Back in the early eighties, John Sunderland was the mastermind behind the “Jorvik Viking Centre”. Employed as the centre’s Project Designer, John was responsible for every element of a ‘museum’ that duly became a world-first by offering visitors a time-travelling ‘experience’ they’d never forget.
Here, in an exclusive interview with “Pulse” author Steve Rudd, John opens up about the Jorvik story in the year the museum celebrates its 30th anniversary:
Hello John, how are things?
Things are wonderful, thanks for asking, especially because here in our Spanish mountain village. After months of continuous drought, it has finally started to rain.
You recently had your debut book entitled ‘On My Way to Jorvik’ published. In a nutshell, what is it about, and are you pleased with the feedback it has received?
I was totally surprised and delighted at the reception I received in York at Jorvik’s 30th anniversary in April. I’m a storyteller, and I was pleased that not only did they approve of my account of the creation of the museum, but they also said it was a very good read. My primary reason was to make a record of what happened during its development. None of us involved in the creation of the Jorvik Viking Centre are getting any younger; I wanted to share the extraordinary story of something very special. No one had really done that before.
On a personal level, it’s a story about manifesting a dream… an unusual one, perhaps, which began for me as an eleven-year-old truant on one wet Wednesday afternoon in 1961, in our local Wakefield museum where I hid out. I also made visits to the art gallery and local flea-pit cinemas, incognito. My dream was to have a museum that told you stories, that connected you to history, transported you to another time and place, suspending disbelief like the experience of watching a film, not just showing you an artefact in a glass box with a label. That was so boring to me. I literally remember wondering, ‘Why can’t museums be more like films?’ My book relates how I went from an eleven-year-old with a mission, to twenty years later, when totally unqualified for the job, I landed my dream commission as Project Designer, to design a truly original and ground-breaking museum: the Jorvik Viking Centre.
How did it feel when you learnt that you’d got the job as Project Designer for Jorvik Viking Centre?
Well, I didn’t hear for six long weeks. I was in the office of Colin Pyrah, the man who was to produce the project, when the call came through from York Archaeological Trust. When Colin put the phone down, looked at me in astonishment, and said, “They want us to do the whole thing”, I jumped up and down and ran around his office for a couple of minutes, whilst he turned pale and held his head in his hands. To sum up, I was astonished, delighted, and not a little challenged. You see, I’d been a freelance designer for several years, but had never attempted anything like this. In fact, no-one had.
At the time, were you aware of what such a role was destined to entail?
Yes, I did in the broad sense; design is design… it’s problem-solving. The problem was how to take archaeological data and bring it to life in such a way that it would be meaningful to everyone. What I didn’t get at the outset was the amount of levels of detail, and how to bring the whole complex thing together as a coherent visitor experience. At this point, I should say that the team at York Archaeological Trust had their vision already developed to a point. However, when I came into the picture, they didn’t know just how to make it happen in an engaging, entertaining and educational way. In fact, they couldn’t find anyone else who could. That became my job. To say that I and my brilliant team of equally unqualified people learned on the job is the understatement of a lifetime and a career.
The design of Jorvik Viking Centre was largely inspired by your determination to make museums more like films. Did you find it easy to bring the rest of your team around to the concept?
It took a while. One good thing about developing a new design approach was that our small design team, just like me, had no previous experience of museum design and development. In that sense, they had open minds.
The first weeks of the design process were frustrating for them. The truth was, I hadn’t got all the answers yet. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but not quite how to do it. I had to pioneer a new approach to the problem. I knew it was going to have to be intuitive. Consequently, I couldn’t bring them on board until I’d cracked the whole thing. Those first few weeks of the contract, when I didn’t have all the answers, were nerve-wracking. I spent an awful lot of time in the bath (my think-tank), trying to find the key. I knew there was one, though I felt it more than thought it. When I cracked the problem, it was so very simple in its essence. At least it appeared simple. Once I could physically demonstrate how we would create one holistic exhibit, then all the team was literally and metaphorically on-board.
Prior to beginning actual construction work on the Coppergate site in York, you and your team built a scale-set of the museum inside an industrial unit on the edge of Wakefield. What do you remember about those days when you were in the planning stages?
It was in that large, anonymous shed where I first birthed my big idea to the rest of the team. Checking that it worked in real-space was very important, so we built a full-scale replica of the reconstruction of the section of the Viking settlement that the archaeologists had uncovered. We built it with two-by-one timbers tied together with string, and we positioned them exactly where they would be in the finished reconstruction.
Since visitors were all going to travel around the exhibit in automated “Time Cars” at a slow-speed with a commentary telling them a story, they would experience Jorvik as though they were in an unfolding movie. Each visitor became their own sensory camera. It gave me complete control over their experience and enabled me to use the available space, which wasn’t particularly large, to full advantage. I was able to prove this idea was the key to the design by sitting on a hand-truck and moving around an imaginary track whilst running the story through my head. I knew it would work, so I convinced the rest of the team. This simple idea of basing all the design on the P.O.V. (Point of View) of the visitor - along with all the other innovative sensory things we achieved with smells, light, and sound - created the first Experiential Exhibit, a 3-D movie in which you were immersed.
