Windermere Jetty

Carmody Groarke’s boating museum makes pragmatic and poetic responses to its Lakeland site, finds Lucy Clark

Words
Lucy Clark
Photos
Christian Richters

At Windermere Jetty – a ‘Museum of Boats, Steam and Stories’ – the stories recounted each describe a different aspect of England’s largest lake. A catastrophic storm and a stilled surface are given a full romantic rendering in a pair of eighteenth-century paintings by Philip James de Loutherbourg. Elsewhere, Arthur Ransome’s sketch illustrations for ‘Swallows and Amazons’ describe a place of adventure and innocence. In the centre of an exhibition hall a 15-metre lacquered teak steam launch, Branksome, fitted out in Victorian splendour, with walnut panelling, velvet upholstery and carpets, tells a tale of privileged access to the waters.

Story-telling continues in the design of this new museum, by architect Carmody Groarke. It is carefully crafted narrative of industrial heritage and boat husbandry recounted with refinement and design rigour. In this architectural retelling, Windermere is also a place of manufacture and industry, gravel extraction and copper mines, of the elements and the elemental.

The cluster of shed-like buildings that makes up the museum sits on the lake’s eastern shore, just north of Bowness-on-Windermere. From land, the dark forms are silhouetted between a grey knapped flint forecourt, sky and lake. The museum is one of the only contemporary buildings built on the lake shore in over 50 years. It is the result of a £20m project by Lakeland Arts, £13m of which was provided by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to redisplay and house the collection of the former Steamboat Museum. In part a themed museum displaying a diverse range of objects – from hydroplanes to a Turner sketch – it also has an active and visible conservation programme, a workshop and operative historic boats. Many of the craft on display originated from Windermere, and were rescued from hen houses or from the bottom of the lake by the originator of the previous museum, local builder and collector George Pattinson.

The need to replace the original museum’s 1970s timber boathouses led to a RIBA competition in 2011. Carmody Groarke’s winning boathouse cluster, with exaggerated overhanging eaves, presented a familiar but sculpturally confident response to the brief.

Since the competition the scheme has evolved. The cluster has been rationalised spatially and materially. The building’s volumes now nestle closer together, and all except the conservation studio have been lifted up a metre in response to changes in the Environment Agency’s predicted lake water levels. The proposed stainless steel cladding has been replaced by semi-oxidised copper in recognition of the realities of the harsh environment.

It is this dark cladding that is most striking as you approach the museum across a large tarmac drive – sized, one presumes, for the anticipated coach-loads of visitors. The only compromise to the inscrutability of its public face is an illuminated sign sitting in a timber-lined entrance space. Otherwise, there is a sense that the buildings have turned their back to the land and the approaching visitor.

Once inside the reason for this slight snub becomes immediately clear. In a carefully orchestrated journey from outside to in, the visitor passes through a glazed antechamber into a timber-lined reception and shop. As warm and honey-hued as the outside is dark, this space has a large window on its central axis which looks directly into the covered wet dock where the functioning boats are moored. The view is unexpected and exciting. Top-lit by apex rooflights, with the sky baffled by the rafters that run continuously the length of the boathouse, the sudden appearance of the lake inside the building feels wonderfully transgressive.

In this space, the steel portal frame is left exposed. Large Douglas fir studs and rafters sit in front of ply sheathing and behind the steel frame. The articulation of the exposed structure draws the eye towards the open boathouse doors at the far end, where light is reflected inside from the lake surface. These six-metre-high doors slide open by means of a mechanical winch, so exhibits such as a 1938 American speedboat can jaunt across the lake. As a clever counterfoil to the varnished elegance of the boats on display, the materials in the wet dock are enjoyably robust, with exposed decking on concrete slab and galvanised steel balustrades.

The shop, entrance and circulation spaces, by contrast, are clad with vertical, secret-fixed and sealed Douglas fir boards. Each of the main rooms has a different lining and atmosphere. In the conservation studio, tools, ladders and dismantled boats sit against a roughly grained scaffolding plank lining that has been fixed with visible galvanised nails. In the galleries, painted plaster provides a neutral backdrop to the collection.

The spaces differ not only in atmosphere but also in environmental conditions. The wet dock is a ‘coats on’ experience but the galleries are conditioned to varying levels, from a closely controlled environment in the temporary gallery to a naturally ventilated permanent exhibition space. The challenge of providing the right conditions for the range of objects on display in this gallery is dealt with at a local level, with water spray humidification to stop the timber boats drying out, and sensitive objects in display cases. Underfloor heating throughout is served by water-source heat pumps with heat exchange panels installed below one of the jetties.

Daylight and views are also carefully curated. In the cafe, views across the water dominate, one facing northwards towards one of small islands that pepper the lake, the other facing west, overlooking the jetties. From the wet dock a slightly less successful internal window looks into the gallery; the differing light levels make views in difficult. In the permanent gallery, Branksome is mounted in a ‘dry dock’ recessed in the floor, framed against a window onto the lake.

This idea of the framed view is continued outside where impressively large overhangs describe particular vistas. These deep eaves define the building from the outside, the voids beneath made all the more striking by flush detailing of the roof edge and the use of copper on both walls and roof. The overhang of the conservation studio and that of the main building reach out towards each other and would touch, were it not for the level difference between the two.

The precision of this formal move is characteristic of the design control exercised by Carmody Groarke, where details, materials and the undoubted challenges faced in building in a UNESCO World Heritage Site on a protected lake shore are put into the service of a single narrative, to compelling effect. This story is one that will evolve as the copper fades and colours, as the day-to-day working life of the museum goes on, with its polishing, stoking and boat repair, as the lake water rises and retreats, as the timber greys, and as yet another coach-load of tourists arrives.