Grime’s Graves, prehistoric flint mines
2024

Client
English Heritage

Location
Norfolk

Role
Interpretation/Exhibition graphic design

Collaborators/Creative partners
Exhibition design: Simon Leach Design
Architecture: Mawson Kerr
AV design: Heritage Interactive
Illustration: Rebecca Strickson
Production and printing: Standard8

Photography
English Heritage, Mawson Kerr, Simon Leach Design

Grime’s Graves is an internationally significant prehistoric landscape. The 90-acre site is a scheduled monument with SSSI protection for its equally significant local ecology. The strange grassy lunar-like landscape was named by the Anglo-Saxons after their god of war, Grim, whom they belived was buried there. But the site dates to c.4000BC when it was one of north-west Europe’s largest active flint mines. We worked with Simon Leach Design and English Heritage over a period of two years to re-think and redesign the overall visitor experience, which included new outdoor interpretation trails, a new exhibition in the visitor centre and a completely new immersive audio-visual experience inside one of the larger mineshafts. 

The new interpretation is tailored for ‘culture-seeking’ multi-generational family audiences, perhaps visiting for the first time, and local ‘explorer’ groups. It is presented through the lens of archaeologists and people-centred storytelling. A playful family trail encourages people to explore the landscape and a unique immersive underground digital experience brings to life the stories buried underground and in the ancient rocks. A timeline of key events is laser engraved into the outside of a new timber building that caps the entrance to the underground mines, and inside features hand-drawn life-size illustrations of Neolithic miners. The separate exhibition in the visitor centre employs a mix of photography, illustration, objects and graphic design to provide wider context and understanding about the site.