Autumn Museum Reports

A mixed collection, my recent museum visits. The Ancient High House in Stafford does have artefacts - and a range of mocked-up sets including a joke, pictured here, that only British readers will get - but the chief antiquity it offers to visitors is the building itself, a late-medieval-origin structure whose story emerges through chronological displays. A few streets away the Heritage Centre, located in a modern building with a doorway through into a Georgian town house, sets out to tell more of Stafford's history but has very little to go on in the way of objects. As is increasingly happening, I tried to buy postcards and really confused the staff.

One day I went into Birmingham to visit a former London Gothic friend who now works in the Jewellery Quarter, and while there called in at a place brought to my attention by another Goth - and ex-funeral arranger - namely, the Coffin Works. This is an industrial museum, preserving a single business site. Ironically coffins are the very thing not displayed, as Newman's dealt not with carpentry but with everything else to do with funeral kit, the plate, the shrouds, and so on. The volunteers wear brown overalls and operate machines of terrifying weight and danger, and as you enter you're given a signing-in time card to have punched. The tone of the whole place is not really a meditation about our relationship with death, but with work. 

The mighty City Museum & Art Gallery is of course not far away, is massive, and is free to go in. I've been there before, but a single visit can't do justice to its collections, from archaeology to pre-Raphaelite art (which I find more irritating the older I get), from relics of the Victorian City Fathers to the new communities that have made Birmingham their home. The Museum tries really hard, though I felt that one thing it could try harder on is visitor orientation as I found it very hard to negotiate my way around.

The Grosvenor Museum in Chester is the closest the city gets to a proper local history museum, though it really covers only Romans (inevitably), natural history, art, and whatever special subject is being displayed at the time. When I visited, that was a show of 'The Worst Album Covers in History' which are, indeed, very, very bad. Had they published a book of them I would have bought it like a shot, but all they had in the shop was a calendar, and that's just twelve horrors for your money.

Finally, despite working not far away in High Wycombe for seven years I have never really looked round the County Museum in Aylesbury, so while meeting up with former colleague Lady Quercus and her partner I went there. Now renamed 'Discover Bucks', this is a series of genuinely imaginative and charismatic displays which give museums a good name! Archaeology bulks large and currently they have a show of Anglo-Saxon burial goods: a recently-discovered 'sentinel warrior' from Marlow, finds from a cemetery uncovered during the excavations preparing for HS2, and finally the princely burial at Taplow - and those finds are not replicas, but the genuine ones from the British Museum. Quite something. Buckinghamshire is a disparate and centrifugal county and wisely the Museum does not attempt any sort of general narrative, but picks the stories of individuals to tell through objects, and any wider lessons emerge gently via those. I was so glad I went.