M Shed

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be taken on a behind the scenes guided tour of M Shed, Bristol’s new museum which has gained a great deal of attention lately.

It has a remarkable number of parallels with Birmingham’s Think Tank and I thought it might me interesting to share here my thoughts about the place.

M Shed replaced the old Bristol Industrial Museum, a much loved attraction on the City’s dockside but one which was not particularly well known to visitors. It’s fair to say that the Industrial Museum had become rather “worn”, although this always begs the question of who allowed that to happen in the first place?

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Think Tank and miss Birmingham’s old Museum of Science and Industry very much. I don’t like over-reliance on interactive displays, nor a tendency to concentrate only on younger visitors. So it’s fair to say that hearing a lot of buzz-words used in conjunction with M Shed didn’t fill me with optimism.

First impressions were good, though. The new museum takes full advantage of its position on the docks, with huge picture windows giving a truly panoramic view of Bristol’s skyline.

The second Big Thing is that admission is still FREE. There are the usual donations elicited and nominal charges for things like guided tours but otherwise, people can come and go as they wish. Not an easy thing to achieve in this day and age and Bristol City Council is to be applauded for it.

We were led first to the Museum’s store, where objects not currently on display are held. As with most museums, M Shed can only show s relatively small part of its collection at any given time but they’ve approached this “problem” in an innovative way, undertaking to change a proportion of their displays every year. In this way, things don’t languish out of sight for ever and people are given something new to come and explore each year, encouraging return visits. The store was very reminiscent of Birmingham’s Museum Store in Nechells, although it’s much more regularly accessible and the labelling was especially good so that even though things were stacked everywhere, you could easily see what they were.

Then it was into the Museum proper, which is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. As a chronological sort of person, I found this quite difficult, at least at first. But there’s no denying that it’s a though provoking approach and it does encourage looking at things from a different angle. There are three permanent galleries, looking at “Bristol Places”, “Bristol People” and “Bristol Life”.

But this juxtaposing of related but different subjects does work to some extent. For example, in “Bristol People”, the section dealing with the difficult subject of the slave trade is cheek by jowl with sections looking at Bristol’s race relations and the famous (in Bristol anyway) bus boycott in the sixties, prompted by the local bus company refusing to employ non-white staff.

Talking of buses, bus building was a big Bristol industry and they have, as one of the most prominent exhibits in “Bristol Places”, a complete Bristol bus (an FLF Lodekka, for the cognoscenti!). This was used as a sort of “gateway” to exploring transport in the City generally, looking at waterways, roads, housing and factories.

The interactive displays weren’t overdone. Indeed, I found those examining the topography of the City to be the most effective way of telling that story. However, they had loudspeakers, not microphones and when two (or three or four) are being used simultaneously I could imagine it might be jolly difficult to concentrate or even hear your “own”.

The “Bristol Life” gallery was a bit too left of field for me (oh Museum traditionalist that I am!) but might well work in bringing the place to the attention and interest of those who don’t normally visit museums. And in any case, out on the dockside there’s plenty more stuff to keep me enthralled with the cranes (a real feature of the city) boats and dockside railway all integral parts of the Museum.

So, M Shed gets a pretty reasonable thumbs up from me; 7/10 for the statistically minded. Go and take a look.

(While you’re there, by the way, don’t miss out on the City’s many other attractions not least the splendid City Museum & Art Gallery up the hill near the University. This too is free and is felt to compliment M Shed. I rather liked the ethos that “M Shed shows Bristol to the World, while the City Museum & Art Gallery shows the world to Bristol.”)

Cadbury's

So the news has broken this morning that Cadbury's board have apparently advised shareholders to accept Kraft's offer of 840p per share, which makes Cadbury's worth £11.5 billion.

Maybe I'd do the same if I was a shareholder. But you know what> Actually I don't think I would. I regret us selling everything off and whatever promises are made in the medium term, the company's presence at Bournville will change eventually, I'm sure.

Our city is littered with take-overs that were supposed to have no effect. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you Rover and LDV. Beyond I give you BSR in the Black Country and Terry's of York. And who bought the latter and moved production overseas? Oh yes, it was Kraft.

I don't think for a minute that Cadbury's will "close down" the Bournville works; but I suspect that things (ie jobs) will just "trickle away" over time.

We are sleepwalking into our own destruction I sometimes think.

Still, at least it'll be an excuse not to eat chocolate anymore!

Yanks a Million!

I’ve been missing from BlogWorld for a while as I’ve been working pretty much continuously this week with an American group throughout the Midlands.

It’s been a very busy week, characterised by a series of very early starts to get to their base at Catton Hall on the Derbyshire Staffordshire border. However, hard work though it was, things were made considerably more pleasant by two other factors.

Firstly, they were a very pleasant group, largely the “accompanying persons” of a group taking part in a sort of Edwardian Shooting holiday.

Secondly (and most unusually) they had asked me to more or less concoct an itinerary for them myself. Unusual this might have been but it did mean that there were none of those ridiculously crowded days with impossible-to-achieve deadlines and skipping past places to say that you’ve “been there” rather than “seen it”.

