The National Railway Museum at Shildon

The site of Locomotion 2 is a post industrial site that currently undermines the experience of the museum and is also not a good neighbourhood to Shildon’s adjacent residential areas. Our proposal brings this site back into active use and makes it attractive and part of the experience of the Museum as soon as you arrive. Play located at the front of the site will also place these new facilities within reach of the local community. The proposal reuses excavated concrete and site materials and reduces cart away to other sites, reducing the carbon footprint of the development and thereby contributing to the sustainability of the scheme. The adjacent Shildon railways sidings nature reserve protects a range of species such as one of the largest colonies of Dingy skipper Butterflies in Durham, the proposed scheme around Lcomotion 2 will extend this habitat into the museum site encouraging a more diverse flora and fauna. Locomotion is here because Shildon is the world’s first railway town and its urban grain has formed around the railway lines. When the railway was still functioning, this had a legibility to it and now this has been lost. This loss has led to the relative invisibility of the train lines today and the visual clutter of a town without its organising logic, despite the location of The Railway Museum in Shildon. The focus of the masterplan is to extend the influence of the museum out into Shildon, ensuring the history of the railway is much more legible. The masterplan proposes the following aims: • To consider how to reinforce the visitor experience of the whole museum by presenting an attractive and easily accessible link between the two buildings • To encourage greater dwell time on the Locomotion site by providing greater access to its outdoor spaces • To visually link the two ends of the museum • To ensure that the Locomotion 2 project is delivered in the context of a Landscape Masterplan for the whole site • To use the potential for ecology to colonise as a way of linking the museum to its landscape context • To reduce waste associated with the development of LOCO 2 • To make space and routes that can be shared with the local community, so the museum is more physically stitched into its community The report identifies a series of landscape projects to support the aims of the Masterplan. The projects identified have been categorised by priority and also by area. This is to help future delivery partners identify which projects are highest priority and/or which could be delivered in discrete packages by area.