Categories
Museum Snapshots

Telecom Technology Showcase

Telecom Technology Showcase

The Telecom Technology Showcase was open between 1982 and 1997 and run by British Telecom. It occupied premises in Baynard House, Blackfriars, which is still owned by BT. The museum’s opening was specially timed: 1982 was Information Technology Year in the UK. BT had been created just two years earlier and separated from the Post Office in 1981 before being privatised in 1984.

Amongst the educational and interactive displays were the design classic K6 telephone kiosk, old telephones, a switchboard, and a working exchange rack. This was just a small portion of BT’s large archive, which included vintage GPO vans, bakelite handsets, numerous telephones and switchboards.

Museums advertise themselves in various ways, and the Technology Showcase used a medium that was distinctly relevant to it: BT Phonecards. These cards were a way of prepaying for calls from phone boxes, and featured a wide variety of products and services, including the BT Museum.

telecom showcase bt phonecard

The museum had 23,000 visitors in 1995 but closed two years later. It was reported to be losing around £500,000 a year.

Images via Light Straw.

Categories
Research Process

One Year On: The Principal Investigator’s View

The Mapping Museums project has just reached its first birthday. One year in, and Dr Jamie Larkin, the researcher, has almost completed the data collection. We now have an extremely long list of museums that are or were open in the UK at some point in the last sixty years. My co-investigator Professor Alex Poulovassilis and the Computer Science researcher Nick Larson have made good inroads on designing a database that will allow us search and visualise that information in complex ways. For me, it has been a pleasure to collaborate with other academics rather than to work as a solitary scholar as is usually the case for those working within the arts and humanities, and the process of conducting the research has been both fascinating and demanding. In this post I’m going to outline the three issues that have most preoccupied me over the last twelve months. They concern the definition of museums, their classification, and the structure of the database.

 Challenge No. 1: Defining a museum

One of the central aims of the Mapping Museums project is to analyse the emergence of independent museums in the UK from 1960 until 2020. In order to accomplish this task, we have had to compile the list mentioned above, and to do that we have had to decide what counts as a museum. This has not been straightforward. While the Museum Association and the International Council for Museums both publish definitions of museums, there have been seven different definitions in use during the time period covered by our study. If we were going to use a definition, we would have to decide which one.

More importantly, the use of definitions of museums only became common in the early 1990s and was closely connected to the accreditation process. In consequence, professional definitions of museums are usually aspirational and prescriptive, and they set standards that cannot be matched by many small amateur and community museums. The Mapping Museum project has a strong focus on such grass roots museums, and if we used established definitions, then we would exclude the less professionalised venues from the outset. We needed to find a different way of deciding which venues would be included in our dataset, and thus my first challenge was: how could we identify a museum as such?

Challenge No. 2 Classification

One of our research questions concerns the possible correlations between the date on which a museum opens, its location, and its subject matter. I want to know whether there are historical trends in subject matter: whether museums of rural life tended to open in the 1970s, military museums in the 1980s, and food museums in the twenty-first century. Similarly, I want to consider the relationship between subject matter and place: it’s likely that fishing museums will be located on the coast, but are there other, less obvious, regional differences? Do local history museums cluster in parts of the UK that have been subject to gentrification, or the opposite – are they predominately found in areas of low economic growth? Do transport museums prevail in the West Midlands and personality museums in the East of Scotland? Or are there no noticeable trends?

In order to answer these questions, we need to categorise each museum according to its subject matter. The last time this happened was in the DOMUS survey that ran between 1994 and 1998. They used a relatively traditional classification system that was suitable for documenting conventional public-sector museums, but was much less useful with respect to small independent venues. Many museums, such as those of Witchcraft, Bakelite, Fairground Organs or Romany life, take non-academic subjects as their focus and they do not neatly fit into academic categories. DOMUS did have the category of ‘social history’, but if we used that for all small non-academic museums, it would be so extensive as to be meaningless, and besides, social history is a methodology rather than subject matter. My second challenge, then, has been to write a classification system that could encompass the diverse subject matter of small independent museums alongside that of the more traditional institutions.

