“A national embarrassment and disgrace,” is how Simon Thurley, the chief executive of English Heritage, described the way that visitors had to approach one of the most iconic and enigmatic megalithic sites in the world.
That all changed last December when the Stonehenge Visitor Centre opened to the public. It is in most respects a triumphant resolution of a decades-long saga of wrangling and aborted designs.
The new visitor centre ticks important boxes architecturally, contextually and theatrically.
The response by the architect, Denton Corker Marshall, to the henge – out of sight over the brow of a hill – has been to make a building that appears provisional, and precariously adapted to its environment, like a Bedouin tent in the desert. It is a clever illusion but effective in its unassuming sensitivity to context.
A wafer-thin, sinuously rigid “awning”, which is supported along its margins on a canted series of spindly poles, shelters the new visitor facilities beneath.
An open-ended cross-passage runs through the centre, which provides direct access to the vehicles that transport visitors to the henge. There is a booth for tickets and audioguides. On either side is an enclosed space. To the right, clad in timber, is the exhibition space (and toilets).
The cafe, shop and education centre is to the left, visible behind glass walls. Visitors take the door signed Exhibition, and move through a small lobby to a circular space.
Images projected on the walls put the audience in the virtual centre of the henge. It is a dramatic introduction to phases of construction that started 5,000 years ago and took a thousand years to complete.
The quality of graphics is superb – and if many visitors do no more than sample this immersive reconstruction, they will get some of the essentials.
A useful timeline, which is reinforced throughout the exhibition, on panels outside and in the guidebook, gives visitors handholds to get a grip on a multi-layered narrative of the henge and its context.
The displays are divided into three areas. First, there is an evidence-based, standard museum exposition that tells visitors who built Stonehenge, when they did it and how.
This draws on objects loaned from museums in Salisbury and Devizes, and reconstructions using models, graphic panels and a wall-length audiovisual.
English Heritage’s decision to display the skeletal remains of people exhumed in the area has attracted accusations of cultural insensitivity and a failure to consult.
My own reactions are mixed: I appreciate learning what science can tell us about the age and origins of a prehistoric visitor.
While pondering the justification for displaying his bones, the facial reconstruction powerfully communicates a fellow human being who would not attract attention had he been outside the vitrine looking in.
Most certainly he didn’t consent to this treatment – so who can speak for him? “These human remains are displayed with the permission of the… University of Cambridge,” the label claims. Hmmm: if only things were really that simple.
A second area uses panels and video to discuss why Stonehenge was built. The few pundits are worth listening to so I would have liked to hear more, however conjectural.
Finally, off to one side is an archive display of a unique assemblage of books and images that show interpretations of Stonehenge since the 12th century.
These are instructive about successive delusions projected onto the stones. I particularly enjoyed the way that 17th-century British architect Inigo Jones argued that they were the acme of Roman classicism. Visitors can also read of the cultural appropriation of the site by druids, long after its construction.
The absence of any published research after 1952 is a shame: recent publications would convey the idea that we’re still scratching our heads as well as the ground to make sense of the thing.
Other niggles: free to wander as they wished, some visitors weren’t sure which way to follow the plot. Sound is a problem: audio intrudes irrelevantly from adjacent areas.
When I visited on a grey day in January, the place was uncrowded. However, the spaces around the museum exhibits are quite constricted – no doubt conceived with the 7,650 people a day that the booking system is designed to manage.
Outside the visitor centre is a full-scale replica of one of the great sarsen stones, mounted horizontally on a wooden sledge. Visitors can try their hand at pulling it and reading how many more people you’d need to shift it.
Or pop into the shop, which takes branded merchandising to a new level. The cafe disappoints, with food and decor more suited to a motorway eatery, and service that fails to match the high standard elsewhere in the centre.
All this is, of course, an overture to the main work. Sited 1.5 miles away, the megaliths cannot be seen from the visitor centre. Far from detracting from the experience, it perversely fuels expectation for visitors. The intervening hill acts like the curtain before a performance.
Frequent relays of shuttle buses (normally miniature road-trains pulled by Land Rovers) carry people to the henge along a remnant of the closed section of the A344. Cresting a rise in the last few hundred yards, the stones slowly come into view, and the effect is mesmeric.
Gone is the ghastly chain-link fencing, so the visitors, who complete the journey on foot, have an uninterrupted view from a path that circles the stones from a distance. The free audioguide is clear and easy to operate.
Given the cost of getting there, admission charges are high: full price adult tickets are £13.90, with a number of concessions. Prior booking is required, a policy that may impact on visitor projections, expected to top a million a year.
