GRASMERE’S iconic Wordsworth Museum has been named as the recipient of a Gold Award across three different sections in a prestigious international competition.

Wordsworth Grasmere has taken the award in the London Design Awards, which is part of an international award programme spanning major global cities from Hong Kong and Berlin to New York, Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The results of its 2021 UK competition saw the Lake District attraction museum taking gold in 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 a 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.