Challenge No. 3: Designing a database

While it was undoubtedly a challenge to find criteria for identifying museums and to devise a new system for classifying them, both these tasks related to my areas of expertise, namely museums. The third major challenge was a long way outside of my comfort zone and concerned the database design. This task was utterly anxiety inducing because it is something I’d never done before and, admittedly, never even thought about, and yet, despite my inexperience, I recognised that it is an extremely important part of the project. Although Dr Larkin has been collecting data on museums, and I have been working on definitions and classifications, that labour will be of little use unless we can search and model it in such a way that it produces information. The design of the database has a direct impact on the possibility of my answering the research questions and on the production of knowledge more generally. It has therefore been imperative that I learn to think about and help develop its structure.

How I responded to these three challenges, and worked with other members of the research team to resolve them will be an ongoing theme in this blog and the subject of scholarly publications. Do keep a look out for more posts.

©Fiona Candlin October 2017

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Dufftown Whisky Museum

Dufftown Whisky Museum

 

The Whisky Museum is in Dufftown, Speyside, which claims to be “Malt Whisky Capital of the World”. Sited on the banks of the river Fiddich, Dufftown was at one time home to nine whisky distilleries with six currently active, including the well known Glenfiddich.

The museum was opened in 2002 by Charles MacLean, a prolific writer on whisky. Its exhibits include illicit stills and other tools and equipment used for whisky manufacture. The museum was forced to vacate its first site in 2009 and has plans to expand its current small premises.

Image from Dufftown Whisky Museum.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

The Ark Museum

The Ark Museum

The Ark is the oldest building in active use in Tadcaster, Yorkshire. Built in the late 15th Century, it is reputed to have been used by the Pilgrim Fathers to meet when planning their voyage to America. As well as a meeting place, at different times the Ark has been used as a post office, an inn, a butchers, a private house and a museum. Its name derives from two carved corbel figures on the exterior which are said to be Noah and his wife.

It housed a museum of local and brewing history, owned by John Smith’s brewery, but the museum closed in 1989. The collections were dispersed to a variety of places including Doncaster Museum, the Castle Museum in York, and private collections. Today the building is in use as council offices.

More information at Visit Tadcaster.

Categories
Research Process

Mapping Museums: Why bother?

Readers who have followed our blogs to date may have realised how much work, time, and money is involved in mapping museums across the UK. The team currently comprises of two professors, and two full time researchers, one in computer science and one collecting and analysing data. By the end of its four-year life span, the project will have cost over a million pounds. On a more personal note, I spent well over a year planning the project and writing a proposal and it now dominates a good part of my waking life, all of which begs the question: why bother? Why does this subject merit such personal, economic, and intellectual investment?

There are pragmatic reasons for the research. The lack of data and of historical research means that museum professionals and policy makers do not have a clear idea of when or where the independent museum sector emerged in the UK, or how it has changed. There is no long-term information on patterns of museums opening and closing, or of their subject matter. Museum professionals who have spent their working lives in a particular region, have been involved with the Area Museums Councils, or with a special interest group, may have a good grasp of the museums in their locale or remit, but their knowledge is not always documented or relayed. In consequence, younger staff charged with supporting museums or staff who are responsible for making decisions about funding may not always have a clear overview of the sector. By compiling a dataset of museums, and modelling trends, this project has the potential to inform museum policy and funding at a national level.

There are also historical reasons for mapping museums in the UK. The museums boom of the 1970s and 1980s (or possibly 1990s) is generally considered to be one of the most significant cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century and yet we know very little about it. Commentators of the time generally linked the rising number of museums to the conservative administration led by Margaret Thatcher, to the economic policy of the time, and to consequent de-industrialisation. This led to the wave of new museums being characterised as entrepreneurial, nostalgic, and often as politically reactionary, but there is very little evidence to substantiate those claims. It might be that many of the new museums were dedicated to rural life and were coterminous with the industrialisation of farming, or they may have focused on religion, or writers, or teddy bears. The Mapping Museums research will enable researchers to revisit the museums boom, and potentially to recast the museums of that period.