Bearing in mind that the taxpayer bank-rolls English Heritage and that Stonehenge belongs to the British people, I think of the way that “posh” culture is now relayed live to regional cinemas from exclusively priced London theatres.
Maybe there’s an opening for English Heritage here? Mid-summer dawn is a little early for most cinema-goers but sunset on 21 December, the winter solstice, could catch on – a timely reminder that, like the druids, Christmas is a Johnny-come-lately on the festival circuit.
The stones are in it for the long haul. Stonehenge reminds us that it will far outlive English Heritage and all its works. Meanwhile, the new visitor centre will do very nicely indeed.
Tristram Besterman is a freelance adviser and writer on museums and culture
One of the Stonehenge exhibition highlights is a reconstruction of the face of an early Neolithic man, who lived in the area 5,500 years ago, before Stonehenge was built.
He was buried within a long barrow located at Winterbourne Stoke, not far from the visitor centre.
His skeleton was excavated in 1863 by John Thurnam, an antiquarian whose collection of human remains later became part of the Duckworth Laboratory at Cambridge University, which kindly loaned us the skeleton for our exhibition.
Before being put on display, analysis of the bones told us that he was male, aged between 25 and 40 years, and that he had an old injury to his upper leg.
A radiocarbon date showed that he died between 3630 and 3360 BC, a time when the earliest monuments such as the Stonehenge Cursus were being constructed nearby.
We commissioned a specialist reconstruction artist, Oscar Nilsson, to recreate his face. The skull was scanned and a vinyl copy produced, which was then used as a base for reconstructing the muscles, guided by known measurements of how faces are structured (known as the Manchester technique).
The skin was made of moulded silicon and the hair was added by punching in real human hairs. The choice of eye colour and hair colour were informed guesses.
Nilsson named the finished sculpture Into the Light, as he had given him a squinting expression, as if he was emerging into the sunlight.
The face is mounted in the case alongside the skeleton, and he looks out towards the location of his original resting place. We hope that when visitors come face to face with him, they feel a connection to the prehistoric people who built and used the earliest monuments in the Stonehenge landscape.
Susan Greaney is a senior properties historian at English Heritage and is based in Bristol. She was responsible for the archaeological content of the exhibition at Stonehenge
That all changed last December when the Stonehenge Visitor Centre opened to the public. It is in most respects a triumphant resolution of a decades-long saga of wrangling and aborted designs.
The new visitor centre ticks important boxes architecturally, contextually and theatrically.
The response by the architect, Denton Corker Marshall, to the henge – out of sight over the brow of a hill – has been to make a building that appears provisional, and precariously adapted to its environment, like a Bedouin tent in the desert. It is a clever illusion but effective in its unassuming sensitivity to context.
A wafer-thin, sinuously rigid “awning”, which is supported along its margins on a canted series of spindly poles, shelters the new visitor facilities beneath.
An open-ended cross-passage runs through the centre, which provides direct access to the vehicles that transport visitors to the henge. There is a booth for tickets and audioguides. On either side is an enclosed space. To the right, clad in timber, is the exhibition space (and toilets).
The cafe, shop and education centre is to the left, visible behind glass walls. Visitors take the door signed Exhibition, and move through a small lobby to a circular space.
Images projected on the walls put the audience in the virtual centre of the henge. It is a dramatic introduction to phases of construction that started 5,000 years ago and took a thousand years to complete.
The quality of graphics is superb – and if many visitors do no more than sample this immersive reconstruction, they will get some of the essentials.
A useful timeline, which is reinforced throughout the exhibition, on panels outside and in the guidebook, gives visitors handholds to get a grip on a multi-layered narrative of the henge and its context.
The displays are divided into three areas. First, there is an evidence-based, standard museum exposition that tells visitors who built Stonehenge, when they did it and how.
This draws on objects loaned from museums in Salisbury and Devizes, and reconstructions using models, graphic panels and a wall-length audiovisual.
English Heritage’s decision to display the skeletal remains of people exhumed in the area has attracted accusations of cultural insensitivity and a failure to consult.
My own reactions are mixed: I appreciate learning what science can tell us about the age and origins of a prehistoric visitor.
While pondering the justification for displaying his bones, the facial reconstruction powerfully communicates a fellow human being who would not attract attention had he been outside the vitrine looking in.
Most certainly he didn’t consent to this treatment – so who can speak for him? “These human remains are displayed with the permission of the… University of Cambridge,” the label claims. Hmmm: if only things were really that simple.
A second area uses panels and video to discuss why Stonehenge was built. The few pundits are worth listening to so I would have liked to hear more, however conjectural.
Finally, off to one side is an archive display of a unique assemblage of books and images that show interpretations of Stonehenge since the 12th century.
