Science exhibits put under wraps
10:30pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in News By Scott D'Arcy
Wroughton Science Museum is building a storage hanger to keep more items. From left, Matt Moore, Piers Ashley-Carter
SOME of the country’s prize scientific exhibits are to get a new home – made of hemp.
The storage facility is being created at the Science Museum at Wroughton, where the former airfield houses more than 500,000 objects for the London Science Museum.
As part of an £800,000 project, the new building, which is the size of four detached houses, is being installed inside one of the 11 hangars to reduce humidity and preserve sensitive exhibits.
Matt Moore, sustainable development manager for the National Museum of Science and Industry, said: “Essentially it will be deep storage – preserving objects for evermore.
“The environment in the hangars for the majority of objects is pretty good, pretty constant, but some items with wood and leather would do better with not quite so much humidity to preserve them for even longer.
“So we’ve gone back to basics and have decided to use hemp to stabilise the environment.
“The advantages of hemp are that it is a really good natural building material, especially in terms of humidity levels in the building, almost like natural air conditioning.
“It’s more sustainable from an economic perspective but also in terms of the carbon footprint, which is almost zero.
“As a building material it’s been used for thousands of years but this is the first I’ve known it to be used in this country for its humidity qualities.
“It is experimental from that point of view but everything has been worked out in detail.”
Lime Technology is supplying the pre-fabricated hemp building, which is to be built in a strict 16-week timeframe.
Ian Pritchett, the company's technical director, said: “We build lots of hemp buildings but this is a building within a building which is far more challenging. The hangar is fairly enormous – about an acre of space.”
The museum houses giant exhibits, including a bus used to transport railway workers around Swindon and an airliner used for a Rolling Stones tour.
