Norfolk Museums

Given that it's a month since I was in Norfolk, this really ought to be my last post about my holiday, but I did want to share some snaps of the museums I visited. Looking back I realise there were only three, as Norwich City Museum is closed on Mondays when I was in the town, and the Bishop's House at Dereham was, in early October, already closed for the winter - like a great deal of Norfolk, as I discovered; trying to buy a cup of tea anywhere near the seafront in either Cromer or Great Yarmouth was quite a challenging exercise. In fact, the three museums I visited were all pretty good, whereas normally I come across at least one that's a bit below par.

Sheringham Museum is an oddity: it's based in a very new building (though not a purpose-built museum one) and the ground floor is dominated by three lifeboats; more general local history is upstairs. Upstairs even further you find a viewing platform enabling you to look out to the windfarm far away in the North Sea, and a display by the company that operates it telling you how it works and why windfarms are jolly good things. Personally I am quite well-disposed towards them but not everyone would feel like that, I suspect.

Apart from the lifeboats the most striking element of the ground-floor displays, which concentrate on the fishing industry, is this presentation of fishermen's jerseys (ganseys, they are called locally), apparently the leftovers from a bigger exhibition exhaustively examining the art and technology of the jersey. In fact none of these dates back earlier than the 1970s but I gather they age rather quickly.





Sheringham is not just about fish, however, having been discovered as a holiday destination from the 1800s, and upstairs visitors are presented with this rather fun illustration of the Victorian hotel and guest-house world. The dress is gorgeous.

Round the coast, Great Yarmouth has a large, well-organised 'heritage sector' and the main local history museum, Time & Tide, is big and impressive (and also a bit on the pricey side, but then there's a lot of it). There are a great many Victorian paintings of ships and fishing life generally, a dark, grimmish reconstruction of a 'Lane' which somewhat frustratingly you can only glimpse from an upper gallery, and some very amusing material relating to the holiday industry. I liked this poster, especially the fact that the young lady is impeccably made-up for a dip in the sea.

One of the more disconcerting aspects of museum-visiting is starting to see your own life appearing in the displays. I recognise far, far too much from this case: one of my aunties had pots with faces just like that in about 1975.

Lastly we find ourselves at The Ancient House, Thetford, a delightfully creaky building heady with the odour of old wood. Here too the displays were interesting and well-put-together, including the incongruous presence of Frederick Duleep Singh, the son of a deposed Maharajah who bought a Norfolk estate and rather exotically settled there - Frederick bought the Ancient House and presented it to the town as a museum. The display text is interesting in itself: I remember a school of thought when I was doing my museum training twenty years ago which held that text should be written with an almost haiku-like simplicity and that sentences should always begin on a new line, a bit like this:

Bingley Brumpton is a very old town.
Near the church archaeologists have discovered
remains of a Roman house,
and there have been people living in the area ever since.
Now the population is about 25,000.

... and so on. I haven't seen museum text written like this in simply ages, and assumed it had completely gone out of fashion. I did try to adopt the same technique for some years, but it's actually very hard to do it and still convey the information you need to get across.

My favourite objects at Thetford are two colossal busts of the emperors Tiberius and Otho, apparently brought back by some aristocratic idiot from the Grand Tour and popped on top of Thetford's theatre where they remained for many years before being transferred to the Ancient House. They have a wonderfully Mannerist grotesqueness. I was particularly taken by Otho who looks like he's not only eaten all the pies but possibly the baker as well.