Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth
Oliver Green wanted to see a more thoughtful approach to the interpretation at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth
Raising the Mary Rose from the depths of the Solent in October 1982 was one of those rare occasions when archaeology is headline news. This gripping real-life drama, full of risk and uncertainty, was watched on television by an estimated 60 million people in the longest TV outside broadcast ever made.
At the time there was the added frisson of the Falklands War, which had been fought only a few months earlier. The task force sent by Britain to the South Atlantic had left Portsmouth in April, sailing past the very spot where, in 1545, Henry VIII had watched from Southsea Castle as his 33-year-old flagship capsized and sank during a naval battle with a French invasion fleet.
The French withdrew on that occasion but the Mary Rose was lost, together with more than 400 men on board, a near-catastrophic event for the English.
The salvage of the Mary Rose was a milestone in marine archaeology. The only comparable precedent is the recovery of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa from Stockholm harbour in 1961, which happened 333 years after she sank on her maiden voyage.
The Mary Rose had already been meticulously surveyed, excavated and recorded underwater over a three-year period before the main surviving hull section was raised. Led by archaeologist Margaret Rule, more than 500 divers and diving archaeologists made over 27,000 descents to the site between 1979 and 1982.
Prince Charles, who is president of the Mary Rose Trust and an enthusiastic supporter, went down nine times himself, describing the experience as “like diving in cold lentil soup”.
Conservation challenges
More than 26,000 artefacts and pieces of timber were salvaged along with the remains of many of the crew members who were trapped on board when the ship sank.
The conservation and ethical challenges of this were considerable but analysis and research of the ship’s contents has uncovered a wealth of information about the daily lives of those on board.
Astonishingly well-preserved material offers new insights into life in 16th-century England, from people’s health and diet to everyday clothing, domestic objects, weapons and personal possessions.
The Mary Rose was brought into dry dock at Portsmouth within metres of where she was built and almost adjacent to Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. The hull was enclosed in a temporary structure and spraying with chilled fresh water began to wash out the salt from the timbers.
This was the start of a drawn-out and costly conservation process. Only a year after she was raised to the surface, the Mary Rose was unveiled for visitors to view while spraying continued, first with water then with PEG (polyethylene glycol).
A fairly basic museum was opened in 1984 in a separate dockyard building, allowing many of the items found with the Mary Rose to go on display. The trust’s ambition had always been to house the remains of the ship and her contents together in a single building but plans for this were not realised until now.
Meanwhile, an enviably high standard of interpretation and display was set by the impressive new Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which opened in 1990. It showcases the much larger and better preserved 17th-century warship and its contents. This has deservedly become the most popular museum in Sweden.
Oyster shell design
By 2005, with the prospect of money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the trust finally committed to creating a new museum in Portsmouth Dockyard over and around the Mary Rose herself.
An integrated display would require internal divisions that could be taken down once the treatment of the hull was complete and the museum had to be designed with this flexibility in mind.
It was clearly quite a challenge as the dry dock housing the Mary Rose is a Grade I scheduled ancient monument. The museum design concept is based on an oyster shell, with the Mary Rose the pearl at its centre.
This is a neat concept, but it has obviously been difficult to achieve in practice and has taken eight years to complete.
From outside the new building resembles a sleek, black upturned ship’s hull that is a nice visual foil to the angular wooden walls of the Victory alongside.
Admission is by timed ticket and I half anticipated a dramatic big-screen audiovisual introduction, but our group was funnelled into a narrow corridor space where we shuffled past a series of dull graphic panels.
We proceeded through an “airlock” with an unconvincing film recreating the sense of sinking through water in slow motion and arrived in the first main gallery.
This sets up the context of the battle of the Solent in 1545, but in a way that is difficult to grasp and not the compelling drama that it should be.
The centrepiece is a widescreen image of the famous Cowdray engraving, which recorded the battle scene in a panoramic view with Henry VIII on horseback at Southsea and the Mary Rose sinking.
Unfortunately all is static, with some feeble interactives, no sound effects or audio guide and a confusing layout of showcases. With most of the interpretation on long backlit text panels that are hard to read, this did not look promising and I hadn’t even reached the ship yet.
The large salvaged section of the Mary Rose is effectively one side of the hull that has been sliced down the middle. This starboard section is positioned along one side of the centre of the museum.