For me, though, the main point of the project is linked to who established independent museums and to the people still running them. Museums are generally discussed in relation to the national or public sector, while curation and other forms of museum work are understood to be specialised professional roles. And yet, in 1983 the Museums and Libraries Council commented that most of these new, small enterprises had ‘been set up in an initial wave of enthusiasm and volunteer effort’, and my initial research suggested that the vast majority were founded by private individuals, families, businesses, special interest and community groups. It is likely that amateurs drove the expansion of the museum sector. In identifying these venues and in documenting the work of the founders and volunteers, the Mapping Museums project will show how the recent history of museums was a grass-roots endeavour, or as Raphael Samuels put it, ‘the work of a thousand hands’.

©Fiona Candlin September 2017

 

 

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Museum of British Transport

Museum of British Transport

The Museum of British Transport opened in an old bus garage in Clapham, south London, in the 1960s. Standing in the forecourt was a replica of Rocket, the pioneering locomotive designed by Robert Stephenson. The museum housed objects and vehicles relating to London’s roads, railways and the Tube. The collection had been started in the 1920s by the London General Omnibus Company, which decided to preserve two Victorian horse buses and an early motorbus.

In 1969 the museum was losing £30,000 a year and threatened with closure. It moved to Syon Park in 1973 as the London Transport Collection. The collection was eventually divided between the National Railway Museum in York and London’s Transport Museum, which opened in 1980 in a Victorian flower market building in Covent Garden.

Image taken in 1966 and © National Railway Museum and SSPL, from National Railway Museum. There are more photos of the museum in 1965 on Flickr.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

House of Wax

House of Wax

 

The Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth was run by Peter and Jane Hays for 58 years. Opened in 1954 and named after Madame Tussaud’s great grandson, it featured models of celebrities and historical figures. But faced with rising costs, declining income, and the loss of the wax modeller they had used, the Hays closed the museum in 2012. When the closure was announced they were praised for their contribution to local tourism. The exhibits were sold to a Czech collector in 2014.

Image via Eastern Daily Press.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Adamston Agricultural Museum

Adamston Agricultural Museum

 

The Adamston Agricultural Museum was opened in 1972 by Hew McCall-Smith. His collection comprised more than 500 items related to farming and domestic life in the North East of Scotland. This included ploughs, horse harness, and dairy equipment. McCall-Smith also organised events, including exhibits of threshing, ploughing, and cheese-making.

The museum remained open until the early 1980s, when the collection was purchased by Moray District Council and incorporated into Aden, the North East of Scotland Agricultural Centre (now known as the Aberdeenshire Farming Museum).

More information about these museums can be found in An Introduction to Scottish Ethnology by Alexander Fenton.

Image via Deeside Books.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Birmingham Nature Centre

Cannon Hill Natural History Museum

 

This building has had various lives, with at least four different institutions occupying the site. It was once the Cannon Hill Museum and devoted to the history of Birmingham. Around 1953, changes at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery led to the natural history department establishing a museum on the site. It subsequently became the Birmingham Nature Centre and is now the entrance to Birmingham Wildlife Conservation Park.

It is situated on the edge of Cannon Hill Park, which opened in 1873. The park was designed by T. J. Gibson, who had previously designed London’s Battersea Park.

(Image via Birmingham Images)

Some information about the history of the museum is from: Wingfield, Christopher. “(Before and) after Gallery 33: Fifteen years on at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery” Journal of Museum Ethnography 18 (2006): 49-62, p.57. (read online at Academia.edu)

Categories
Museum Snapshots

The Button Museum? It’s fastenating.

