Last term, our Museum Council students worked with Rumble director Lorna to create a tube map of the Rumble Museum's collections and displays.
The tube map is an iconic design, loved by many, and its striking simplicity in mapping out the complex underground system made it an ideal way to map out the very varied and spread out nature of the Rumble collections and galleries! The students set to work on planning what the different lines should be, how they should intersect, and what colours they should be. Lines include "classics", "art", "nature", "science" and "future" lines. There is also a "protest" line featuring artefacts connected to protest throughout history such as our Suffragette and Racial Justice collections. A "literature" line explores dystopian fiction and Stranger Things-related objects from the 1980s.
They also invented the idea of a "beeline", which would be a special line that mapped out the "must see objects" in the museum. The beeline stops were chosen by Year Nine students and include an ancient Greek tetradrachm coin featuring Athena and her owl, a Victorian Albion Printing Press recently donated to the museum, our World War Two gas mask and Covid vaccine vials from the first roll-out of the vaccine, amongst many other items.
Other innovations they made to the tube map included making the crossover stops hexagon-shaped rather than round to reflect the hexagon theme of the Rumble Museum, and having large hexagon images on the main tube map as well as smaller signs showing the stand-out artefacts.
Once they had all their ideas and designs in place, these were handed over to local designer Naomi Waite to turn into the beautiful map that you can see below. The huge (3 metre by 2 metre) map is appearing this week in main reception and also in the outside space, so students and visitors alike can enjoy it. A number of smaller signs will soon be appearing in individual buildings showing which lines run through those buildings and more must-see objects.
The Rumble Museum is planning to produce tickets for particular routes which can get stamped for different events throughout the year.
