The Future
The museum underwent major building works in 2007. This entailed removing the Rennie flat V steam engine (now to be found at Chatham Historic Dockyard) to create a larger exhibition space, a cafe and improved toilet facilities. With the closure of the East London Line in December 2007 for extensive upgrading the museum hoped that the access shaft into the tunnel (originally built to be the grand entrance hall to the tunnel) could be capped with a concrete shelf at the bottom, above the level of the trains. This shelf was completed in early 2010, with the inauguration taking place in late January. The access shaft took in its first groups from the general public on 14 February 2010 (Valentine's Day) when it was opened as the 'Tunnel of Love' for short historical presentations detailing the history of the tunnel and of some interesting historical notes from the private life and diary of Brunel's son, Isambard.
The museum now plans to continue the fit-out of the shaft, which will house exhibition and performance space.
Read more about this topic: Brunel Museum
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)