Moving stories
As visitors flock to the recently opened Riverside Museum in Glasgow, Simon Stephens finds out about the challenges of interpreting and displaying transport collections
In many senses, the £74m Riverside Museum in Glasgow is a big leap forward for transport museums.
The huge column-free spaces created by architect Zaha Hadid allow the many large objects space to breathe, while the 150 interactives offer a state-of-the-art approach to providing interpretation for the 500,000-plus visitors who have been attracted to the museum since it opened in June.
But the story that the Riverside Museum tells, of the transport, engineering and shipbuilding legacy of the area, is one repeated by many other transport museums in the UK – that of the decline of most of the UK’s major car plants and shipyards.
Transport manufacturing is still important in the UK, but it is not on the same scale it once was.
How to tell the story of an industry that has undergone dramatic change in recent years is just one of the many challenges that transport museums face.
As well as having to bring alive a topic that is all about movement in a static museum environment, curators also often have to balance the needs of transport enthusiasts and general visitors.
The objects themselves are large and sometimes awkward to store, while acquiring items can be difficult as they are frequently expensive and the technology moves on very quickly.
The designers of the Riverside Museum have tried to deal with a number of these challenges in order to make transport a compelling and accessible subject for today’s visitors.
The Riverside Museum used the same twin criteria of collection significance and visitor interest that led the creation of the displays at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which reopened in 2006 after a £27.9m redevelopment.
But project director Lawrence Fitzgerald, who also worked on Kelvingrove, says the Riverside Museum wanted to avoid some of the specific mistakes of other transport museums.
“Museums of transport have a tendency to be celebratory and also to be inward-looking,” Fitzgerald says. “We are celebrating things that we feel are worth it, but the great men of history story is a bit overdone in technology and transport museums.”
Fitzgerald says the Riverside Museum also avoids the over-emphasis on the technical side of objects that is often apparent in transport museums. Instead, the focus is on personal stories attached to how the public use and experience transport.
“Even social history museums will just talk about the workers and makers, but most people who visit museums are consumers,” he says. “They don’t work in transport, so they tend to see transport from the point of view of the end user.”
Fitzgerald has also tried to make the displays as flexible as possible, taking advantage of the fact that many transport objects can be moved fairly easily, despite their size.
“We have developed a flexible display system that means that we don’t need to wait for the next £20m refurbishment to change things,” he says. “Too often in museums you have these big overriding narratives that, as well as boring people rigid, make it impossible to take anything out.”
Getting it right for the various audiences that visit transport museums is a challenge. This is particularly true for Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey, which claims to be the birthplace of British motorsport and aviation, as well as the home of Concorde.
Cycling was also important at Brooklands and this mix has been further complicated by the recent arrival of the London Bus Museum, which is operated by a separate trust, but will be part of the overall offer to visitors.
Brooklands Museum director Allan Winn says: “Right from the early days, one of the tensions was that there were motor-racing enthusiasts who wanted to see this corner of the original race track returned to how it was in 1939 and the aviation enthusiasts who wanted to capture how this site was in the early 1960s when it was building the biggest airliner ever to be put into production in the UK.
"But as far as we are concerned, these two core areas of motor racing and aviation are inextricably linked on one site.”
Brooklands Museum, which opened in 1991, is working on a lottery bid for a redevelopment of the site and one of the aims is to develop a project that caters to these different audiences.
“When we have done audience research here we have found that there are people who have come here because they just want to look at the racing cars or who just want to visit our Concorde, but there is a huge middle ground of people who are looking for a good day out,” Winn says.
“The enthusiasts know we are here, so it is growing greater numbers in the middle ground that is the focus of everything we do.”
The Heritage Motor Centre (HMC) in Gaydon, Warwickshire, is another organisation that has its fair share of enthusiasts but also works hard to attract a more general audience.
“It is a balance, and the enthusiasts can be quite demanding but you don’t want to alienate them,” says Tim Bryan, the head of collections at the HMC. “We want to attract as many people as possible and part of this is making sure that the displays are as interesting as possible.”
Bryan is working on a plan to create a new collections facility that will offer open storage and will enable visitors to see far more of the cars that the museum owns.
Bryan believes his museum, like many other transport museums, is very different from what many people perceive such places to be like.
Although there are transport museums that still feature rows and rows of vehicles with very little interpretation apart from a few technical details, this is not the norm, particularly among the larger museums.
Many transport museums have realised that they have to move on if they are to attract new audiences. Coventry Transport Museum is a case in point. The city was once the powerhouse of the UK motor industry, but those days are gone following the closure of car plants across the Midlands during the past 30 years or so.
Despite this, there is still a lot of pride in Coventry’s role in car manufacturing, particularly among those who worked in the factories and associated businesses. But many of the younger generation will be unaware of this history.
“A youngster growing up now in Coventry or the region wouldn’t know that it was this big industrial motor city because they would not have experienced it,” says Chris van Schaardenburgh, the curator of vehicles at Coventry Transport Museum.
“We should retain the link, otherwise what’s the point of keeping 250 old cars if no one who walks through the door knows why they are relevant to the city?”
Van Schaardenburgh says some of the museum’s displays are still quite traditional, although the city council-run museum is looking at a major redevelopment project. The venue gets visitor figures of 350,000-400,000 a year, but van Schaardenburgh says it could improve what it offers.
“I’m an enthusiast and it’s nice to see enthusiasts, but you also want to bring normal people in,” van Schaardenburgh says.
“The more recent galleries get more involved in the story and that is where the future should be. I love cars, lots of people love cars, but rows and rows of them won’t do it for everybody. You have to make a bit more effort.”