Directly opposite, a virtual port side has been recreated almost as a mirror image and within these cavernous spaces objects from the ship are placed where they were found on three deck levels.
The designers were clearly determined not to create Disneyfied reconstructions or use CGI effects but have instead contrived a bleak, dead “underwater” scene that requires a huge leap of imagination in the visitor. Without any labels or other information in the viewing areas it is not remotely atmospheric or theatrical.
I may be keel-hauled for saying this, but compared with the Vasa, which is the most jaw-dropping museum centrepiece I have seen anywhere, the hull of the Mary Rose still looks more like a lot of wet planks on a building site.
The small windows in the temporary wall panels restrict the view of the ship unnecessarily.
Until they are removed when the conservation treatment ends, the only unimpeded view of the hull chamber is the few seconds glimpsed from the glazed lifts. I managed to miss this because I took the stairs. It’s easy to get disorientated in the gloom of the galleries, which have no natural light.
Ponderous display
The main display galleries at either end of the museum do not follow a clear theme or chronology, nor does the presentation offer any variation in approach. Use of multimedia and interactives is strictly limited by an almost obsessive concentration on the objects in their high-spec showcases.
These items are important and of course they need carefully controlled display conditions, but they also require imaginative interpretation.
What you get here is a heavy, traditional diet of long text panels and captions. It reminds me of the sort of ponderous “treasures” exhibitions that major museums used to mount years ago before anyone paid attention to different learning styles or pacing an exhibition.
Slipping in a couple of computer games about gunnery tactics and a corner where you can simulate drawing a longbow does not give a display popular appeal or suggest serious attention to what different audiences might want or need.
Careful conservation seems to have trumped creativity here. The future survival of the Mary Rose should now be more secure but, as a museum experience, it is not very satisfying.
Going round this exhibition after visiting the Vasa Museum is a bit like watching a familiar old episode of Frost after being introduced to Scandinavian TV dramas such as Wallander and Borgen.
After such a long wait I had hoped for a more thoughtful and original approach, but the designers have kept their carpet slippers on.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at London Transport Museum
At the time there was the added frisson of the Falklands War, which had been fought only a few months earlier. The task force sent by Britain to the South Atlantic had left Portsmouth in April, sailing past the very spot where, in 1545, Henry VIII had watched from Southsea Castle as his 33-year-old flagship capsized and sank during a naval battle with a French invasion fleet.
The French withdrew on that occasion but the Mary Rose was lost, together with more than 400 men on board, a near-catastrophic event for the English.
The salvage of the Mary Rose was a milestone in marine archaeology. The only comparable precedent is the recovery of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa from Stockholm harbour in 1961, which happened 333 years after she sank on her maiden voyage.
The Mary Rose had already been meticulously surveyed, excavated and recorded underwater over a three-year period before the main surviving hull section was raised. Led by archaeologist Margaret Rule, more than 500 divers and diving archaeologists made over 27,000 descents to the site between 1979 and 1982.
Prince Charles, who is president of the Mary Rose Trust and an enthusiastic supporter, went down nine times himself, describing the experience as “like diving in cold lentil soup”.
Conservation challenges
More than 26,000 artefacts and pieces of timber were salvaged along with the remains of many of the crew members who were trapped on board when the ship sank.
The conservation and ethical challenges of this were considerable but analysis and research of the ship’s contents has uncovered a wealth of information about the daily lives of those on board.
Astonishingly well-preserved material offers new insights into life in 16th-century England, from people’s health and diet to everyday clothing, domestic objects, weapons and personal possessions.
The Mary Rose was brought into dry dock at Portsmouth within metres of where she was built and almost adjacent to Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. The hull was enclosed in a temporary structure and spraying with chilled fresh water began to wash out the salt from the timbers.
This was the start of a drawn-out and costly conservation process. Only a year after she was raised to the surface, the Mary Rose was unveiled for visitors to view while spraying continued, first with water then with PEG (polyethylene glycol).
A fairly basic museum was opened in 1984 in a separate dockyard building, allowing many of the items found with the Mary Rose to go on display. The trust’s ambition had always been to house the remains of the ship and her contents together in a single building but plans for this were not realised until now.
