Can’t wait to check out The Box in Plymouth, opening tomorrow (Tuesday 29 September) and adding a new museum, gallery and heritage archive to the so-called Ocean City’s cultural landscape. The £46 million project occupies the old – and old-fashioned – City Museum site on North Hill (more or less opposite the University), dragging the original building into the 21st century by way of some bold additions and interventions – including the eponymous box. Clad in a blue-hued mosaic of aluminium squares, this ‘floating’ cubic extension facilitates a series of galleries, a café and gift shop, a new piazza and a temperature-controlled archive.
According to the Guardian, the Box’s box looks like ‘an out-of-town storage shed got blown here in a gale’. Maybe true, but I’m still eager to get inside. In the year of the pandemic, any new cultural project deserves attention, particularly one on this scale.
Admission is free (to support social distancing, visitors are allocated timed slots which can be booked in advance online) unless you want to see the opening exhibition, Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy which marks the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower from Plymouth to America in 1620 (tickets for over-18s, £5).
Photos: Courtesy of The Box/Paul White