Jorvik Viking Centre opened to great fanfare in 1984. That first morning, when you peeked through the window to see a colossal line of wannabe-visitors lined-up outside, how did it feel?
It was truly an astonishing moment, as I say in the book. The core team of clients and designers were gathered in an upstairs room at the centre in Coppergate Square. We’d gathered at half-past nine in the morning, the opening was at ten, there was nervous laughter all round; it was a bit like waiting for your A-level results to be published. Not one of us dared get up from the table to take a peek out of the window until ten. I don’t want to spoil the end of the book, so you’ll have to read what happened. Honestly, none of us had any idea whether we would have any visitors or not! It was, without giving the obvious away, the most exultant moment of my professional life.
Aside from your work in Design, you’ve helped to oversee the running of a couple of restaurants in New York. How long were you resident in the states, and what is it about American culture that you so adore?
I first went to the states for ‘Quest’ in the mid-nineties. I fell for Provincetown, and pretty much took up living and commuting from there in 1998. I met my New Yorker wife there in 2003, in a bar open throughout the winter, with the engaging name of ‘The Screaming Pig’. It was Friday night when we met, and snowing. We’ve been together ever since. My introduction to New York City, and to the bars I helped with, was because of her. Kath had started what became a very famous place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early eighties. It was truly a pioneering establishment in an otherwise no-go area of drug-dealers and users. Called ‘Life Cafe’, it became a centre of bohemian life in that creatively fertile decade for alternative art and lifestyle. The cafe was immortalised in the musical ‘RENT’ by its writer, Jonathan Larson, who used to hang out there, and who based many of its characters on Life’s regulars. He loved the place and wrote it into the show. ‘Life Café’ is where the kids all meet up and dance on the tables! The cafe was well-established when I got to New York in 2004. My main contribution was bringing art back into the place. I did the same in my wife’s newer cafe in Bushwick, Brooklyn, over the East River, where I created art of my own for the café and curated shows by emerging artists. Bushwick was another haven for rent-challenged young artists… and, once again, my wife opened the first hang-out! I love bars and the chance to get involved with the art-scene. It was a perfect fit for me. Altogether, I was in the states for fourteen years… six living a sometimes hermit-like and lonely existence within twenty feet of the sea, and eight more years living cheek-by-jowl with nine million New Yorkers… and an awful lot of rats! As for what I “adore” about American culture, it’s Americans’ positivity that I always got a buzz from.
More recently, you relocated to Spain. What prompted such a move?
My wife lost the leases of both cafes within a year of one another. When the newest cafe’s lease came up for renewal, to our shocked surprise, the landlord refused to renew it, wanting younger blood in his property. The East Village cafe’s leases were abandoned because the buildings were literally crumbling, and the landlords fought over the cost of repairs instead of fixing it. My wife couldn’t operate in such dangerous conditions, so it was time to start over, or get out of town. We decided that at our time of life, starting over wasn’t an option. We thought about moving to South America, but Spain made more sense, not least because it’s in Europe and closer to Yorkshire.
Bolstered by the runaway success of ‘On My Way to Jorvik’, you are busy working on your second book, an Eco-Thriller. Do you happen to have a working-title for it? Moreover, is there any chance of an insight into the plot?
Well, I am hoping that it runs away even more; it’s very exciting. I have twelve other books outlined, and three that I’ve put serious time into. Largely because of the success of ‘On My Way to Jorvik’, I’ve thought about writing another project-based book. ‘A Pirate Brought Me Here’ will be based on my experience of recreating pirate-life. However, it will have a lighter side, telling the story of my ‘straight man’ life in the largely gay town of Provincetown.
The book I’m working on right now is called ‘Agua, the Tears of Gaia’. I don’t want to give too much away, but I can tell you that the story has two main locations: the first in a very wet area of North Wales, the other in Spain. It’s essentially about how the living cocoon of our planet’s biosphere (Gaia) jump-starts another level of human evolution, one totally unexpected, a change so fundamental to earth’s survival as a living entity that she changes our species’ evolutionary direction over a short period of time. Enough said, I think.
Taking into consideration all of the projects you’ve worked upon over the past forty years, of which are you the most proud, and why?
That has to be Jorvik, because I was so very fortunate, against all the odds, to see my childhood dream come true, and to design the first, most impactful version of it. I am immensely proud of what we achieved. I mean, if you read the book, you’ll see… how I got to design Jorvik beggars belief! It’s a Cinderfella story.
Finally, what’s the best way for folk to find out more about you and your staggering canon of creative projects?
There’s my website at www.johnsunderlanddesign.com and most of my stuff is on there, including details of designed-and-built projects. Alternatively, people can e-mail me directly via j.g.sunderland1@mac.com
I am very open about my work and the creative process. Also, I have a gallery here in Spain, and I’d be more than happy to share images of current paintings and illustrations, most of which are for sale.
Should anyone be interested in my first book, ‘On My Way to Jorvik’, it’s available via www.amazon.com and the Jorvik Viking Centre shop.