Dockyard Museum interpretation

Interpretation panels about the history of the SS Great Britain

  • Role: designer
  • Stakeholder: SS Great Britain Trust
  • Sectors: charity (heritage)
  • Deliverables: Interpretation panels

Large-scale panels for the Dockyard Museum, which is part of Brunel's SS Great Britain, that tell the varied history of Brunel's famous ship from ocean liner to scuttled wreck and ultimately its salvage.

  • Design
  • Illustration
  • Infographics
Full artwork for the panel showing the whole world map and the extend of the journey with location pins, dates and logbook excerpts Finished and installed panel at the museum with inset display case showing original artefacts and a close-up of the salvage operation schematics
Falkland Islands to Bristol is a large-scale panel at the entrance of the Dockyard Museum that explains the SS Great Britain's complex salvage and journey across the Atlantic in a comprehensive way.

By 1937, 94 years after its launch as a passenger ship, the SS Great Britain was deemed unseaworthy and was abandoned in the Falkland Islands, where it deteriorated and part sunk. To save this historically significant ship a salvage operation was launched in 1970 to refloat and tow the SS Great Britain back to Bristol.

The animated documentary The Incredible Journey tells the whole story with the help of original interviews.

To visualise the complex operation I used museum archive material to draw up simplified maps and pinpoint the SS Great Britain's journey stages. A secondary panel inset illustrates how the ship was lifted off the seafloor, steered onto a pontoon and towed across the Atlantic.

The panel sits at the museum entrance and gives visitors a quick and comprehensive overview over how this part-sunken steamship managed to find its way back from the Falkland Islands to its original dry dock in Bristol.

  • First 3 stages of the salvage: patch up holes, take out masts, pump out water to refloat the ship while sinking floating pontoon by pumping it full of water
  • Stages 4-6 of the salvage: tug floating ship over the sunk pontoon, slowly raise the pontoon underneath by pumping out water raising the ship with it, tugboat pulls pontoon with fully emerged and secured ship