James Clay Stuff

When I heard about the Science & Innovation Park I knew that I wanted to visit. However, when I checked for tickets I saw that it was all sold out. So, I joined the mailing list to hear about when tickets would be released. In January I got the email, and even then the tickets looked like they were selling fast, so I booked myself in for a Friday early evening slot. They generally have two slots in the evening every weekday and four morning slots at weekends.

The Science & Innovation Park is part of the Science Museum group, which includes the famous Science Museum in Kensington in London, and the National Railway Museum in York.

The Science & Innovation Park is in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside on the former RAF base at Wroughton. There are numerous buildings on the site, I was going to visit the Hawking Building.

At the Hawking Building we care for hundreds of thousands of objects in the Science Museum Group Collection. In 2018, we embarked on an ambitious project to create this new purpose-built facility, transform how we care for museum objects and enable people to explore much more of the Collection than ever before. More than 300,000 historic objects have now been carefully moved to this sector-leading facility, bringing together these historic objects under one roof for the first time for conservation, study and public access.

I joined a group of fifteen for a guided tour of the collection. Obviously we weren’t going to see everything in the building, but we did see a lot.

Tickets were £25 which for a 90 minute tour seemed a little on the expensive side, however I do think it was worth it. So, much so, I would probably go again another time.

I was pleased to have reached my fifty places in 2025 for my #50places2025 series of blog posts. This year I am planning to do something similar with a new hashtag, #50places2026 and it will be the same rules. Each time I visit a place I will post a blog post and some photographs. I can’t repeat places, and in an extra twist I can’t use the fifty places I visited in 2025 in the list as well (though I anticipate visiting some of those places again).