Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

Museum Detectives

Collecting information on closed museums is a challenge. Museums usually open with a degree of fanfare but often close quietly – and their catalogues, visitor books, and other documentation are not always retained. (Although cowhide hats off to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery for keeping the data from the now-closed Museum of Leathercraft). No-one is specifically charged with keeping records from closed museums and it is hard to find anyone connected to a closed museum, especially after twenty years or more. The staff have relocated, volunteers filter off to other organisations or spend their time in other ways, people die. In this blog I’m going to outline some of the ways that we were able to collect information.

We began by scouring the internet. In some cases, websites or social media accounts lived on after the museum had closed and occasionally the final post explained the circumstances of closure and what was happening to the collections. These pages also provided contact details. Most of the time our emails bounced, and the phone numbers we called were defunct or had been reallocated to someone new, who would be utterly bemused by our enquiries, but in some cases, especially at private museums, the museum owner still lived or worked on the premises. When I called the number for Red Carriage Working Museum in Matlock, Derbyshire, the proprietor told me a moving story about being forced to close when professional burglars stole their entire collection of antique and irreplaceable harnesses, thereby making it impossible for them to show the carriages in action. Although she and her husband sold the yard and the rest of their substantial collection, they had kept the house.

In other cases, online reviews, blogs, or chat forums gave us a lead. A TripAdvisor review for the Longstone café on the Isles of Scilly, noted that it had replaced the Longstone Heritage Centre. Amy Jenkins the proprietor told me that all kinds of things had been left at the site – including two cannonballs which she gave to her father – and gave me the name of the founder who I was then able to contact. Similarly, an online chat forum mentioned that the founders of Harmonium Museum in Shipley, Yorkshire, Phil and Pam Fluke, were continuing to repair instruments. A few clicks later, I found their website and was able to get in touch. Phil also gave me some leads for other closed museums. Alternatively, we called the business at the location where a museum used to be. Jacob Clark, owner of the Animal Avenue Pet Supplies shop at Ringwood, told me that the shop fronts from the Ringwood Town and Country Experience were still outside and a collection of objects in the attic.  And we put out calls for help on social media. Twitter users provided an obituary for Kathleen Mann who had run a Cat Museum at her antiques shop in Harrow-on-the-Hill in London, which enabled us to pinpoint the date of closure.

Phil and Pam Fluke stand in front of a wide range of harmoniums in their museum
Phil and Pam Fluke at the Harmonium Museum in Shipley, 2009. Photo by Mykhaylo Khramov, via Wikimedia.

Sometimes we spent a lot of time investigating one museum to no immediate avail. Finding pictures of the Museum of Cipher Equipment in Cupar on a cipher enthusiasts’ website, I contacted the webmaster in California who emailed a call for information to his network. We also contacted staff at Scotland’s Secret Nuclear Bunker, the Museum of Cupar, and the Museum of Communications, none of whom had heard of the museum but promised to investigate further. I posted on Twitter and word spread. A historian raised it at a museums meeting in nearby Dundee and a member of Museum Association staff persuaded their in-laws who lived in the area to make enquiries on our behalf. Some months later I got an email from the owner. He had visited the Secret Nuclear Bunker and they had passed my email on to him. It turned out that the collection had been destroyed in a fire and that he had moved to Orkney.

Looking through a doorway into a cramped room with metal benches, on top of which sit cipher equipment resembling a large typewriter and assorted other items.
The Museum of Cipher Equipment. Photograph by Ken Earle Mitchell.

Another alternative, especially when we were investigating Local Authority museums, was to contact a neighbouring institution. The staff were often only too aware of closures in the area and in many cases had either inherited the collection or been personally involved in its relocation. Out-of-the-blue telephone calls or emails regularly elicited extremely helpful responses along the lines of ‘The objects all came back into the service. It was before my time, but I can put you in touch with my predecessor if you want more detail. I have his email’ (Wirral Museums Service) or ‘The Lace Museum was never part of the Nottingham Service, although a lot of people thought it was. Some of the collection did come to us. I can send you the relevant section of the catalogue if that’s of interest to you’ (Andrew King, Registrar). Needless to say, it was.

