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. 

Cyfarthfa Castle Museum

Raven (who used to be Cylene, keep up) now lives considerably up the Rhondda Valley and so I don't see them very often. Yet it's surprisingly doable as a day trip provided the roads are favourable. Yesterday the weather was against us and Raven had an appointment in the middle of the day so although they would like to go to St Fagans one day we in fact stayed local and went to Cyfarthfa Castle, which functions as the municipal museum for Merthyr Tydfil. Even covered with scaffolding (and looking a bit rough in places) few local museum services have settings as grandiose as Cyfarthfa, complete with a park and lake. The Castle was built as the home of the Crawshay family who built their fortune on ironworking, and once they vacated it, oddly, the Council opened part of the ground floor as a museum and the rest as a school. You have to piece this history together from the displays rather than being oriented as you go in, but as we went round them in the wrong direction the task was made especially taxing! The collection is remarkably eclectic as the museum attracted art and artefacts from a variety of well-to-do gentlemen and only later began an effort to represent the social and working history of Merthyr. You are rightly not allowed to overlook the fact that the fantastic wealth of the Crawshays derived from the unspeakable toil of generations of local residents and often involved their injury and harm, exactly as you would expect from Red South Wales, as once was. Maybe that political identity only survives in its museums now. 

Smaller Than You Thought

In fact all the Easter services went rather well apart from a confusion about hymn numbers on Sunday ('I feel like a bingo caller', said Il Rettore as he tried to read out the correct one), but having also had to pop to the hospital to take communion to a congregation member on Easter afternoon as all the chaplains were off sick I was very glad to observe 'Bank Holiday Order' on Monday and only do the work I absolutely had to. This was complete early enough in the day to allow me to take advantage of the weather and zoom to Uffington. Algorithms had thoughtfully brought to my attention a new display at the museum there and as I'd never seen either Wayland's Smithy or the White Horse of Uffington I decided to go. 

Apart from the distance I ended up walking (further than anticipated) things being on the small side was the theme of the day. The Neolithic long barrow of Wayland's Smithy has two massive sarsens guarding its entrance but the proof that it was made by fairies is that only the Wee Folk could have fitted inside the burial chamber. I'd thought it was like the West Kennet Long Barrow which has space for visitors to wander around inside but no, it's only tall enough for an adult to crouch in. At the foot of a tree I found what were clearly 'cremated remains', reinforcing how important the place is for some people.

The Horse, too, I had imagined ranging over perhaps a hundred yards of a broad hillside, and P Newman in Lost Gods of Albion says that's how long it is, but I wouldn't have put it much bigger than 50 feet! Curiously that made the figure all the more moving to me - to think firstly that our remote ancestors made this effigy that they wouldn't even have been able to see properly, and also that it has survived three thousand years or more, just a fragile, delicate thing, an absence more than a presence, turf removed to reveal the chalk beneath. 

I did know that Uffington Museum was going to be tiny. It started out as a 17th-century schoolroom, and Bank Holidays are one of the few times it's open. There is basically one room, with a mezzanine forming a separate display area; that 'exhibition' that tempted me there was a small display about mythological landscapes, and I was very pleased with it. Very good graphics and information, a video with an Anglo-Saxon poem being recited against a background of spooky trees, and items left by visitors at Wayland's Smithy, from dreamcatchers to decorated stones. Easily the eeriest is a white-painted plaster ram's head deposited in the chamber itself. Most odd. I'm glad I wasn't the one who found it. 

Winter Museums

It's a bit of a while since my last post, and though I am no longer publishing for the sake of doing so these days I do still have a minor mission to sing the praises of the local museum and over my New Year break managed to find a couple new to me. I must have been to the Salisbury and South Wilts Museum many years ago, but if so remember little about it. It's now based, of all places, in what was until 1994 the Sarum Theological College, a rambling hodge-podge of a building of many periods which doesn't feature much in the displays themselves. There are a couple of rooms of art, a natural history gallery, one of Medieval Salisbury and another which covers the later town and includes the towering figure of Giant Christopher whose modern counterpart is still taken on procession through the streets at Midsummer; but the most evocative area of the Museum is the relatively new archaeology display, the Wessex Gallery. This dates from 2015, but although it's sparkly and modern it has a delightfully retro feel to it, even down to the typeface used which could have been designed in the 1950s. The only thing it lacks, thankfully, is hessian fabric backing to the display cases.

