Science Museum Group

The Science Museum Group, the world’s leading group of science museums appointed Direct Access in 2021 to undertake accessibility reviews of three key museum sites. Direct Access mapped out the customer journey to identify all the touchpoints including pre- and post-visit. Onsite audits by NRAC and IAAP-certified Access Consultants covered both the public exhibition spaces and back-of-house employee areas.

The Science Museum Group enjoys over five million visitors a year and is the home of many iconic exhibits including Mallard, Tim Peak’s spacecraft, Amy Johnson’s Gipsy Moth, and Alan Turing’s ACE computing pilot. 

It was the first major museum group that became a client of Direct Access. Since then, we have had the pleasure of working with several different museums to innovate new ways of being accessible and inclusive of disabled people.

The sites included:

• Science and Industry Museum, Manchester – site of the world’s first passenger railway station
• National Science and Media Museum, Bradford – 7 floors of galleries, three cinemas, and Europe’s first IMAX cinema.
• Locomotion, Shildon – spread over a 1km route the museum highlights the world’s first railway, the Stockton to Darlington railway.