Text created for The Postal Museum – due to open in London next year – had to reflect its new aims to engage a wider audience.
The British Postal Museum and Archive and the Postal Heritage Trust secured funding, including £4.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), to reopen an historic underground railway used by the Post Office on the grounds that it created a family friendly attraction.
Nothing was left to chance when it came to producing text for the new site and thorough research was conducted with families with children between the ages of seven and 11. The purpose of this was to gauge the levels of knowledge these groups had of the UK’s postal service, as well as to find out what their interests were.
While participants didn’t have specific knowledge relating to the Penny Black – the world’s first adhesive stamp – or know what GPO (General Post Office) stood for – they were familiar with the Victorian period and the first and second world wars. To this end, says Emma Harper, the exhibition officer at The Postal Museum, the interpretation team made sure it linked the stories from the archive to historical events that their target audience would be familiar with.
The museum will have a zone dedicated to the Post Office in conflict, which covers both of the world wars, and tells the story of middle-aged postman Frederick Gurr, who, during the second world war, set up a salvage squad to rescue letters from pillar boxes and burnt out post offices.
“We have tried to focus on the people in the new galleries, ordinary people who have worked for the Post Office or been affected by it,” says Harper.
“We want to bring out some of the more strange and obscure stories as well,” she adds. “Not a lot of people know that the Titanic was a RM ship and it was carrying mail when it sank.”
Previously, text used in the museum was created for an older more specialist audience or those with an interest in philately. “We used to focus much more on the processes rather than the people that carried them out,” says Harper.
“We decided that we wanted to make the museum a much more family-friendly experience and much more revelatory. We want to make people realise how connected they are to the postal museum and how important the history of it is.”
Harper developed the museum’s new philosophy on text with colleagues in access and learning and communications and independent interpretation consultant Rebecca Mileham. It is characterised by revelatory and exciting language, direct questions and contemporary relevance panels, highlighting how online communication methods and symbols still relate to the Post Office. Underpinned by a style guide created by Mileham, this approach is now part of the organisation’s brand guidelines and has been rolled out across the organisation and is used on signage and in marketing material.
“The main challenge is not what you write but what you don’t write,” says Harper. “What do you leave out? There are so many stories that we could tell,” says Harper.
The British Postal Museum and Archive and the Postal Heritage Trust secured funding, including £4.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), to reopen an historic underground railway used by the Post Office on the grounds that it created a family friendly attraction.
Nothing was left to chance when it came to producing text for the new site and thorough research was conducted with families with children between the ages of seven and 11. The purpose of this was to gauge the levels of knowledge these groups had of the UK’s postal service, as well as to find out what their interests were.
While participants didn’t have specific knowledge relating to the Penny Black – the world’s first adhesive stamp – or know what GPO (General Post Office) stood for – they were familiar with the Victorian period and the first and second world wars. To this end, says Emma Harper, the exhibition officer at The Postal Museum, the interpretation team made sure it linked the stories from the archive to historical events that their target audience would be familiar with.
The museum will have a zone dedicated to the Post Office in conflict, which covers both of the world wars, and tells the story of middle-aged postman Frederick Gurr, who, during the second world war, set up a salvage squad to rescue letters from pillar boxes and burnt out post offices.
“We have tried to focus on the people in the new galleries, ordinary people who have worked for the Post Office or been affected by it,” says Harper.
“We want to bring out some of the more strange and obscure stories as well,” she adds. “Not a lot of people know that the Titanic was a RM ship and it was carrying mail when it sank.”
Previously, text used in the museum was created for an older more specialist audience or those with an interest in philately. “We used to focus much more on the processes rather than the people that carried them out,” says Harper.
“We decided that we wanted to make the museum a much more family-friendly experience and much more revelatory. We want to make people realise how connected they are to the postal museum and how important the history of it is.”
Harper developed the museum’s new philosophy on text with colleagues in access and learning and communications and independent interpretation consultant Rebecca Mileham. It is characterised by revelatory and exciting language, direct questions and contemporary relevance panels, highlighting how online communication methods and symbols still relate to the Post Office. Underpinned by a style guide created by Mileham, this approach is now part of the organisation’s brand guidelines and has been rolled out across the organisation and is used on signage and in marketing material.
“The main challenge is not what you write but what you don’t write,” says Harper. “What do you leave out? There are so many stories that we could tell,” says Harper.