A couple of days later I found myself in Brighton visiting one of the most lacklustre holy well reconstructions in the country (St Anne's Well at Hove), and while ambling along the seafront discovered the Fishing Museum. This is a great contrast to the mighty Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (is it really six years since I was there?) and consists of two small rooms crammed under the promenade. The best use is made of this space with a small walkway taking the visitor round on a higher level around a small boat, fibreglass seagulls, nets, and pictures of 18th-century crab-sellers and Edwardian swimming clubs. It's free to go in, but a card reader waits hopefully for visitor donations. I much enjoyed it!

Lincolnshire: Museums

It's time for an annual slew of posts about thing seen on my holiday, this time in Lincolnshire, an area I only knew from a very brief visit many years ago when applying for a job in Barton-on-Humber, the end of the line in ways literal and metaphorical. My museum-visiting didn't go as expected. Lincoln City Museum was closed for refurbishment; Grantham Museum in the process of being reorganised though the general public could still come in and wander about while the staff tripped over each other moving display cases and the only objects were some old bottle fragments, a mocked-up apothecary shop, and Mrs Thatcher's coat; and Stamford Museum, while still shown on my map, closed permanently in 2011. That left Louth, Grimsby, and Boston.

Louth Museum rams a lot into a very small space thanks to some creative layout decisions which lead the visitor up and down a mezzanine which allow you to view properly some of the exhibits mounted on the walls. You have to do some work as you occasionally come across artefacts whose significance is only explained later on, such as the amazing products of a Louth woodcarver which you meet before you discover who he was and what these things are. But it's good fun.

In Grimsby I eschewed the well-known Fishing Heritage Museum in favour of the Time Trap Museum. This is a decidedly odd experience. The Time Trap is underneath the old Town Hall, and you have to ring the bell and be buzzed in by a member of staff who points you down a corridor lined with portraits of mayors and cabinets of municipal regalia and to a staircase which leads into the Stygian depths. 'Creative layout decisions' is barely an adequate description as the visitor ascends and descends stair after stair through a variety of sections illustrating the history of the town - or, as so often happens in these cases, the history of the town between about 1860 and 1950. And a riotous, weird, disreputable history it is, almost as though the designers are making the point that this is the dark reflection of the respectable municipal world of the Town Hall above. There aren't many objects, and what you will remember is the bizarre dioramas of raucous Edwardian theatre audiences, rioting pubgoers, and drunken policemen accosted by ladies of the night, like cartoons rendered 3D, as well as the overall effect. Part of the building was the old police cells, and one of the artefacts is a wall of bricks from the prison exercise yard, scratched with inmates' graffiti.

The closest Boston has to a museum is the Old Guildhall, the home of the medieval Guild Merchant of St Mary, and after the Reformation to the Corporation and magistrates' court. This makes for a rich history, but whereas I normally lament the lack of attention museums play to the buildings that house them, Boston's focuses on it to such an extent that you get little sense of the development of the town beyond, and certainly nothing of its contemporary identity. It's also quite fragmentary, and really needs a guiding hand to bring it all together. 

But the trip renewed my sense of how important museums are, or at least should be. It was striking that when I visited friends on the way home who are liberals, Liberal Democrats, and liberal Christians, on being told I'd been to Boston they volunteered that the town 'gets a very bad press' which didn't surprise me. I expected a nice little market town which it sort of is, but when, amongst the sadly boarded-up shops every town centre is defaced by, you come across a 'Bulgarian Shop' that, a sign tells you, has been closed by the police due to 'criminal activity' being carried out on the premises; and yards away there's a 'Bulgarian Food Store' which seems to have no more than three loaves of bread and half a shelf of canned soup in it; and there's a surprising number of young men standing next to shiny black cars talking into phones in Eastern European-sounding languages; then it isn't really shocking that my friends called it 'the most Brexity town in Britain'. Something has happened here that hasn't happened elsewhere and you wonder what it is. This is not a place at ease with itself. A bold museum with a commitment to interpreting a community to itself might be able to tell something of that story - of how so many Poles and Lithuanians came to be here - without expressing an opinion about it. There are, funnily enough, not that many Bulgarians in Boston, so the story behind the Bulgarian Stores might be one to treat with great care.

