Cathy Ross, Director of Collections and Learning at Museum of London explains how the opening of the new Galleries of Modern London raises the bar for museums around the world...
If there was a world league table of museums, where would the Museum of London be ranked? The launch of the Galleries of Modern London, the biggest intervention to the building since the Museum opened in 1976, is a good time to reflect. Do the new galleries shoot us to the top of the premiership or just mildly improve our position in the first or second division of British museums?
Ranking museums is a notoriously inexact science since each is so different. The Museum of London is more sui generis than most: not a fully fledged national museum (as defined by direct funding from national government), yet more than just local. The great gap in UK museum provision is any national museum of history and the Museum of London has always gone part of the way to filling that gap, its national scope often unacknowledged thanks in part to regional sensitivities.
Internationally, the Museum of London sits more comfortably with a group of international city museums, a type of museum that emerged around the turn of the 19th century (our own London Museum of 1910 being a good example). City museums have been something of a growth area in recent years, as city authorities have come to realise the importance of bolstering civic identity; City museums have shifted their scope to encompass intangible civic issues such as citizenship, race relations and social values. It is fair to claim some degree of leadership status for the Museum of London in this context. The Museum has long been acknowledged by its peers as an innovator, and we regularly share our experiences with colleagues from around the world.
So what will the new Galleries of Modern London do for the Museum? Have we raised the bar? How will it change us? Professor Jack Lohman, the Director, points out that just doing the project has already changed the Museum: ‘The project has enabled a culture change within the Museum, one which had always been part of our objective. We now have a culture which raises the status of learning within the Museum and places it centre stage. Accompanying this is a philosophical change which places communities as part of our central mission. The second key change for the museum is that we have ‘up-skilled’ an entire workforce: this project has helped us develop a workforce, which gives us a far stronger platform for our future.’ Altogether the project has already been an agent of reinvigoration, giving the Museum the means and confidence to grow further into its already strong position among history and city museums, nationally and internationally.
But what about the galleries themselves: how does the reinvigoration translate into visitors’ experience? Many aspects of the new galleries will feel slightly different, despite the presence of old favourites among the actual objects. We have developed our exhibits with learning and audiences more explicitly in mind: there are new stories woven around the objects. It is perhaps worth mentioning just two of these new aspects as examples of how the new galleries can claim to be raising the bar professionally.
The first relates to the design of the galleries, and more particularly the way we have integrated the content and its presentation. We have been lucky in our timing in that developing the gallery content has coincided with the phenomenal rise of digital technology. Although UK museums have made stunning use of multimedia before now (most memorably at the Imperial War Museum North in 2002), we can certainly claim to be raising the bar in the way we have integrated digital content with real objects. The 18th century printing press exhibit is a case in point. Technology enables us to make the press ‘come alive’ but we still preserve the object’s integrity as a rare and historic survivor.
When digital exhibits first started to appear in museums they were often assumed to signal ‘dumbing down‘. In fact the opposite is the case. Digital technology gives you the means of enriching content, adding complexity, diversity and sheer quantity. Our ‘Snapshot of London’ exhibit contains over 1,600 browse-able photographs of contemporary London - fifty images for each of the 33 London boroughs. It cannot capture all strands of London’s multi-faceted character but it does give a flavour of the city that just would not have been possible with a smaller selection of photographs presented conventionally in frames.
If the way we present our content raises the bar, so too does our subject matter. We set out to explore some ‘big ideas’ about the past; again, our timing is lucky in that big ideas about Britain’s intangible heritage, such things as democracy, rights and free speech, are very much in the public eye these days. It would be too much to claim that they form the main gallery narrative (as was the case in the British Library’s 2008 exhibition ‘Taking Liberties’), but they are woven very strongly into the story. One of our narrative strands is about people and change: we want visitors to leave the galleries reflecting on, or indeed inspired by, the thought that people do have the power to bring about social change. Placing our objects in this sort of narrative, as opposed to, say, an art and design narrative, is another mark being slightly ahead of the curve, at least for UK museums. As Jack Lohman points out, it reinforces the international character of what we do: ‘the approach to subject matter has ultimately delivered a more international outlook’.
London is a fearsomely complex city, and this has been a fearsomely complex project to work on. The proof of the pudding will of course be in its reception, from both critics and visitors. But from a viewpoint inside the project team, the Galleries of Modern London feels like a real catalyst for change.
Dr. Cathy Ross, Director of Collections and Learning, Museum of London
* All images © Museum of London
The Galleries of Modern London opened at Museum of London on 28 May 2010
