One visit, three buildings

Loxley is one institution with one ticket and three addresses, eleven minutes’ walk apart at the extremes. Its marketing had spent a decade describing it as a single gallery, which is true administratively and false the moment somebody arrives at the wrong door.

The honest fix was editorial before it was spatial: stop saying “at Loxley” and start saying which building. That sentence took four months to win, because it reads as an admission of a weakness the institution had been carefully not mentioning.

Once the buildings had names that appeared everywhere the exhibition was named, the wayfinding became straightforward — street-level markers at the two junctions where people actually go wrong, a consistent threshold treatment so all three read as the same institution, and a plan-your-visit tool that sequences a day rather than listing what is on.

The tool does one thing we were asked to remove and argued to keep: it will tell you that you cannot see everything today. Given an arrival time and a closing time, it says so plainly and proposes what to leave out. Visitor services expected complaints. They got the opposite.