A NEW exhibition at Keswick Museum and Art Gallery celebrates and explores both 19th and 21st Century modelling technology.

Running from Monday, February 9, The Grandest Views: Models of Lakeland from Victorian Times to the Present Day, the exhibition will show what is believed to be the last remaining, beautifully hand-painted piece of a relief model of the Lake District, along with some of the plaster moulds which were used to create it. Ordnance Survey, which provided the data used to produce the early model, is providing a similar size floor map of the Lake District to put the model pieces in context. Bringing the story right up to date, a thrilling virtual ride over the Lakes will be provided by modern digital modelling techniques constructed from current Ordnance Survey data.

Apparently, in 1875 what excited interest from tourists pouring into Keswick via the newly constructed railway was a 15-feet square 3D relief model of the Lake District, constructed by Henry and Thomas Mayson, in Keswick, and was displayed in their photographic studio on Lake Road. The building is still there, now a large homeware shop.

The exhibition has been created by a team from the University of Nottingham led by Dr Gary Priestnall working with Sue Mackay, curator at Keswick Museum: “The exhibition will be a great spectacle, much as the original model would have been,” explained Sue. “The work which Gary and his team have done really breathes new life and meaning into the plaster moulds, re-interpreting them for a 21st Century audience."

Robert Andrews of Ordnance Survey said it had been a delight to see how its 21st Century technology, maps, digital information and comprehensive aerial surveying techniques had helped bring a 19th Century masterpiece to life.

The Mayson model was novel in that it claimed to be "constructed mathematically from the Ordnance Survey maps" and was four times the size of any other model of the area. It gave visitors arriving on the newly constructed railway an overview of the landscape at a time before maps were widely used for recreational purposes. The model itself no longer exists but a large number of negative moulds were recovered from storage.

Dr Priestnall said: "The attention to detail in the model is incredible. It is hard to imagine what an impact this would have had on visitors who would not have seen anything like it before.”

The university team has captured the remaining 140 moulds using high precision laser-scanning. These will be displayed over the large floor map to convey both the level of detail and the scale of the original model. The team at the University include Dr Katharina Lorenz in the Digital Humanities Centre coordinating the laser-scanning and Sarah Thomas in the Centre for 3D Design creating the positive replica models.

Keswick Museum and Art Gallery reopened last year following a £2.1 million refurbishment, funded largely by Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).