It all started with a trip to Paris in early 2020 that I was able to tack onto the end of a scientific conference. This was my first ever trip alone and I discovered that untied down by others my instinct was to seek out as many museums as I could find and that I spent dawn ‘till dusk travelling from one to another hardly even stopping for lunch.
Since then, whenever I've had the opportunity, I've sought out to visit as many different museums as I can. Big and small, regardless of the topic, I'm interested in them all.
You can’t visit that many museums without beginning to compare them and this led to an interest in museums themselves. How do they tell their story? Why? What are the key ideas they’re pushing, and how effectively do the different elements of the exhibits convey them? This has led to what has been described as me ‘devouring’ museums. I now take a yearly trip to somewhere on my own where I spent about a week visiting as many museums as I can (whilst also incidentally exploring the rest of the city too).
Between the end of general covid restrictions towards the end of 2021 and the start of this blog a little over 3 years later I have visited 198 museums, galleries, heritage sites, or other similar places across six countries and two continents. Much of this has come in bursts on my holidays such as the one to Berlin (35) or Amsterdam (38) but it has also come from grabbing a spare hour to drop into a town and its handful of museums on the way to somewhere else.
Finally then I have decided to write about my experiences and thoughts of the museums that I have visited and will visit. Primarily as an exercise to consolidate my own thoughts on what makes a good or bad museum.
Briefly then I should lay out my foundational philosophy for what a museum is and what it is they should be attempting to achieve.
What is a Museum?
As already touched on in the numerical count my definition of Museum is relatively broad for the purposes of categorisation. I consider for this blog a Museum to be any physical place that is dedicated to preserving or sharing knowledge for the education of others. This then would count something like the ruins of a castle so long as some boards about its history were included, but not something like a memorial statue. You may choose to quibble over the definition but it is the one I have chosen.
The purpose, like with much other education, is that I will end the visit with more knowledge or understanding than I began. Though I hasten to note this is not necessarily the same thing as traditional learning. I won’t get into the weeds of cultural and scientific capital at this stage (though it’s prime for another post at some other point) but this is the difference between going to an old castle and coming away with a better feeling of the place, the people who lived there, and the history of the country and time it existed in rather than knowing it was owned by Lord Soandso before being sieged and overrun by Baron Suchandsuch in 1476. This is vague and a bit airy, but I'm fine with that.
Ruins of Kilchurn Castle (Image from Magic K)
Why Museums?
The history of the museum is another interesting topic that I'm not going to touch here and now. But Museums rose to prominence as the best way to show the wonders of the world to large swathes of people and were one of the primary scholarly tools up until the modern era.
With the introduction of the internet their role has changed significantly. If I specifically want to learn some jolly interesting facts about knot tying it is far easier for me to search for some blog or online video. Amazon promises me 587 books on knot tying which can be delivered near instantly to my kindle or computer for less than a few pounds, these include the seemingly semi autobiographical The Knot Book by Geoffrey Budworth. There’s no need to go and find a maritime museum for this information now.
Image of Collection from the Fleetwood Museum that I visited on School Trips as a Child (Image from Fleetwood Museum)
A museum then offers one key advantage in the modern era and that is a sense of place. A location, perhaps where something once happened, which contains the stuff and things that relate to its topic. It is an opportunity to tell a story with a level of physicality that cannot be replicated online, or even in a book. This is the power of a museum, when you are there you are there.
That is why I am (at least for the purposes of this blog) uninterested in digital museum collections or the many ways that museums are reaching out on the internet through podcasts, videos, or other online methods. It is not that these are unimportant (in fact they may be more important than the traditional location) or that they don’t influence museum design (I believe that the British Museum’s BBC Radio 4 Series A History of the World in 100 Objects may be the single most useful museum guide put out yet) but we have to draw the line somewhere.
What to expect from this blog.
The plan is to put out at least one monthly post which discusses either some museums themselves or some aspect about museum design which has grabbed my particular attention at that moment.
This is a plan, not a promise. And if the blog went unexpectedly quiet 2 years ago with no explanation, then I am sorry.
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