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Farewell RRM

The River & Rowing Museum at Henley opened the year after I arrived at Wycombe Museum. We were local authority, they were independent, but broadly speaking still within the 'social history' sector, and immediately we sort of looked to them as one of the more prestigious, grander vessels within the great fleet of British museums. The year after opening, its building won a major architectural award and it was declared National Heritage Museum of the Year. Yet despite attending a couple of events there I'd never actually done the basic thing of looking round the galleries. This holiday week I decided to remedy that - and discovered that my resolution was just as well, as in February the RRM announced its intention to close. It's been losing about £1M per annum for years and has reached the end of the road, or the river if you prefer. 

A visit reveals why, really. The place is enormous: the galleries alone are vast, and attached to them is an array of ancillary rooms for school groups and meetings which have never been fully used. It's gorgeously and imaginatively designed and considering the mainstay of the place is a sport I have minimal interest in, even I could just about see the point. Also, the extreme heterogeneity of the displays might be considered an advantage: as well as all the actual rowing stuff, there's a 'Wind in the Willows Experience' which recreates the illustrations in the book in 3-D form, an array of artworks from John Piper's time at Fawley Bottom round the corner, a gallery of contemporary riverine art, and local history material about Henley itself. But although the Museum seemed quite busy to me on Thursday, parts of it I wandered around without meeting another soul, a bit like the minerals rooms at the Natural History Museum. Nobody seemed that interested in the great John Piper, while the huge Henley Gallery, isolated from the rest of the displays by the long, narrow corridor that was the art gallery, I had entirely to myself. There's a whole room devoted to one painting - I can see why, as it's a photo-realistic image showing Henley town by a 17th-century Dutch artist full of architectural, social, and environmental information, but even so, it's a whole room devoted to one painting. Ironically, if anything survives of the RRM it's likely to be just that collection of artefacts, forming the basis for a new Museum of Henley. But what about the rest of it? Museums think of themselves as permanent, but of course they are as much a part of the flow of history as the communities or subjects they curate on behalf of the rest of us. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

2025 Museums

That is, museums I've visited this year, not two thousand and twenty-five palaces of culture. It is International Museums Day, which is no bad thing at all even if this year's theme, 'The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities' does sound like the old historian's joke that the perfect title for any work of historiography is 'Change and Continuity in an Age of Transition'. So, even though I no longer habitually post here every time I visit a museum, I would describe very briefly the ones my travels have taken me to so far this year, special exhibitions in London excepted.

1. West Berkshire Museum, Newbury

Many years ago I applied for a job at Newbury Museum, as it was then, and remember absolutely nothing about it apart from the building that houses it, the 17th-century Old Cloth Hall & Granary Store. The strongest memory from my second visit early this year is of the café where the visitor services manager acted as barista. The collection is rather the usual kind of thing you would find in a museum of its sort, though there's some impressive commitment to contemporary collecting with Greenham Common Peace Camp memorabilia (oh dear, that's not really very contemporary now, is it), and a covid vaccination centre sign. 

2. Islington Museum

Between tracing the route of the next Goth Walk and seeing my god-daughter for dinner I found I had enough time to stride down Essex Road and visit Islington Museum, which is nowhere near what you might imagine Islington to be but serves the London Borough of that name. It is basically one big room under the Library, accessed down a flight of bleak concrete steps. I was not the only visitor but I caused confusion when I approached the desk and asked if I could make a donation. A collection of radical badges, a bust of Lenin from the Town Hall (power to the people!), a cow's skull and artefacts found under the floorboards of an 18th-century house: I am so glad this museum exists in the middle of what might seem like an unpromising chunk of the capital.

