The Glastonbury Abbey Yard creates a new public realm and forming a new entrance to celebrate the site’s unique history, previously obscured by 1990s development. As a Scheduled Monument site with multiple Grade I listed structures the Abbey is nationally and internationally significant.

The project forms a new entrance by careful editing of the existing buildings into a new ticket office, shop, café, and improved visitor routes. Removing parts of the 1990s structures restores key historic views, such as St Patrick’s Chapel from the Gatehouse, helping orient visitors and reconnect them visually with the ruins.

New façades were designed to reflect the Benedictine period, anchoring the site in its historical context. Two 11-metre glass walls depict, at full scale, sections of the lost 12th-century cloister by Henry de Blois. Stone fragments were 3D-scanned and digitally reconstructed by York University. Thread collaborated with archaeologists, Historic England, and Reading University to create the final illustrations.

Working with glass artist Andrew Moor, Thread produced kiln-fired enamelled glass to ensure durability. Layered, textured graphics in laminated glass offer depth and dynamic light. The glass was also designed with ecologists, as part of a wider approach to lighting, to reduce light pollution, protecting local bat species including the rare Grey Long Eared bats which populate the site. The project also achieves an EPC rating of A, using discretely located air-source heat pumps.

SEED’s landscape design restores the medieval approach to the Abbey, integrating stone artefacts and planting to support local insects, key to the bat population. The design balances archaeology, rainwater gardens, drainage, and structural needs within the constraints of this protected site.