galleries a structure that could hold the full diversity of Oxford's history without forcing it into a single linear narrative.

We developed characters to lead visitors through the city's history, commissioned new films, maps and original illustrations, working closely with artists Peter Edwards and Andy Gammon, and created an innovative digital podium and slave screen system for 360° virtual exploration of Oxford.

Community consultation is not just a methodological virtue, it produces demonstrably better content, because local people know things about a place that no archive holds and no external researcher will find without being invited in. The volunteer research team brought stories, objects and connections that would never have surfaced through conventional curatorial research alone.

A project that began as a small orientation exhibition became the foundation for a long-term interpretive infrastructure for an entire city, the signage scheme and digital trail that followed were made possible because the narrative framework developed for the galleries was strong enough to extend into every street, building and corner of Oxford beyond the museum's walls.

Client: Oxford City Council

TGA: Interpretive Masterplanning, Community Consultation, Research, Content Development, Design Integration

Partners: Exhibitions+ (Design), Peter Edwards (Illustration), Andy Gammon (Artist)