These are instructive about successive delusions projected onto the stones. I particularly enjoyed the way that 17th-century British architect Inigo Jones argued that they were the acme of Roman classicism. Visitors can also read of the cultural appropriation of the site by druids, long after its construction.
The absence of any published research after 1952 is a shame: recent publications would convey the idea that we’re still scratching our heads as well as the ground to make sense of the thing.
Other niggles: free to wander as they wished, some visitors weren’t sure which way to follow the plot. Sound is a problem: audio intrudes irrelevantly from adjacent areas.
When I visited on a grey day in January, the place was uncrowded. However, the spaces around the museum exhibits are quite constricted – no doubt conceived with the 7,650 people a day that the booking system is designed to manage.
Outside the visitor centre is a full-scale replica of one of the great sarsen stones, mounted horizontally on a wooden sledge. Visitors can try their hand at pulling it and reading how many more people you’d need to shift it.
Or pop into the shop, which takes branded merchandising to a new level. The cafe disappoints, with food and decor more suited to a motorway eatery, and service that fails to match the high standard elsewhere in the centre.
All this is, of course, an overture to the main work. Sited 1.5 miles away, the megaliths cannot be seen from the visitor centre. Far from detracting from the experience, it perversely fuels expectation for visitors. The intervening hill acts like the curtain before a performance.
Frequent relays of shuttle buses (normally miniature road-trains pulled by Land Rovers) carry people to the henge along a remnant of the closed section of the A344. Cresting a rise in the last few hundred yards, the stones slowly come into view, and the effect is mesmeric.
Gone is the ghastly chain-link fencing, so the visitors, who complete the journey on foot, have an uninterrupted view from a path that circles the stones from a distance. The free audioguide is clear and easy to operate.
Given the cost of getting there, admission charges are high: full price adult tickets are £13.90, with a number of concessions. Prior booking is required, a policy that may impact on visitor projections, expected to top a million a year.
Bearing in mind that the taxpayer bank-rolls English Heritage and that Stonehenge belongs to the British people, I think of the way that “posh” culture is now relayed live to regional cinemas from exclusively priced London theatres.
Maybe there’s an opening for English Heritage here? Mid-summer dawn is a little early for most cinema-goers but sunset on 21 December, the winter solstice, could catch on – a timely reminder that, like the druids, Christmas is a Johnny-come-lately on the festival circuit.
The stones are in it for the long haul. Stonehenge reminds us that it will far outlive English Heritage and all its works. Meanwhile, the new visitor centre will do very nicely indeed.
Tristram Besterman is a freelance adviser and writer on museums and culture
Focus on… Facial reconstruction
One of the Stonehenge exhibition highlights is a reconstruction of the face of an early Neolithic man, who lived in the area 5,500 years ago, before Stonehenge was built.
He was buried within a long barrow located at Winterbourne Stoke, not far from the visitor centre.
His skeleton was excavated in 1863 by John Thurnam, an antiquarian whose collection of human remains later became part of the Duckworth Laboratory at Cambridge University, which kindly loaned us the skeleton for our exhibition.
Before being put on display, analysis of the bones told us that he was male, aged between 25 and 40 years, and that he had an old injury to his upper leg.
A radiocarbon date showed that he died between 3630 and 3360 BC, a time when the earliest monuments such as the Stonehenge Cursus were being constructed nearby.
We commissioned a specialist reconstruction artist, Oscar Nilsson, to recreate his face. The skull was scanned and a vinyl copy produced, which was then used as a base for reconstructing the muscles, guided by known measurements of how faces are structured (known as the Manchester technique).
The skin was made of moulded silicon and the hair was added by punching in real human hairs. The choice of eye colour and hair colour were informed guesses.
Nilsson named the finished sculpture Into the Light, as he had given him a squinting expression, as if he was emerging into the sunlight.
The face is mounted in the case alongside the skeleton, and he looks out towards the location of his original resting place. We hope that when visitors come face to face with him, they feel a connection to the prehistoric people who built and used the earliest monuments in the Stonehenge landscape.
Susan Greaney is a senior properties historian at English Heritage and is based in Bristol. She was responsible for the archaeological content of the exhibition at Stonehenge
Project data
- Cost £27m (for Stonehenge Improvement Programme)
- Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £10m; Garfield Weston Foundation; Linbury Trust; Wolfson Foundation
- Architect Denton Corker Marshall
- Exhibition design Haley Sharpe Design
- Audiovisuals Centre Screen
- Main contractor Vinci
- Structural engineer Sinclair Knight Merz
- Building services engineer Norman Disney & Young
- Cost consultant Firmingers
- Landscape architect Chris Blandford Associates
- Project manager Gardiner & Theobald
