Mr Willet's Popular Pottery

May 2002 saw the reopening of a transformed Brighton Museum and Art Gallery following a £10 million grant to redisplay its rich and diverse collections.

As part of this redevelopment, 'Mr Willett's Popular Pottery' was commissioned to bring to life the social history traced on the pots. We proposed to do this by giving visitors a quick, insightful look into the stories depicted on them.

We also proposed to include the entire two thousand or so pots in the interactive, since we believed a partial display of the collection would ultimately be disappointing both for the museum and for visitors with specific interests. This guarantee secured us the project.

Our strategy was to present all the pots using Henry Willett's own system of categorisation, with one hundred pieces highlighted as being of 'special' interest. These either had interesting stories illustrated on them or there was a gripping tale associated with their inclusion in the collection. They became the focus of an introductory quiz designed to capture the interest of the casual visitor and are a valuable resource covering the social history traced on the pots.

Henry Willett was not only a collector of pots. He also collected Old Masters and examples of local manufacture (notably, iron firebacks), as well as chalk fossils, dodos and dinosaurs. Taking this into consideration, and the important role he played in the museum's history, we rounded off the interactive with an anecodal section about 'Willett the man'.