Recasting the Past

A zoom down to Dorset to celebrate my birthday brought the chance to revisit two museums which have been completely refurbished over the last few years. The mighty County Museum in Dorchester, which I reported on in 2017, is all but unrecognisable inside. They are understandably keen to recoup some of the enormous cost of the rebuilding, and so not only is there now a rather steep entrance charge but the one-time centrepiece of the whole museum, the Victorian Hall, its galleries jam-packed with miscellaneous social-history collectanea, is now an 'events space' - I could only peer into it and watch it being set with tables for rich people to come and eat at. The new organising space is a colossal Brutalist stairwell with the Fordington Mosaic up one wall, a bit like the Ashmolean's only rougher, with the exhibition areas opening off it: those are sleek and imaginatively laid out, and ever so slightly antiseptic. I know it's churlish to quibble at that, especially when four years ago I was complaining about it being a bit old-fashioned! I wonder whether even more of the collections could be brought out, now there is so much space to display them in. 

I have more invested in what used to be the Priest's House Museum in Wimborne and is now the Museum of East Dorset, as it was my workplace in 1991 and 1992. I was there in the midst of the great refurbishment which marked its transformation from an essentially volunteer-run, somewhat quaint little place to a more professional set-up whose arrangements were shaped around historical and architectural knowledge. Stephen, the curator, had a vision of exploring the very varied history of the building through the people who had lived there, decorating a series of rooms to fit in with those themes based on the fragments visible in them. Expensive handmade mannequins were purchased and displayed. So the entrance area became an old-fashioned ironmonger's; grumpy Victorian Mr Low glowered behind his counter in the stationery shop; in the Georgian parlour, Mrs King consulted with her plumber whose initials had been found on the lead rainwater heads; and in a 17th-century back room an anonymous woman we all called Harriet sat sewing against a background of painted wallcloths based on those surviving in Owlpen Manor. Every day the first and last jobs (which fell to me when I was on duty) were to take down or replace the wooden shutters along the bow-fronted windows: Stephen had had these reconstructed to recreate the 18th-century shop frontage.

Thirty years later and all of this has gone. Mannequins are certainly not flavour of the day any more, notwithstanding how well-made they are; the bow-fronted windows have been replaced by a plate-glass panel. Not only has a lot of the reconstruction been driven by the need to provide a fully-accessible space, but the whole display philosophy is different - instead of a succession of period rooms, the construction of the building is highlighted. Upstairs there is a massive stone fireplace I don't even recall existing, which must have been covered up behind later plasterwork. I can't work out where the Tinsmith's Forge was: it was an horrendous mess, but still part of the history of the site, so I'm surprised it's gone completely. I spent several freezing days listing all the objects, and on my last visit, with Ms Formerly Aldgate back in 2013, was able to point out the little tags I'd put on them in 1991, left undisturbed, so it's probably understandable that they are all gone. The only things that remain from those far-off days are the Victorian Kitchen, and the mummified cat, which inhabits a tiny case upstairs and, I suspect, always will, as long as the museum survives!