During the spring of 2009 a running joke appeared in the letters page of The Guardian newspaper. Prompted by a double-spread photograph showing rows of antiquated toasters on display at the Toaster Museum in Kettwig, Germany, one reader wrote proposing that a visit to the Toaster Museum might be followed by a trip to the Bread Museum in Ulm or the nearby Cutlery and Salt museums. More suggestions followed as correspondents recommended the Egg Museum in Soyans, the Chamberpot Museum in Munich, Szentendre’s Marzipan Museum (with its life-size marzipan sculpture of Michael Jackson), Condom’s Condom Museum, the Mousetrap Museum in Eifel, and a penis museum in Husavik, Iceland.

Numerous other curious collections were mentioned until, after some two or three weeks, the letters began to take on an overtly playful tone. While purporting to recommend museums, these missives were actually an exercise in making puns. Allan Blunden started the trend by commenting that ‘those not too set in their ways’ might enjoy a trip to the German Cement Museum, Josie Greenwood followed suit noting that the ‘Button Museum in Ross-on-Wye is fastenating’, and Malcolm Jones thought the Spam Museum in Austin Minnesota ‘a good place to fritter away a few hours’. Other Guardian readers found the Dickens House bleak, The Fan Museum cool, judged Limerick Museum pure poetry, and Dartmoor Prison Museum quite captivating. The recommendations even began to began to reference other running jokes on the letters page including one, which would be impossible today, about uses for empty 35mm film canisters.

At the time the correspondence appeared, I was just beginning to think about writing a book devoted to small museums that concentrated on particular types of objects or single themes, and particularly the domestic, culturally marginal, or ostensibly insignificant. Almost all of The Guardian readers focused on museums that fitted this category and thinking that they may be useful at some point in the future, I copied the letters down. Here are the first half now, the second set is to follow:

Having showcased the Toaster Museum in Kettwig it might be appropriate to follow with the Bread Museum in Ulm. It is forever engraved on the memory of several nephews and nieces, as was the Cutlery Museum (next to the Wallpaper Museum) in Kassel. Though my sister and I found them strangely entertaining! The Salt Museum was more hands-on. Some holidays just happen that way – sorry kids!

Gaynor Lewis, Smallburgh, Norfolk 4/04/09

 

Gaynor Lewis could link her visits to the Bread and Salt Museums with one to the Egg Museum in Soyans, in the Drome valley, France.

Robert Davis, London, 07/04/09

 

Readers hastening to Germany for the delights of Kettwig’s Toaster Museum, Ulm’s Bread Museum and the Wallpaper and Cutlery Museums should continue southwards for the Chamberpot Museum in Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich. Unmissable.

Kirsten Cubitt, Sheffield 10/04/09

 

No trip to Hungary is complete without a visit to Szentendre’s Marzipan Museum with its life-size model of Michael Jackson carved in marzipan.

Ian Clark, Chartham, Kent 11/04/09

 

Germany does not have a monopoly on unmissable museums. While on honeymoon in 2001, we went to the Musée du Cartonnage in Valreas, Provence. Cardboard has not been the same for us since.

Nina Young, Nottinghamshire 13/04/09

 

Then on to the Condom Museum in Condom

Jane O’Mahoney, Launceston, Cornwall 13/04/09

 

Don’t miss Neroth, in the Eifel region of Germany, where the Mousetrap Museum traces the development of a local cottage industry – making mousetraps from bent wire, sold by travelling salesman throughout Europe.

Anthony King, Bristol 16/04/09

 

Visitors to Koblenz it he 1960s will have unforgettable memories of visiting the ‘Binns’ Museum in the Ehrenbreitstein fortress, devoted to the processing of pumice and the manufacturing of breezeblock.

Jane Caplan, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford 17/04/09

 

The Whip Museum in Killer, Germany, takes some beating.

David Hemsworth, Haywards Heath, West Sussex 18/04//09

 

Once you’ve visited le Musée du Pruneau in Agen you’ll want to go regularly.

