Hawking Building Freestanding Grid

The freestanding grid in the Hawking Building is home to some of the largest objects from the Science Museum Group Collection.

Standing over 5 metres, the tallest object on the grid is the Glasgow Tram (1962-256), which served the people of Glasgow for over 60 years. The grid contains a myriad of different vehicles from carriages to buses and historic fire engines, a Blue Peter RNLI lifeboat (1976-56) and the world’s fastest milk float. Also on the grid are incredible telescopes, from a 17th century example to the space-flown Spacelab 2 X-ray telescope (2005-33) and machines that helped us study the ocean floor and the atmosphere, such as TOBI (2020-209) and the record breaking gondola (1935-268) used by Professor Auguste Piccard.