Science and Innovation Park

The Science Museum took ownership of the 545-acre former RAF Wroughton airfield in 1979, to be used as a storage facility for the museum's largest objects. In 2007 the collection of the Science Museum Library and Archives was also relocated to new facilities at the site. The Science Museum Group, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum had previously used Blythe House in London as storage, but had to move out after the government announced its intention to sell the building. The Science Museum Group received £40m from the government to develop and create a high-quality accessible facility for the management of the collection at the site in Wroughton. In 2018, the project to create a new purpose-built facility to care for the collection began. It was completed in 2021 and is now the Science Museum Group’s primary collections management facility. In October 2024 the Hawking Building, named in recognition of Stephen Hawking's life long association with the museum, was opened to the public as a new facility to house the collection and make it more accessible for visitors. ==Activity==

Science Museum Group Collections The primary role of the Science and Innovation Park (formerly the National Collections Centre) is to conserve and manage the collections of the Science Museum Group. Over 300,000 objects are housed at the site in former aircraft hangars and a modern purpose-built collection management facility, the Hawking Building, named after the late Stephen Hawking. The facility is 90m wide and 300m long, and has conservation laboratories, research areas and photography studios alongside a storage hall with 30,000 metres of shelving to house the collection. Access by researchers to objects can be requested by appointment. The National Collections Centre also hosts bookable tours for the public and school visits. • de Havilland Comet 4B G-APYD, Hawker Siddeley HS-121 Trident 3B G-AWZM and Lockheed Constellation N7777G, the only Constellation preserved in the United Kingdom • A double-decker bus • A TV detector van In 1992 the Library joined with Imperial College London to form the Imperial College & Science Museum Libraries. Due to the increasing demand for space in South Kensington, about 85% of the collections and all of the archives moved to a specially adapted library building at Wroughton in 2007. By 2014, almost all of the library had been moved to Wroughton. Researchers can apply to have items brought to the Dana Research Centre and Library in South Kensington. Amongst the library and archives holdings are: • Charles Babbage's notebooks, engineering plans, certificates, social diary and letters. • Barnes Wallis’s plans for the bouncing bomb. • Pearson PLC engineering papers and photographs. • Walt Patterson nuclear collection. • Humphry Davy's letters. • George Parker Bidder's papers. • The New Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences. (Rees's Cyclopædia) Sustainability In April 2021 the Science Museum Group announced that it is targeting to achieve overall Net Zero / Carbon Neutrality by 2033. The Science and Innovation Park hosts one of the UK's largest solar farms, completed in 2016, which is capable of generating close to 50GWh of energy per year, three times more than that consumed by the Science Museum Group as a whole. The Park contains large open grasslands and 30 hectares of native woodlands. More than a hundred bird and bat boxes together with log piles, hibernacula, beehives, and species-rich grassland provide habitats and homes for reptiles, insects and other wildlife. In a further commitment to biodiversity, 1,000 native trees will be planted annually throughout the 2020s, joining 49,000 trees already planted by the Science Museum Group at the site. Inserts for the television series The Grand Tour were filmed on the site's former airfield roads from 2016 to 2019. ==See also==