Don Jackson, York 18/04//09

 

Husavik in Iceland boasts a phallological museum exhibiting the penises of most of the islands mammals. It doesn’t yet have a human penis, although a local farmer is reported to have donated his – upon his death.

John Land, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk 20/04/09

 

For those not too set in their ways I recommend a visit to the German Cement Museum. It’s situated on the windswept outskirts of Henmoor on the road to Cuxhaven.

Dr. Allan Blunden, Liskeard, Cornwall 21/04//09

 

Visitors to the south-east of France should take their hats off to Le Musée du Beret in Nouy, between Lourdes and Paris.

Tim Nokes, Kendal, Cumbria 21/04//09

 

Why go abroad for unusual historical collections when you can visit the Prickwillow Drainage Engine Museum in fenland Cambridgeshire.

John Loader, West Wilton, North Yorkshire 22/04/09

 

I am quite a fan of The Fan Museum in Greenwich. It is so cool

Tom Frost, London 22/04/09

 

The Button Museum in Ross-on-Wye is fastenating

Josie Greenwood, Worksop, Nottinghamshire 23/04/09

 

Have the courage to visit the Bottle Museum – run by the wonderfully named Codswallop Trust – at the Elescar Heritage Centre near Barnsbury.

Stuart Currie, Barnsley, South Yorkshire 24/04/09

 

Does the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence in Port Talbot set the pulses racing?

Alan Paterson, Cambridge 24/04/09

 

None of them are a patch on the Quilt Museum and Gallery in York

Steve Bradley, York 24/04/09

 

Surely after the Bottle Museum the next step would be to see the Flessenscheepjes (ships-in-bottles) Museum in Enkhuizen, Holland. And while you’re there, you might as well look in the Sigarbandjes (cigar band) Museum in Volendam

Willem Mejs, Birmingham 27/04/09

 

The Sewing Machine Museum in South London left me in stitches

Tom Bolger, Woodbridge, Suffolk 27/04/09

 

Since this series is going to run and run, I suggest you find time for the clock museum at Upton Hall near Newark.

Rev. Tony Bell, Chesterfield, Derbyshire 28/ 04/09

 

I went to the Idaho Potato Museum in Blackfoot Idaho. Who could resist the strapline ‘Free baked taters to Out-of-Staters’. They had the original Dan Quayle ‘potatoe’ and some potato ice-cream that I would not recommend.

Neil Skilling, Loanhead, Midlothian 28/04/09

 

Anyone visiting Dumfriesshire might find interest in the Savings Bank Museum at Ruthwell

Neil Forrest 29/04/09

 

The Dickens House is bleak

Jan Pitt, London 29/04/09

 

Why not whip along to the leather museum at Walsall?

Ian Joyce, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire 30/04/09

 

I’m sorry Jan Pitt found the Dickens House Museum so bleak. She shouldn’t have gone with such great expectations.

Phillip Stephenson, Cambridge 30/04/09

 

I’ve heard that the Museum of Country Life near East Kilbride is the best in its field

Colin Montgomery, Edinburgh 01/05/09

 

The Lawrence Sterne Museum in Coxwold is xxxx xxxxx x xxxx

Patrick Wildgust

Shandy Hall, Coxwold, N. Yorkshire 01/05/09

 

To say nothing of Waregub’s “Museum which ought to be in a Museum”

Geoffrey Pogson, Gillingham, Dorset 01/05/09

 

Always a popular starter – Arnay-le-Duc’s Soup Museum

Bob Johnson, Durham 02/05/09

 

The Colour Museum in Bradford should be on any list of buildings to see before you die.

Cliff Challenger, Bradford 02/05/09

 

None of the museums can cut it like the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, USA

Dave and Moira Emmett, Leeds 04/05/09

 

The Museum of London is just capital

David Joss Buckley, London 04/05/09

 

Only a blip on the map, but the Radar Museum, Neatishead, Norfolk is well worth a visit.

