“One visit to the Provincial Museum is never enough. This time machine, this place of dreams, reality and enlightenment leaves a deep mark on all who experience it.”
–Christopher Dafoe, The Vancouver Sun
Our approach took the four major themes: Urbanization, Industry, Gold Rush and Exploration and put them into a sequence leading the visitors from the present and walking them back through time to the arrival of the Europeans in British Columbia. Exhibit highlights include a recreated street-scene, alive with sound and light, which features a gas station, theatre, printing shop, saloon, clothing store, sporting goods, train station and livery stable. Period rooms are ideal for displaying, in context, the often varied collections of history museums. To enliven these static displays, human voices in ordinary conversation are heard, as if ghosts of the past were present in the rooms. Horses clip-clop by an open window in the kitchen, a train whistle echoes to signal its thundering arrival at the station, period music pours from the Majestic theatre.