A Museum for Now

The climate crisis and pandemic highlight fragilities in communal networks and relationships to home-place. Collective imaginations are vulnerable as the stories we live by are re-written to foster greater resilience in precarious times. This public infrastructure gives space for convivial networks to develop, re-linking communal life and place.

The UK's canals played a large part in the wealth creation that brought local and global inequality through Empire. Relevantly, boaters lived and worked aboard their homes, highlighting the intersection of domesticity and a finance driven State. At this threshold, canals were a social, residential, and industrial infrastructure; a regeneration project that changed the towns it travelled through, whilst Empire disrupted globally. Presently, interwoven infrastructures and local networks are being revalued, finding voice in planning policy and regeneration debates. Network-thinking and demonstrating connections between local and global scales becomes a political project to strengthen both local and global communities as a form of resistance and act of Care. Empire demonstrates that dominant uni-lateral narratives lead to instability, inequality, erasure of voices. Complexity and diversity of narratives bring strength. In an area that has experienced many migrations, with a diversity of communities, Hackney and the canal give precedent of landscapes where traveller and person rooted to land cross paths and find common ground. Considering the site’s distant past as a Common, where dependence on one another and the land saw farming and communal festivity linking cosmic and communal scales, the project imagines the Museum as the Public House at the crossing: an institution with place-based roots: where old and new connections are developed: a festive place of sharing narratives, and a place where 'history' is the unbroken stream of the present. Speaking of roots and routes, the museum reflects the site's past with heavy brick volumes connected by light timber bridges, embedding itself into landscape like the fragments of ruined industrial structures nearby. Referencing historical theatre typologies, it makes use of the height gained with the existing canal bridge to raise galleries onto first floor level, forming a ground-level colonnade that connects park to river, where access to garden and kitchen can exist independently, yet linked to, the exhibition spaces above.