For All Life's Rich Tapestry
Gunnersbury Park & Museum
Purpose
- Transforming organisations
- Building brands
- Shaping places
- Creating journeys
What we did
- Brand strategy
- Brand architecture
- Naming
- Visual identity
- Verbal identity
- Experience
- Wayfinding
- Campaign
Collaborator
- Rebecca Sutherland
One of our capital’s lesser known public treasures, the beautiful Gunnersbury Park and Museum is 72 hectares of Grade II listed parkland in West London. Once home to Royalty and Rothschilds, the park is now a vital, free and open community space, welcoming over one million visits a year - from picnicking families and dog walkers to Park Runners, festival goers, wedding parties and sports teams. At the heart of it all sits the Gunnersbury Park Museum, celebrating and showcasing the rich history of the area and its diverse community - from the Stone Age to modern day. In its centennial year, we partnered with Gunnersbury Museum and Park Development Trust, the charity responsible for the preservation and conservation of the Gunnersbury estate, to develop a brand strategy, new visual identity and wayfinding approach. Our goal - capture the significance of its role in the community, the variety of its offer, and set the organisation up for its next 100 years.
From overlooked to unmistakable
The Gunnersbury Park story is a brilliant one: a tale of rich heritage, close-knit community and constant evolution. Yet it’s a story that was not being told, leaving space for louder, external voices to shape perception and reputation. Many frequent visitors were unaware the museum even existed. Our work centred on helping them to seize their narrative and reframe the organisation, place and space around a fundamental question: what is Gunnersbury truly here to do?
We focused on three critical shifts:
1. Taking ownership of its unique story - celebrating both its heritage and evolution into a space that plays a profound role in the community
2. Going from invisible and passive to visible and active - confidently communicating all it does with personality, passion and playfulness.
3. People, people, people - spotlighting that Gunnersbury’s driving purpose lies in providing for people: their lives, their routines, their interests, their stories.
This reframing unlocked a powerful positioning rooted in the Park and Museum’s unique multiplicity - the ability of Gunnersbury to offer many experiences, evoke many emotions and hold many meanings in one radically accessible place: A park, museum, sports ground, festival site, wedding venue and community space all at once. We captured this idea in a distinctly Gunnersbury way: Life’s Rich Tapestry. Through this idea, the brand expresses a place where diverse experiences, histories and people come together, each as significant as any other in their contribution to the whole.
Unifying brand and experience
A key insight - that historically, Gunnersbury was characterised by a collection of disconnected offers (great in isolation, but lacking cohesion) inspired a brand system that brings greater clarity to this multiplicity. Connecting culture, learning, nature and recreation. Helping the organisation more easily communicate, and do so with greater confidence, consistency and personality. The result is not just a brand, but a full springboard for action: guiding programming, partnerships, communications and future decisions. It equips the Trust to speak with pride about what it offers, why it matters, and the role it plays in London life.
Helping people connect with the whole offer
To realise this on the ground, we developed a new wayfinding strategy transforming how visitors navigate and experience the park. Previously, poor visibility and fragmented signage meant visitors often missed key parts of the offer or experienced the park in isolated moments. The new wayfinding is clearer and more intuitive - connecting spaces, revealing hidden experiences, and encouraging discovery of the variety of things to do. In this way, wayfinding becomes storytelling and an invitation for exploration - whether for an hour or a full day. Time and again.
A platform for the next 100 years
As Gunnersbury marks its 100th year as a public park, the new brand equips the organisation to own its past and confidently build its future. What was once an understated, humble community space is now a confident and playful cultural institution: storyteller, custodian and host. The new brand provides the foundation to amplify its impact, attract new audiences, and communicate the extraordinary breadth of experiences it offers. But, ultimately, it enables Gunnersbury to do what it has always done - but with greater clarity, visibility and pride: to create a place where all of life’s richness can unfold.