Alongside our internet searches we contacted area museum services or the members of staff with responsibility for heritage in local councils. They were often extremely helpful, giving detailed information about why a museum had closed and where the collections had gone. We also met with the Museums Development Network who scanned through lists of closed museums in their regions, trying to dredge up memories of long-gone venues, as did subject specialists. Anthony Coulls, Senior Curator at the National Railway Museum in York, got in touch when he read about the research and checked our information on closed transport museums while Julian Farrance, Regimental Officer at the National Army Museum and Paul Evans, ex-Historical Projects Officer at the Army Museums Ogilby Trust, looked over our lists of closed military museums.

All of the input that we have received has been very useful: thank you to everyone who has given us information, leads, or advice. We really couldn’t do this without you. However, we’re still trying down missing information on some museums so do keep watch on this space for updates and, no doubt, calls for help.

Fiona Candlin

September 2024

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK Events

Afterlives of Objects

Thursday 24th October, 6.00 – 8.00pm

Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London, 25-27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

Places are free but limited and must be booked in advance

Book here

In 2009 Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins collaborated on The Object Reader (Routledge). Since then, they have individually pursued diverse research on the histories of objects, curation, design, and disposal.  This conversationbrings Fiona and Raiford together again with their longstanding collaborator, interlocutor, and friend Joanne Morra to discuss their current work in progress on the afterlife of objects: Fiona is currently driving around the UK visiting closed museums for her new book on the subject, while Raiford is on a world tour of video game museums researching his next book, Museum Games: Journeys in Search of Playable Media. Both are investigating the process of collecting, exhibiting, experiencing, caring for, and scrapping objects. They share a mutual fascination with where stuff goes. Jo and Ray were Founding Principal Editors of Journal of Visual Culture (2001-2019), and previously worked together on the journal Parallax. Fiona and Jo read each other’s material.

Joanne Morra is Professor of Art and Culture and Programmes Research Director at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She writes on contemporary art and psychoanalysis. Her publications include Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art (IB Tauris 2018), Intimacy Unguarded (JVAP, co-edited with Emma Talbot, 2017). She is now working on a book provisionally titled Holding Art: Women and Radical Care

Raiford Guins is Professor & Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School and Adjunct Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Feeling Leeds: Notes on Loving a Football Club from Afar (Pitch Publications, 2022), Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020), Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT 2014), and Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Minnesota, 2009). Guins also co-edits MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood. His newest book, Changing the Game: How Atari’s Pong Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, is forthcoming with MIT Press in 2026.

Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology and Director of the Mapping Museum Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester University Press 2010), Micromuseology (Bloomsbury 2016), and Stories from Small Museums (Manchester University Press 2022). Her new book is provisionally titled Stories of Closed Museums

For more information about this event contact Katy at mappingmuseums@bbk.ac.uk

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Bournemouth Transport Museum

Yellow bus from Bournemouth Transport Museum
Leyland bus from Bournemouth Transport Museum marked as a Mobile Museum. Photo by Michael Wadman at Netley rally, 1988.

The Bournemouth Transport Museum was a collection of public transport vehicles on display to the public each summer, probably from the late 1970s. It was later known as the Bournemouth Heritage Collection. Some of the vehicles were returned to commercial service in the early 1990s. The collection changed hands and locations a number of times and was eventually sold at auction in 2011. The bus pictured above now appears to be in the West of England Transport Collection, along with many other Bournemouth vehicles. Interestingly it is labelled as a mobile museum, although we don’t know if it contained any exhibits. As always, if you can offer any information about this, please get in touch.

Image via Michael Wadman on Flickr, where you can also read a short but detailed history of the collection.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Big Four Railway Museum

Post mark for the Big Four Railway museum

Some museums are well documented, while others can be rather elusive. A case in point is the Big Four Railway Museum in Bournemouth, about which we know very little. According to one source it housed a collection of railway locomotive name plates belonging to the enthusiast Frank Burridge and was open in the 1980s. As this postmark suggests, it may also have hosted temporary exhibitions.

Burridge wrote a book about locomotive name plates. As the book’s cover indicates, the Big Four were the four main railway companies in the United Kingdom between 1923 and 1947: Great Western Railway, London, Midland and Scottish Railway, London and North Eastern Railway, and Southern Railway.

