Despite attracting more visitors than Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, the Kensington Museums area fails to develop a sense of place or become a hub of public urban life. Developed as my thesis project while at the RCA I proposed working around the existing museums and university monuments to create an urban enfilade of public spaces stretching from the Natural History Museum to the Albert Memorial and into the heart of the Kensington Gardens.
My proposal, Albertopolis 2025, was to set out how a vibrant metropolitan public realm could be integrated at the heart of this historic district. Using the geometry of the 19th-century axis set out by Albert himself, the proposal ran from the centre of the Royal Kensington Gardens to the National History Museum on Cromwell Road in the South. I proposed to re-route Kensington Road into a tunnel in order to create a seamless sequence of pedestrianised spaces from the park around the Albert Memorial and Hall across a shared university campus green to the foot of the restored Imperial College tower. From there, a south-facing grand stairway through a colonnaded screen led into a new Museums’ Square onto which each museum face, and onto which the Natural History Museum had originally been designed to address with its monumental towers. These inner public spaces were accessible by pedestrians coming from Exhibition Road and Queen’s Gate through covered shopping gallerias, themselves lined in arcades for retail, cafés and bookshops.
