Designing a Window into Must Farm

We’re delighted to be working with the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery on a Round 1 National Lottery Heritage Fund application for a new permanent exhibition exploring Must Farm - a late Bronze Age settlement dating to around 850BC, often described as “Britain’s Pompeii”.

As exhibition designers, what makes Must Farm extraordinary is not just its preservation, but its intimacy. The fire that destroyed the raised platform also froze a moment in time - from cooking pots still holding meals to tools, textiles and personal objects left behind. It offers a rare, almost immediate connection to everyday life nearly 3,000 years ago. Our conceptual thinking focuses on translating this archaeological richness into a spatial narrative that unfolds across three interconnected environments: landscape, event and life. Visitors begin with the wetlands - a world of movement, craft and resourcefulness - before passing through an immersive threshold that evokes the fire and its aftermath. From there, the exhibition opens into domestic space, where human stories take centre stage.

Rather than presenting artefacts as isolated objects, we are working to re-position them within lived experience revealing a sophisticated and deeply human society. This is an opportunity to move beyond prehistory as abstraction, and instead encounter it as something tangible, sensory and profoundly familiar.