The National Science and Media Museum will partly reopen to visitors on 8 January 2025 with a public programme and newly renovated foyer space, as well as returning favourites such as interactive gallery Wonderlab and the Kodak photography gallery, alongside Yorkshire’s biggest independent cinema. The new Sound and Vision galleries will open in summer 2025.
Ahead of the full reopening, the museum’s IMAX screen will welcome audiences back from 20 December 2024, with screenings of Mufasa: The Lion King across the festive period.
The museum temporarily closed in June last year to undergo a once-in-a-generation transformation with huge changes through a £6 million capital project called ‘Sound and Vision’, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, the museum will have two new permanent galleries, a new passenger lift and improvements to the main entrance.
The museum will celebrate its reopening weekend with a special partnership with Aardman, featuring film screenings, model making workshops and more. The museum’s team of Explainers will also be delivering free family-friendly activities with live science shows and object handling.
Visitors will be welcomed back into the museum’s brand-new foyer space, which has been updated to provide a more flexible and welcoming space for visitors and local communities to enjoy. The new foyer includes soft seating, a redesigned shop and the popular Media Café, as well as the installation of an additional passenger lift, allowing more visitors to move around the building with ease.
The museum will also open a new temporary exhibition, David Hockney: Pieced Together, on 15 January. The exhibition showcases Hockney’s video installation capturing Woldgate Woods in the Yorkshire countryside through the four seasons, with each screen showing a different perspective of the country lane. The exhibition also explores the artistic and technical parallels of Hockney’s early ‘joiner’ photocollages, two of which are part of the museum’s collection. One of the joiners on display shows the museum in its early days as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in 1985.
Commenting the museum’s reopening, Jo Quinton-Tulloch, Director of the National Science and Media Museum said: “We are delighted to be reopening the museum on 8 January and can’t wait to welcome visitors back into the building. With newly transformed spaces, improved accessibility and exciting additions to our public programme, it marks the beginning of an extraordinary journey for both the museum and our community. As the year unfolds, we will unveil more exciting improvements to the museum, culminating in the summer with the launch of our spectacular Sound and Vision galleries. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be reopening the museum with the backdrop of an amazing Bradford 2025 programme, making this a once-in-a-lifetime moment.”
Helen Featherstone, Director, England, North at The National Lottery Heritage Fund added: “It is incredibly exciting that audiences will be welcomed back into the National Science and Media Museum in January as their doors reopen. In 1995, the museum was one of the first transformational projects in Yorkshire that received funding from the Heritage Fund, and after 30 years we have supported the museum again with the new Sound and Vision Galleries. Showcasing key objects and stories from the museums world-class collection, the new galleries are due to open later in the year, ensuring that the museum will be a star attraction of Bradford City of Culture 2025.”
The early 2025 programme will also see the return of the museum’s annual Yorkshire Games Festival, taking place from 10–23 February, including half-term activities for all the family. The festival’s industry-led Game Talks will also take place across 12 and 13 February, featuring a unique programme of talks and workshops from talented videogame developers.
As part of the museum’s regeneration project, vintage arcade Games Lounge has been relocated and transformed into Power Up. Opening in March, Power Up is still the hands-on gaming experience that has grown to be a visitor favourite, but it provides a refreshed offer designed to engage visitors of all ages. It will include a BAFTA Young Game Designers section, where visitors are invited to play previous winners’ titles and learn about the next generation of game design, as well as an opportunity to discover more about the history of the arcade.
As part of the museum’s 2025 public programme, a new interactive and immersive installation by experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast in partnership with Bradford 2025 will open in April 2025. The installation will take visitors on a multimedia ride through time and space, exploring who we are and what makes us human. With Bradford running through its DNA, the experience has been inspired by Born in Bradford, a major research programme that has been tracking the lives of more than 40,000 people across the district since 2007.
The museum’s new Sound and Vision galleries will open in summer 2025, featuring permanent displays of the museum’s world-class collections of photography, film, television, gaming and sound technologies. The new galleries will take visitors on a journey through the explosion of media technologies, and their impact on our lives. The Sound and Vision Project is a £6m capital investment, and in addition to funding received from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project also has support from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, Bradford Council and the Science Museum Group, which the National Science and Media Museum is a part of.
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