Medieval Threshing Barn, Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings
How creativity, imagination and a little ‘magic’ can transform a space
Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings is a large open air space dedicated to the preservation and display of architectural treasures that would have been lost to the march of progress without their intervention and ongoing care and maintenance. Whilst wandering around the museum is in itself an interesting experience, many of the buildings were saved, dismantled and then rebuilt without an overarching plan in terms of the whole visitor experience. As a result, this vast site presents an oddly disparate array of buildings which often bear no relation to their neighbour, and interpretation is largely confined to a visitor centre on entry and small panels across the site.
Mike Foster
(Maltings)
Essentially our brief was to interpret a medieval threshing barn, but a site visit showed that we had to think carefully about how we approached this project. To begin, there was no real branding or uniform design ethos imposed across the museum. Its sheer size and the huge investment that would be necessary to refresh all the interpretive displays meant that this would never be a practical option. There was also a strong desire within the client team for this barn to represent a change of direction. They recognised that a small panel could never convey the whole story they wanted to tell, and the dwell times for each building were short - basically wander in, wander out. Their ambition for this barn was to explain the design of the built space with large doors on opposite walls, to describe the threshing process, and then go on to examine the history of agriculture as applied to grain farming over the last 500 years, through the development of mechanisation and resultant social impact, unrest and riots, to modern day industrialisation with the advent of the combine harvester, and how that has in return affected yield and nutritional values of crops. There was also mention of AV or interactive interventions to support the stories.
This is of course a lot of interpretation for one little barn which currently had dwell times measured in seconds! However, we are always up for a challenge and we felt a good solution was possible. The budget was relatively small, being around £13k net, so we knew that options were limited. We were also concerned about introducing AV to a space which, whilst covered, was still essentially outdoors and subject to moisture and significant seasonal temperature variation. A good quality outdoor projector would use up the entire budget available to us, and there was also the potential risk of fire which in an unoccupied, medieval barn would be catastrophic. After some negotiation and a lot of brain-storming and back and forth with the client we eventually came up with a way forward agreed by all parties: AV would include an animation of hand-threshing (created by ourselves) projected onto the internal barn doors, a soundscape of same together with an oral history from the 1950s which described hand threshing in the late 19th century, and the physical displays would comprise four large panels in rustic frames hanging within the barn on ropes. The client team agreed to procure and install the projector - and a power supply - as we were unwilling to bear that responsibility given the significant concerns outlined above.
We created the animation as a loop, showing two men hand threshing wheat. It was rendered in a woodcut style, white line on black background, and edited to gradually appear around 10-15 seconds after the soundscape of the threshing noise began - in turn triggered by PIR as visitors enter the barn. Together these elements gave the overall impression of a ‘distant memory of threshing’ - almost a ghost from the past - which was really quite magical and engaging for visitors of all ages. The panels themselves covered all the themes the client wished to include. However, we were keen that these were not standard interpretation panels - instead developed in a storybook style where the illustrations did a lot of the heavy lifting. We imposed the same ‘period’ style that we developed for the animation, but here with a black ‘ink’ line on parchment. The text weaved around the images, telling the story in a way that was easy to digest and understand. Most importantly, these complex themes could be read and digested in under two minutes - important to ensure the greatest possible number of visitors would dwell long enough to take in everything.
Feedback on the installed interpretation has been overwhelmingly positive, and children in particular love the ‘magic’ barn! Although we could not fully realise the ambitions of the client, we believe we developed a solution that should surpass all reasonable expectations for the budget available to us. The project was genuinely a wonderful experience and perhaps one of our favourite briefs to resolve and realise. It was challenging - at times seemingly impossibly so - but the end results are, we think, the absolute best we could offer. Visitors who enter the space would not begin to imagine the surprise that awaits them - and how much they will learn in just two minutes! We are sure that our barn interpretation is now one of the take-away memories of Avoncroft Museum!
Maltings are members of the following professional organisations: Association for Heritage Interpretation, Group for Education in Museums, and Association of Illustrators.