A postcard apparently showing the museum’s interior is reproduced below.

Interior of the big four museum with name plates

Images via ebay and Alwyn Ladell on Flickr.

 

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Buxton Transport Museum

Buxton Transport Museum - outside view

The Buxton Transport Museum was relatively short-lived, open for only three years. It was established in 1980 by Peter Clark, a vintage car enthusiast. The site is now occupied by Buxton Mineral Water company.

Buxton Transport Museum - badge

Images and information via Badge Collectors Circle and Derbyshire Through Time by Margaret Buxton on Google Books.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

The Douglas Museum

Sign for The Douglas Museum - The House of Wonders
Sign for The Douglas Museum installed at Castleton Visitor Centre, 2017

The Douglas Museum was the brainchild of Randolph Osborne Douglas, who created it in his home in Castleton, Derbyshire with his wife Hetty. Douglas was a silversmith, locksmith, and amateur escapologist with the stage name of The Great Randini, inspired by his childhood hero Houdini. His collection included miniature houses, locks, models of the world’s largest diamonds, a variety of Houdini ephemera, and many other curios.

Douglas opened his museum in 1926. After he died in 1956, Hetty continued to run the museum until her death in 1978. The collection was transferred to Buxton Museum and parts of it are now on show in the small museum at Castleton Visitor Centre.

Douglas Museum showcase at Castleton Visitor Centre, 2017.
Douglas Museum showcase at Castleton Visitor Centre, 2017.

Images by Mark Liebenrood.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Edinburgh Wax Museum

Edinburgh Wax Museum opened in 1976 and was soon attracting more than 230,000 visitors a year. Displays included Scottish historical figures, fictional characters, and, as you might expect, a chamber of horrors.  The museum was curated by Charles Cameron, a professional magician, who also performed as Count Dracula in night-time shows in the Castle Dracula Theatre on the top floor.

Ticket for Castle Dracula's Gothic House of Terror

Despite its popularity the owners decided to sell the premises for office development and the museum closed in 1989, joining the ranks of lost wax museums. The premises were up for sale again in 2008, but it seems nothing came of plans to reopen the museum.

Images via Flickr.

 

Categories
Museum Snapshots

The Spalding Bird Museum

The Spalding Bird Museum was owned by the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society and run by Ashley K. Maples and taxidermist Ben Waltham. It contained 840 specimens of British birds and many other specimens, in 160 display cases. Maples died in 1950 and a lack of funds forced the Society to sell the premises in 1953, when a small part of the collection was moved to Ayscoughee Hall and much of it loaned to Leicester Museum. The Hall closed for refurbishment in 2003, when the whole bird collection was transferred to Leicester Museums Service.

Images via South Holland Life (PDF)

Ben Waltham, taxidermist, with an Osprey in the Bird Museum’s workshop, 1949

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Guernsey Tomato Museum

Little is known about the Tomato Museum, which is said to have closed in 1989. Hudson and Nicholls’ Directory, an invaluable resource for museum researchers, describes it in 1985:

History of tomato-growing on the island, in [a] group of glasshouses built at various dates between the 1890s and 1970s. Crops illustrating the history of the glasshouse industry in Guernsey. Tomato-growing equipment, including an early soil-steamer.

Guernsey tomatoes were an important part of the island’s economy, and in 2003 the Guernsey Museum staged an exhibition about the industry, which might give us a flavour of what the now-lost tomato museum was like.

Image via The Dabbler.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Dinting Railway Centre

The Dinting Railway Centre was open between 1968 and 1990. The brick engine shed was built between 1888 and 1898 for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway. The centre was run by the Bahamas Locomotive Society, who are based at  Ingrow on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. An old badge marks the connection between Dinting and the Society.

bahamas locomotive society dinting badge featuring scots guardsman locomotive

The photo above of the locomotive Scots Guardsman, taken by Hugh Llewelyn, is dated April 1980, and another photo shows a different locomotive, the LNER 60532 Blue Peter, at Dinting in 1983.

lner 532 blue peter at dinting in 1983

Photos by Hugh Llewelyn and via Badge Collectors Circle and rmweb.

Update: this post was updated in April 2022 with a new image at the top and some small changes to the text.