The architects’ Purcell UK has overseen
the newly completed refurbishment and extension of the Charles Dickens Museum
in London.
The Charles Dickens Museum, the author’s
former Bloomsbury home, is once again open following a major investment that
has seen the building transformed and doubled in size in Dickens’s bicentenary
year.
The £3.1m Great Expectations
project, funded substantially through the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), is the
most significant legacy of Dickens’s bicentenary, securing the future of the
building for generations to come and offering a brand new visitor experience
for the 21st century. The re-opening of the Museum is a fitting finale to a
year of worldwide Dickens celebrations.
As well as restoring the house at 48
Doughty Street – Dickens’s home at the start of his career and the birthplace
of classics Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – and opening the
house’s attic and kitchen for the first time, the Museum has expanded into
neighbouring 49 Doughty Street. The adjacent building has been converted into a
state-of-the-art Visitor and Learning Centre with rooms available for formal
and informal learning events, study and reading facilities.
The redevelopment project has given the
Museum the once in a lifetime opportunity to conserve and improve the historic
building at 48, restoring the Grade-I-listed house to its original early
Victorian splendour with the help of heritage specialists and literary
scholars.
For Museum enquiries contact:The Charles
Dickens Museum,
48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX
T: +44(0)20 7405 2127
E: info@dickensmuseum.com
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