Museum 200: The People’s Museum

I consider late 2021 as the start of my big museum journey. Whilst it was a 2020 trip to Paris that inspired it being trapped in the house for the better part of a year and a half really kickstarted the desire. This was not least to look at how the museum landscape changed as it came out of the pandemic.

Since then I kept track of all the museums, galleries, cultural sites and other ‘learning spaces’ that I've visited and I noticed that I was nearing two hundred different places. I wondered for a while if I should try and make something of it. Go to a particularly grand, or meaningful museum? (Incidentally Museum 100 was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum that I've already complained about in my round up of Berlin). However, in the end it happened like so many of the museum visits do. With me grabbing the opportunity whilst I was nearby.

Last week I was in Manchester for a scientific conference. Being there early to set up the stall a day ahead of time and with nothing of interest happening until the evening I took the spare hour or so to check into my hotel and to visit the only museum in Manchester I hadn’t ever been to. The People’s History Museum.

Scene Setting Display at the People’s Museum (Own Image)

Democracy in Action

The People’s History Museum is the national museum of democracy and across its two floors it follows a broadly linear timeline from around 200 years ago to about the 80s on how British democracy and people power has changed and increased over that time.

It hits all the major note, general suffrage, women's suffrage, labour movements, the rise of the Labour government and even many modern elements such as the Black Lives Matter Protests and Climate Strikes, or even the local Deliveroo Worker Strikes

Display Case of Items from Protests Across Manchester (Own Image)

The galleries show all the hallmarks of a well put together modern museum. There are clear displays with easy to digest text. There are a range of different types of displays and exhibits. Offering content that’s suitable for different ages as well as good discussion points to have with children and hands-on activities.

Perhaps one of few issues with the People’s Museum is that whilst the timeline helps show a clear arrow of progress though as with these things they don’t perfectly line up and different displays can jump around in time a little. Democracy is such a broad idea that it can be difficult to focus on any individual event and often there are scant details

Children’s Activity Area within the Museum (Own Image)

The inclusion of broken up spaces helps direct the flow of visitors and lets the space feel bigger than it is. There is a break between more cluttered spaces of small objects and large displays of the grand union banners. It’s a museum that does everything right whilst engaging with a difficult and somewhat intangible topic. And yet, I find myself with very little to say.

After 199 Museums they all get a bit samey

The People’s Museum is a good museum, maybe even a great one, but it did little to excite me. This however is probably a ‘me’ problem and this is as good a time as any to accept probably my most obvious bias towards novelty.

It should be fairly obvious but at 200 museums in about three and a half years I am not a typical museum visitor. And the unspectacular truth is that museums exist on a continuum and most of them are decidedly fine. They’re perfectly okay. They do the job competently but not spectacularly. I want to make it clear that I genuinely believe that’s not only always going to be the case but that it’s a totally legitimate way to run a museum.

I imagine that in these blog posts I will deride things that are mostly just fine. But a dozen perfectly fine museums are better than just one or two spectacular ones. This blog exists to help me formulise and let out some of my ideas and thoughts on how we can push museums to be better, but the real world requires resources, time, and people which just isn’t always possible.

When I'd spoken to people about this project they'd asked if I was going to ‘review’ museums. But I'm not sure that giving museums a score and a tagine is a great idea (though if someone is willing to pay me, all these morals are able to go right out the window). I had a brief dalliance with video game reviewing for a publication some years back and going through a stream of releases each week. I quickly discovered that most games that came out were perfectly fine, and I had little to write about for most of them because they were just a version of something else. I found it neither fun or interesting and the writing itself was dull. I fear similar would happen if I simply reviewed each place I visited.

Anti-Suffragette Propaganda in The People’s History Museum Exterior which was maybe the only thing that really caught my attention (Own Image)

There are very few museums that I visit that I genuinely wouldn't recommend a visit to. The People's History Museum gets a recommendation from me either as part of a family trip, or somewhere to go if you've got some spare time in Manchester. They even seem to have a fairly robust academic program for scholars and even an events program, and if I lived there I would probably engage further. I could wax lyrical about many of the great things that it’s doing with its space and its collection but it would be more in the context of how museums can or should be doing it.

This then is a warning about my opinions within this blog. Here I look towards the new and original. What we can do to make places better rather than just strictly looking at what exists. Focusing on the flaws and the new rather than those that are doing the hard graft, and doing it well. Because whilst I would like to pretend I can champion everything that is good despite the fact that I feel my opinion has now solidified to the People’s History Museum being a genuinely excellent museum, for me it’s just one of a sea of others like it and the only standout feature is that it’s Museum 200.