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No.53 - October 2002 | Contex HOME FROM THE CHAIR MUSEUMS GREAT AND SMALL In London we have museums of international importance and expect very high standards in both the quality of object and means of display. However I have recently been on a trip to the Midlands and saw three museums of very different character and origin that seemed to be working hard towards the duel aims of preserving our heritage and interpreting it the general public. First there was the Jewry Wall Museum in central Leicester, in the ground floor of a college, facing the excavated remains of a very large Roman bath-house. Ratae Coritanorum, started as regional tribal centre, but soon developed into a well appointed Roman city, having many houses with fine painted wall plaster and mosaics. The history of the city is laid out in a pleasant, light filled space and the displays having simple, clear captions. Dolls dresses as Roman deities are a hit with little girls and there is a hands-on demonstration of how a sun dial worked. Over at the Lunt Roman Fort, at Baginton near Coventry, the Guides’ time was booked solid for the coming year with school parties fascinated by the life of the Legionaries, while many essential needs are met by fees from TV companies using the ‘Gyrus’ horse training ring for gladiator re-enactments. A reconstructed wooden granary acts as the visitors centre. The fort only lasted 20 years, but the Lunt’s rebuilt earth ramparts are already 30 years old and sagging dangerously. An interesting exercise in experimental archaeology, but an expensive one to replace and a funding application is in the balance. The smallest museum I went to was the Wigston Framework Knitters Museum at Wigston Magna, outside Leicester. Run and staffed by volunteers it is the uniquely preserved house and workshop of one of the last producers of frame knitted socks and gloves, for which Leicester was once famous. Imagine an incredibly intricate 19th Century foot-powered machine that is half way between a hand-loam and a printing press, imagine eight or more in the space of a small garage, a guide who is one of the last 14 master knitters and a museum shop that sells real home-made jam and pickles. That is Wigston*. At a time when the British Museum is complaining of an acute shortage of funds and the Museum of London is undergoing a series of extensive and expensive changes, it is easy to think that museums have to be big, complex and ‘state of the art’. Trendy approaches do not always work however; the friends I met in Leicester complained bitterly about the gimmickry and apparently aimlessness of the new Museum of Scotland. There is a role for major institutions, but less can mean more and small is also beautiful.
*Open every Sunday 2-5pm, the first Saturday every month and Bank Hols (except Xmas and New year) |
