Grime's Graves: Transporting Visitors 4,500 Years Back in Time
Our Latest Exhibition Design Project
On Saturday, April 27, English Heritage unveiled a remarkable new entrance to an extensive prehistoric flint mine: Grime's Graves. This site transports visitors back 4,500 years, offering an immersive glimpse into a neolithic world. Grime's Graves is a series of flint mines recognized as the oldest human-made underground space in the country.
The Pavilion's exhibition design is a nod to the working methods of archaeologists, incorporating gridded notepads for note-taking and raw plywood to reflect working outdoors. Incorporating the tools and celebrating marks made by people is a visual response that we like to make as a way to link visitors to the stories of the sites we interpret. This thinking is continued across the landscape interpretation that uses red and white striped ranging poles to help visitors identify locations, and along the entrance driveway that has adapted road signs to signal the subject matter and provide reassurance and confirmation that visitors are on the right path.
At the end of the path is a life-size illustration of a prehistoric miner at work. This image greets visitors and offers a glimpse into the stories that will be told across the site. This is part of a series of commissioned illustrations undertaken by Rebecca Strickson. These illustrations depict the daily life and labour of those ancient miners and help connect today's visitors to their past lives. Within the entrance building to the mine shaft, Rebecca has hand-painted her illustrations on the walls, further building on the idea of celebrating the 'mark making' of people.
Visitors walk along a curved ramp leading into the new entrance building on top of the accessible mine shaft; they encounter key dates of local and national significance etched into timber posts. This timeline starts with the present day and gradually takes visitors back to 4,500 years ago, preparing them for the descent into the prehistoric mine.
Descending nine meters below ground into the excavated mine shafts, visitors step into a unique world where men, women, and children once toiled to extract flint. An immersive projected animated film plays out on the stone walls of the mine shaft, linking visitors to ideas on working in the mine shaft, religious or spiritual practice and a sense of geological time and the formation of the rocks.