Don Baines, Malden, Essex 05/05/09

 

The British Lawnmower Museum of Southport is a cut above the Mustard Museum of Wisconsin.

Bob Mays, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire 05/05/09

 

06/05/09

Tar for mentioning the Asphalt museum, Sacramento, California

Louisa Burville-Riley, Seveoaks, Kent

 

Limerick Museum, pure poetry.

Brian Hodkinson, Assistant curator, Limerick Museum, 05/05/09

 

Dartmoor Prison Museum – quite captivating

Johnny Ray, Dorchester, Dorset 07/05/09

 

Steve adores the Museum in Docklands

Moira Duhig, London 08/05/09

 

The Keswick Mining Museum in Cumbria is quite oresome

Chris Drinkwater, London 09/05/09

 

Wigan Museum has no peer

Eric Stanier, Macclesfield, Cheshire 09/05/09

 

The Discovery Museum in Newcastle is a great find.

Robin Campbell, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear 11/05/09

 

Missed the Oyster Museum while visiting Whitstable. Oh shuck.

Paula Evans,

Whitstable, Kent 11/05/09

 

Pull out all the stops and visit the St. Albans Organ Museum

John Bailey, St. Albans, Hertfordshire 12/05/09

 

It’s funny that no one’s mentioned the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria.

Mike Whittaker, Rugby, Warwickshire 12/05/09

 

The sad news that all the Victorian exhibits are having to be sold off would suggest that the Shambles Museum in Newent is in a bit of a mess.

Max Perkins, Frome, Somerset 12/05/09

 

Maybe your readers would like to ‘get on up’ to the Sex Machines Museum in Prague.

Dan Adler, Farnham, Surrey 13/05/09

 

The Manx Kipper Factory and Museum. Smokin’

Steve Pinder, London 14/05/09

 

I’m rooting for le Musée de la Truffle, Périgord

Colin Virden, Mattlock, Derbyshire 14/05/09

 

Amsterdam has its Sheepvaart Museum but I wasn’t brave enough to go in.

Fergus Lang, Irby, Wirral 15/05/09

 

The River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames is more than just a load of old rowlocks.

Chris Whitehead, Hambledon, Oxfordshire 15/05/09

 

There used to be a Museum of Atheism in Shkoder, northern Albania, but I don’t believe that it exists anymore

Brian Ferris, Tunbridge Wells, Kent 16/05/09

 

You should try to squeeze in a Visit to the Concertina Museum in Derbyshire

Robert Bigio, London 16/05/09

 

The Helicopter Museum in Weston-super-Mare must be an uplifting experience

Julian Dunn, Great Haseley, Oxfordshire 18/05/09

 

Have a look through Sunderland’s glass museum

Chris Williams, Rufford, Lancashire 19/05/09

 

There is a Hat Museum in Stockport that has a rival in Narbonne in France. There is a lot of titfer tat between them.

John Banbury, Marple, Stockport 19/05/09

 

Kidderminster’s new carpet museum will take some beating

Clliff Wilmott, Bewdley Worcestershire 21/05/09

 

Hurry to the submarine museum in Gosport – there are fears it’s going under.

Clare Ash, Southsea, Hampshire 21/05/09

 

It’s good that the Hancock Museum is reopening after a £26million redesign and rebuild. Ought to be worth half an hour of anyone’s time.

Anthony Bramley-Harker, Watford 22/05/09

 

I found a visit to the Museum of Lifts in Brussels and elevating experience.

Pat Nicholls

St. Neots, Cambridgeshire 22/05/09

 

A visit to the Tinplate Museum in La Tour Blanche, Dordogne gave me unalloyed pleasure

Ian Churchill, Leeds 23/05/09

 

The Gustav Holst Museum in Cheltenham is on another planet.

Susan Davis, Cheltenham 25/05/09

 

© Fiona Candlin August 2017