In 2021, we reopened as a place to reveal and rethink how we live, in order to live better together. Our public galleries doubled in size, introducing the new Home Galleries, which were co-curated to be more representative of our local communities in Hackney.
After extensive consultation and development, seven new Rooms Through Time were opened in 2024, drawing on personal stories to speak to universal themes of home and belonging. These stories are deeply intertwined with the complex histories of migration and identity that have shaped London for generations, resonating nationally and globally.
Organisations and groups including our local community, The London Irish Centre and the Interactive Research Studio have been involved in the Real Rooms project at various stages of the process, such as research, design, co-curation and interpretation.
The Rooms
The new rooms include a Jewish tenement flat from 1913, an Irish couple’s house in the 1950s, LGBTQIA+ renters sharing an ex-council home in 2005, a British Vietnamese home in 2024, and the Innovo Room of the Future, which explores real homes amid challenges such as the climate crisis and technological advances. Our beloved 1870s Parlour and 1970s Front Room have also been expanded.
Visitors now have the opportunity to step inside the spaces—from bedrooms and bathrooms to kitchens and gardens—and immerse themselves in each. From the aroma of lokshen soup wafting from the stove to changing the music on a record player to grabbing a mic and singing karaoke, guests will get hands-on in the spaces and be transported through time, encountering fragments of the stories that constitute our shared history.
Typeone has created an interactive network of things to see, hear, feel and activate. An audio tapestry of retrofitted vintage home entertainment and ambient immersive audio sings, gurgles and hums between the rooms as stories are brought to life.
An immersive film, together with a phone-based Augmented Reality experience, tells stories at the confluence of urban living and the natural world.
Working with our Community Authors
In 2021, we launched the Room to Rethink, a space for visitors to reflect on the existing Rooms Through Time and tell us what they would like to see happen to the displays.
As a result, the Community Authors – a group of eight people from a variety of professions and backgrounds – were recruited to play an active role in reshaping the Rooms Through Time.
The Community Authors share ideas, produce and suggest creative programming to challenge the ways we work to ensure that Museum of the Home is representative and inclusive.
The resulting Real Rooms project comes from extensive work with the Community Authors, as well as continual outreach and engagement with visitors and our local communities.
Our community authors for this project were:
- Julia Thanh
- Naima Hassan
- Drucilla Burrell
- Amy Peace Buzzard
- Priscilla Tagoe
- Lesley Dixon
- Joseph Callanan
- Afia Khatun
Typeone Interactive Design
Typeone worked with Museum of the Home’s curators to design digital interactives which work together to tell the stories of the new Rooms Through Time.
Typeone Text 300 DPI
Typeone has created an interactive network of things to see, hear, feel and activate. An audio tapestry of retrofitted vintage home entertainment and ambient immersive audio sings, gurgles and hums between the rooms as stories are brought to life.
An immersive film, together with a phone-based Augmented Reality experience, tells stories at the confluence of urban living and the natural world.
Lighting Design
Drawing inspiration from urban nature, Typeone have reimagined Branson Coates’ distinctive architectural features to create a chromatic, sound-reactive light sculpture. Enter the space and you are enveloped in digital weather. Look up – above, electric rain patters rhythmically overhead. A rainy day – we’ll stay at home today. Look to the far end of the soffit, the glow of the geometric centre, where organic colour patterns lay claim to the negative space between the steel frame of the soffit.
Roots and Clouds
Typeone have created an immersive virtual reality screening space and are currently showing the preview of immersive film Roots and Clouds. Exploring Hackney and surrounding boroughs, catching glimpses, hearing snippets from inhabitants who are old, young, transient, returning and lifelong, award-winning directors Isobel Mascarenhas-Whitman and Alex Tennyson have used particle swarms and pointclouds to create a poignant illustration of the passage of time. With a score by Randomer, this is a piece that speaks to the soul of London.
Street Animals
Take part in an Interactive Augmented Reality Adventure, starring Anna-Maria Nabirye, Sarah Thom and Divian Ladwa. Follow Lucky the parakeet as she escapes from her cage, and Fennie the Fox as she hunts down dinner- find out about the emancipation of the parakeets and the urbanisation of the foxes through your own phone, and the magic of projection.
Control System
The Real Rooms is the first permanent installation to use Typeone Realities, the Mixed Reality show control system which Typeone developed in 2021, using Innovate UK’s Creative Innovation Fund. This intricately networked system of media nodes allows audience members to trigger projection and augmented reality elements with their own phones, and by doing so automatically alter lighting and audio. Typeone Realities show control offers presets for audiences with access requirements, in order to create multisensory stories which can be experienced in different ways.
Free digital guide
Explore Museum of the Home with our digital guide on Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app.