A review of the group’s week gives an “interesting” insight into the world that is tourism in the Heart of England…….

On Monday went to explore Old Shropshire, with visits to Shrewsbury and Ludlow. These are two places I think are amongst the loveliest towns in the Midlands and deserve to be explored just as much as the Strafords and the Warwicks. If the group went anywhere because I put it in, then this was the day!

It was up into Derbyshire and the Peak District National Park on Tuesday for a visit to Chatsworth, the “Palace of the Peak”. This was somewhere the group themselves chose to go, although I did add an Ian flourish by calling in at Buxton on the way up. Chatsworth is, of course, superb, although it was fully decorated for Christmas and I find it very difficult to be festive in, er, November.

Wednesday saw an unashamed assault on Tourist Central, going on a tour of Stratford-upon-Avon in the morning and a ride around the Cotswolds in the afternoon. Bizarrely, though, both were curiously deserved, even for November. I don’t think the group knew it but they were seeing it as quiet as it’s ever going to be!

I a little bemused that – despite free time in Stratford – no-one went into the Birthplace! Still, they found places to eat drink and shop and what keeps them happy keeps me happy!

It was back to Shropshire on Thursday for a look at the Iron Bridge and then the rest of the day at the recently-extended Blist’s Hill Victorian Town. The latter was awash with school groups and some of the staff seemed a little surprised to see a non-school group there.

I think it's fair to say they were less "blown away" by Blist's Hill than other groups I've taken there but it did give our transatlantic visitors the chance to learn about our pre-decimal money, though, which is as big a challenge for them to understand as Cricket!

And that brought us to today, another unashamedly “Ian” day, as I took them on a ride around Birmingham and a visit to the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. On the way back we called into Lichfield to have a look at the Cathedral, the Lichfield Gospels and the newly-discovered Lichfield Angel.

And do you know, that was the only time all week that they found themselves outside in any rain? Everywhere else, it rained when on the coach and stopped as we left.

Whatever magical meteorological power it is that these people have, I want some of it. Could do with a few more like these, I tell you!

Heritage in Store

I went on a behind the scenes visit to the amazing Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Collection Centre (ie store) in Nechells today.

The place – which is occasionally open to the public – is an amazing repository of all the things there’s no place to show at the other City Museums. To say that there’s a “variety” there is a monumental understatement. Full size traction engines and the statue of George Dawson which used to adorn Edmund Street rub shoulders with Matchbox cars and early electric irons, while lathes and a wooden carousel horse jostle for space with a model of the town hall and a (full size) Sinclair C5!

Some of the items have never been on display anywhere as there’s never been room. Others are there as a result of changes to displays and – ominously – because of the closure of the Museum of Science & Industry and its “replacement” (ha!) with “Think Tank”. The lines of cars and motorcycles, together with the old Birmingham Corporation battery-electric dustcart, were nostalgically reminiscent of the Science Museum. You almost found yourself looking around for the “City of Birmingham” locomotive to start moving along on the hour…….

More things will probably end up in the store as galleries at the Museum & Art Gallery are gradually changed. A new Birmingham Gallery is due (and is long overdue) but this will probably displace yet more stuff to Nechells.

When the store is opened (on a couple of weekends per year and at other times for private group bookings) it is immensely popular. This – like the recent queues to see the Staffordshire Hoard – suggest that there is great appetite for this sort of Museum in the area. We have endured trends in recent years away from “traditional” museums with exhibits lined up ion favour of more “trendy” ways of imparting knowledge. In fact, it seems to me that a lot of the “traditional” stuff is the most popular with people and somehow strikes a chord with them.

I have a great idea. Why not transfer the stuff in store to a new building in the centre of the City. I’m sure they could find a site. There’s a vacant site in Newhall Street that would fit the bill and there’s not a lot in the old Elkington’s Electro-Plating works next to it at the moment. Then you could open the “store” more frequently. Say, er, every day.

You know what? People would love it. And no, my tongue isn’t entirely in my cheek saying this…….

PS I was wondering where the giant turtle shell from Aston Hall had gone. It was in a corner there!

Selling What All the World Desires

On that rare thing for me, a Sunday off, we’ve spent the afternoon visiting the Matthew Boulton Exhibition Selling What All the World Desires in the Gas Hall of the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Okay, so I was always going to like it. It’s about Birmingham and concerned with a subject that interests me. But goodness! I was, as they say, just “blown away” by how good it was. I thought I knew a lot about old MB but there I learned loads of new stuff about him. His relationship with Joseph Wright of Derby. The Lunar Society always meeting on Sundays. His political views. His involvement with Benjamin Franklin. All these were revelations to me.

There’s some fabulous stuff on display: clocks and vases for the Royal Collection, a painting from Tate Britain (which was one of my exam pictures years ago), a collection of medallions showing Birmingham landmarks and even Boulton’s personal diary.

The whole thing was pure joy to me from start to finish and I urge anyone vaguely near Birmingham to visit it before it closes on 27 September 2009. It’s even FREE! There are more details at:

http://www.matthewboulton2009.org

I feel inspired to do a themed Birmingham walk just about Matthew Boulton now!