Even More Museums

Bath is a city like an architect's drawing-board, and Richmond has a bit of that feel about it, at least if you linger in the Riverside area which was given the Quinlan Terry treatment in the 1980s. I was in the former on my own on Tuesday, and at the latter with Ms Brightshades yesterday. In both places there are museums: in Bath I steered clear of both the Roman Baths with its £20 entrance fee and anything to do with Jane Austen to visit instead the Museum of Bath at Work, located behind a red door at the end of a yard off an obscure street to the north of the city centre ... There wasn't a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard', but it was almost that overlooked.

MBW is not part of the Bath Preservation Trust which looks after several of the other museums, nor linked to the Council which has responsibility for the Roman Baths: I was greeted by an elderly lady on the front desk (I think with a northeastern accent) who informed me that 'the museum was set up to tell the story of the people of Bath who weren't Romans or Georgians', with a hint, I thought, of defiance. She stood behind the original shop counter of Mr Bowler's engineering business, based not here in this 18th-century building, but down by the river: as the business - which had begun with brass-founding and progressed through general engineering, soft drinks bottling, and even shoe-selling at one stage - began to run down in the late 1960s, the Bowler family were courted by Russell Frears, who'd trained as an industrial designer and realised that the Bowlers had never thrown away a single bottle, founding pattern, bill or bit of paper, and that what they had on their hands was an industrial museum in the making. Frears spearheaded the founding of the Bath Industrial Heritage Trust specifically to make that a reality, and six years after the Bowler factory was demolished the Museum opened. 

Even though what you're looking at is all a mock-up, it's mocked-up so fully that you do feel at points that you are walking through a small factory - or you would do if it wasn't for various bits of art for sale around the exhibitions. Straight after the reception is the machine shop, where you press a green button on the wall and the whole thing gradually judders into life, driven by the flying belts to a frenzy of rattling, banging, screeching and whirring, until you can bear no more and press the red button whereon it all slows to a stop again. It all looks massively dangerous and you are glad to be looking down on it from a mezzanine rather than being in the midst of it.

There is then a quieter gallery looking at the history of Bath as a whole with special reference to industry and work. There was a special display about the avant-garde havoc the Bath Arts Workshop caused around the city in the 1960s and 70s, a scourge of the City Fathers and an outrage to public decency.  Wonderful stuff and not a toga in sight.

Richmond Museum is nothing like that. It is upstairs in the Town Hall, and I and Ms Brightshades being bears of little brain we found it quite hard to find our way in, taking wrong turns several times and nearly ending up in the Library instead. It is quiet, though the helpful assistant on the front desk did warn us it was about to be deluged with schoolchildren so we might like to bear that in mind. While at MBW the setting is part of the show, here the surroundings are anonymous - but restful, if you like, a calm white backdrop for the history on display.

You do get a good idea of how the town developed, from the influence of the Charterhouse of Sheen followed by Richmond Palace, an increasing presence of fashionable residents and those who served their needs creating a place with a distinctive character. Richmond Museum has far more of what you would usually expect in the collection of a small municipal museum, from the ubiquitous knife-grinder to Mayoral regalia. I wasn't expecting the papier-maché Tudor trumpeter, though.

(We got lost on the way out, as well.)