Meanwhile, an enviably high standard of interpretation and display was set by the impressive new Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which opened in 1990. It showcases the much larger and better preserved 17th-century warship and its contents. This has deservedly become the most popular museum in Sweden.
Oyster shell design
By 2005, with the prospect of money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the trust finally committed to creating a new museum in Portsmouth Dockyard over and around the Mary Rose herself.
An integrated display would require internal divisions that could be taken down once the treatment of the hull was complete and the museum had to be designed with this flexibility in mind.
It was clearly quite a challenge as the dry dock housing the Mary Rose is a Grade I scheduled ancient monument. The museum design concept is based on an oyster shell, with the Mary Rose the pearl at its centre.
This is a neat concept, but it has obviously been difficult to achieve in practice and has taken eight years to complete.
From outside the new building resembles a sleek, black upturned ship’s hull that is a nice visual foil to the angular wooden walls of the Victory alongside.
Admission is by timed ticket and I half anticipated a dramatic big-screen audiovisual introduction, but our group was funnelled into a narrow corridor space where we shuffled past a series of dull graphic panels.
We proceeded through an “airlock” with an unconvincing film recreating the sense of sinking through water in slow motion and arrived in the first main gallery.
This sets up the context of the battle of the Solent in 1545, but in a way that is difficult to grasp and not the compelling drama that it should be.
The centrepiece is a widescreen image of the famous Cowdray engraving, which recorded the battle scene in a panoramic view with Henry VIII on horseback at Southsea and the Mary Rose sinking.
Unfortunately all is static, with some feeble interactives, no sound effects or audio guide and a confusing layout of showcases. With most of the interpretation on long backlit text panels that are hard to read, this did not look promising and I hadn’t even reached the ship yet.
The large salvaged section of the Mary Rose is effectively one side of the hull that has been sliced down the middle. This starboard section is positioned along one side of the centre of the museum.
Directly opposite, a virtual port side has been recreated almost as a mirror image and within these cavernous spaces objects from the ship are placed where they were found on three deck levels.
The designers were clearly determined not to create Disneyfied reconstructions or use CGI effects but have instead contrived a bleak, dead “underwater” scene that requires a huge leap of imagination in the visitor. Without any labels or other information in the viewing areas it is not remotely atmospheric or theatrical.
I may be keel-hauled for saying this, but compared with the Vasa, which is the most jaw-dropping museum centrepiece I have seen anywhere, the hull of the Mary Rose still looks more like a lot of wet planks on a building site.
The small windows in the temporary wall panels restrict the view of the ship unnecessarily.
Until they are removed when the conservation treatment ends, the only unimpeded view of the hull chamber is the few seconds glimpsed from the glazed lifts. I managed to miss this because I took the stairs. It’s easy to get disorientated in the gloom of the galleries, which have no natural light.
Ponderous display
The main display galleries at either end of the museum do not follow a clear theme or chronology, nor does the presentation offer any variation in approach. Use of multimedia and interactives is strictly limited by an almost obsessive concentration on the objects in their high-spec showcases.
These items are important and of course they need carefully controlled display conditions, but they also require imaginative interpretation.
What you get here is a heavy, traditional diet of long text panels and captions. It reminds me of the sort of ponderous “treasures” exhibitions that major museums used to mount years ago before anyone paid attention to different learning styles or pacing an exhibition.
Slipping in a couple of computer games about gunnery tactics and a corner where you can simulate drawing a longbow does not give a display popular appeal or suggest serious attention to what different audiences might want or need.
Careful conservation seems to have trumped creativity here. The future survival of the Mary Rose should now be more secure but, as a museum experience, it is not very satisfying.
Going round this exhibition after visiting the Vasa Museum is a bit like watching a familiar old episode of Frost after being introduced to Scandinavian TV dramas such as Wallander and Borgen.
After such a long wait I had hoped for a more thoughtful and original approach, but the designers have kept their carpet slippers on.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at London Transport Museum
Project data
- Cost £27m (£35m project, including the completion of conservation)
- Main funder Heritage Lottery Fund £23m
- Exhibition design Land Design Studio
- Architect (external) and design team consortium leader Wilkinson Eyre Architects
- Architect (interior) Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will
- Structural engineer Gifford
- Building services engineer Ramboll
- Main contractor Warings
- Project managers GVA Second London Wall
- Display cases ClickNetherfield
- Audiovisual Sysco