3. East Grinstead Museum

I had no idea East Grinstead was the location for a pioneering plastic surgery hospital in WWII, but that's the sort of thing museums can teach you. The town museum deals with that potentially queasy topic with compassion and interest, and contains plenty of the more common stuff you'd associate with the history of a market town.

4. Leigh on Sea Heritage Centre & Museum

'Museum' is a generous title for the Old Smithy as it has only a handful of artefacts, but it is the closest this seaside town has, a collection of photographs and a reconstructed forge in an old building which adjoins 2 Plumb Cottages. The Old Leigh Society leased that from the Council to restore and display as an example of a mid-19th-century fisherman's home, but it promptly fell down and so what you see now is more a reconstruction. Still, both were free to go in and I bought lots of postcards which is one of my key performance indicators for a heritage site.  

5. Havant Museum

This is really one room with a mocked-up 1950s kitchen to one side (these seem to be eclipsing Victorian Kitchens which were the standard when I was a museum curator). There was an amusing mechanical toy involving a windmill, a yacht, and lots of cogs which I couldn't resist playing with, a graveyard-keeper's badge, and plenty of objects jammed into a small area, though I should have paid more attention to the significance of the stuffed big cat.

Happy museum-going!

Two More Museums

The whole reason I went to Maidstone last week was to pay my respects to Ta-Kush, 'the Lady of the House, Daughter of Osiris' at the Museum. As I dripped my way through the rainy streets and finally found the Museum, I found a grand Tudor house - Chillington Manor, originally - a far more impressive setting than I envisaged, even if I quickly discovered that you don't go in here, but through a modern annexe at the side.

Like Hastings Town Museum which I visited last year, but on a bigger scale, Maidstone houses different collections of stuff which it's been given over the years, and what is in fact technically an entirely separate institution, the Royal West Kent Regimental Museum. There's the Bentlif Art Gallery, the Oyler Collection of Toys and Games, Lady Brabourn's Costume Collection, two distinct huge donations of Japanese artefacts, and the Brenchley Collection of South Sea Island ethnography. It's exhausting, and means that if you don't warm to one gallery there's always something different round a corner (and there are a lot of corners). When I visited there was also a temporary display 'I Grew Up 1980s' full of things I have disturbingly clear memories of as well as dark oak rooms full of dark oak furniture and suits of armour. I could have spent much longer here had I not already been a bit worn out by my trip to Knole House in the morning. And at the centre, in her own dark alcove - appropriately the former chapel of an almshouse - is Ta-Kush. They treat her kindly now, but she was cut about after being confiscated in 1820 by Customs & Excise as they checked her for smuggled goods. The children boggled at her, and I stood in silent salute. She has come all this way across time and space, as it were, to teach us about her vanished world. I didn't photograph her.

Then on Friday last week I was in London seeing my god-daughter to hear about the frustrations of life as a very junior civil servant living in the capital and a young Christian who can't find a local church where they don't worship a drum kit. I made a day of it by exploring the City of London Cemetery in Wanstead (which has a café!) and then dropping by at Hackney Museum. As far as you can get from the model of local history museum represented by Maidstone, Hackney's is one room (they have a gallery for temporary exhibitions, but it was closed when I went) under the borough library dating from 1999. Nobody has given them hundreds of oil paintings, Japanese sword hilts or Egyptian mummies; they don't have much, but they make what they have work hard. They focus, as far as possible, on the multifarious stories of the varied people who have made their home in this part of London over the centuries. There is the paraffin stove used by a West Indian couple in their rented room in the 1950s because the landlord turned the gas off at a certain point in the day. There's a net used to catch eels from the tank at the back of an eel-and-pie shop. There's a tiny artwork made by a schoolchild showing how their parents met. There is enormous compassion and commitment. And when I visited there were lots of children enjoying the games and toys for free, and some of the older ones even looking at the displays. 

Go and find your local museum. They're all gorgeous. Well, nearly all.