A popular Lake District attraction has picked up a GOLD award in three categories at the London Design Awards.
The awards – part of an international awards programme spanning major global cities from Hong Kong and Berlin to New York, Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai – has announced the results of its 2021 UK competition, with Wordsworth Grasmere taking the GOLD Award across three different categories.
Wordsworth Grasmere, the visitor attraction celebrating the work and former home of the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, has been named winner of the ‘Gallery and Exhibition’ category, the ‘Identity and Branding’ and the ‘Wayfinding’ categories.
All were designed by a team from Nissen Richards Studio working closely with the Wordsworth Trust curatorial and marketing teams and the project’s architects Purcell.
Gallery and Exhibition
The exhibition design for the project aimed to bring the lives of William and Dorothy and the poetry of William Wordsworth to life for a wide range of visitors, from those new to Wordsworth’s work to those with specialist knowledge and interest – all within a beautiful site in the heart of the landscape that inspired the Wordsworths, with four galleries housed in the newly-expanded museum and an evocative visitor experience within Dove Cottage itself.
Identity and Branding
The new branding for the attraction features bespoke characters inspired by Baskerville, the typeface designed by John Baskerville and used to print the first Wordsworth editions of poetry, whilst the logo’s unique ligature was inspired by a set of glyphs taken from the first edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. The identity also suggests the stain of ink and the echo of handwriting.
Wayfinding
Nissen Richards Studio developed a series of signs that span in scale from small, single word signs to larger totems signs to highlight key thresholds, whilst also directing visitors, using local slate, so that the signs could be integrated seamlessly alongside both old and new buildings as well as the wider Town End area.
About The Wordsworth Trust
The Wordsworth Trust has been providing a living memorial to William Wordsworth at Dove Cottage since 1891. In May 2021 the Wordsworth Trust opened the visitor attraction now known as Wordsworth Grasmere following a £6.5 million transformation that included creating new outdoor spaces and new galleries in an expanded museum.
In October it opened Dorothy: Writer, Sister, Friend, a new exhibition about Dorothy Wordsworth ahead of the 250th anniversary of her birth on Christmas Day 2021.