The Heritage Lottery Fund has provided lots of support for transport museum redevelopments in recent years. But in these harsh economic times, it is not always easy to secure funding.
Earlier this year, the National Railway Museum in York was forced to scrap plans for a £21m upgrade to its Great Hall after the Regional Growth Fund turned down its bid for £7m funding.
But the museum, which is part of the National Museum of Science and Industry, is still using some of the analysis it did for the NRM+ project to develop the museum on a more piecemeal basis.
A £600,000 art gallery opened in July with an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints showing the country’s first railway line, which ran from Tokyo to Yokohama.
In the same month, the museum also opened phase one of a scheme to redisplay Station Hall, which is aiming to create a more immersive railway station experience. Paul Bowers, head of interpretation and design at the National Railway Museum, says the Station Hall project is part of a wider aim to get visitors closer to the objects.
“Access is a major challenge,” says Bowers, who worked on the development of galleries at London’s Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre. “You want to give the most inclusive experience for our visitors but a footplate is up high and that requires steps or long ramps.”
According to Bowers, the scale of the objects also creates challenges. “There are 1,000s of smaller items in the collection, but it is difficult to tell their stories when they are dwarfed by large vehicles,” he says.
But despite all the challenges, Bowers, like others who work with transport collections, feels the objects provide numerous ways to engage visitors.
“One of the great things about the objects is that they prompt conversations,” says Bowers. “For us, promoting that type of dialogue is fundamental. And unless you are creating dialogue about the collections, all you have is a load of dead metal.”
Bryan at the Heritage Motor Centre agrees that transport objects are great for engaging museum visitors.
“The thing about transport museums, with a few exceptions, is that people can connect quite directly with the objects. And that is where all museums succeed – when people can identify with the objects on display.”
A temporary exhibition at the London Transport Museum could provide pointers to the way that displays in transport museums might develop. Sense and the City (until 18 March 2012) looks at how emerging technologies are changing the way people access and experience London.
The exhibition opens with a range of past visions of how the future might have been. It features images by architects such as Le Corbusier and Archigram and objects such as the Sinclair C5.
Curator Veronica Dominiak has worked hard to source interesting artefacts for the exhibition, but a huge effort has also gone into the technological side of the show.
The concept was developed by museum consultant Stephen Feber who researched how GPS, smartphones, mobile apps and social media are changing the way we live, work and play in the city.
A centrepiece of the exhibition is an interactive table with eight screens that allows visitors to look at films, animations, and data visualisations on subjects ranging from the cashless society and driverless cars, to reactive buildings and augmented reality.
Visitors can also give feedback about such developments. Feber says one of the aims is to use the platforms created to gather, store and display the digital elements of the exhibition for future work in the museum.
The London Transport Museum has worked with a number of partners on Sense and the City, including students at the Royal College of Art, who have developed a range of practical ideas about how today’s technology might be applied on tomorrow’s street.
The exhibition also features data visualisations from such developers as Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aaron Koblin of Google Creative and students at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London.
“This will be a platform to look at new ways of thinking about cities,” says Feber.
Many of the UK’s transport museums have their roots in the passions of a few committed enthusiasts. The Electric Railway Museum in Baginton, near Coventry, is one such place.
The museum’s volunteer team argue that electric railways have a long history, rich in technical innovation and socio-economic impact, yet remain largely marginalised in existing museum collections, where there has been a traditional focus on steam trains.
Its aim is to provide the UK with a location where the success and heritage of its electric railways can be recognised. Originally established as the Coventry Steam Railway Centre, the Electric Railway Museum site was taken over by the Suburban Electric Railway Association in 2004.
In 2008 plans were put in place that saw the coming together of other nationwide projects involved in electric traction preservation to create a charity with a view to establishing a permanent home for an electric railway museum.
To achieve this, the Electric Railway Museum was created in 2009 as an independent registered charity. Graeme Gleaves, the chairman of the museum, has secured many of the electric multiple units for preservation, while the organisation’s heritage adviser is Richard Gibbon, the former head of engineering and collections at York’s National Railway Museum.
The museum is open to the public by prior booking and the site has free open weekends throughout the year that feature various activities and demonstrations. It is all outdoors at the moment, but there are plans for a covered hall to house the railway collection.
www.electricrailwaymuseum.co.uk
The huge column-free spaces created by architect Zaha Hadid allow the many large objects space to breathe, while the 150 interactives offer a state-of-the-art approach to providing interpretation for the 500,000-plus visitors who have been attracted to the museum since it opened in June.
But the story that the Riverside Museum tells, of the transport, engineering and shipbuilding legacy of the area, is one repeated by many other transport museums in the UK – that of the decline of most of the UK’s major car plants and shipyards.
Transport manufacturing is still important in the UK, but it is not on the same scale it once was.
How to tell the story of an industry that has undergone dramatic change in recent years is just one of the many challenges that transport museums face.
As well as having to bring alive a topic that is all about movement in a static museum environment, curators also often have to balance the needs of transport enthusiasts and general visitors.
The objects themselves are large and sometimes awkward to store, while acquiring items can be difficult as they are frequently expensive and the technology moves on very quickly.
The designers of the Riverside Museum have tried to deal with a number of these challenges in order to make transport a compelling and accessible subject for today’s visitors.
The Riverside Museum used the same twin criteria of collection significance and visitor interest that led the creation of the displays at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which reopened in 2006 after a £27.9m redevelopment.
But project director Lawrence Fitzgerald, who also worked on Kelvingrove, says the Riverside Museum wanted to avoid some of the specific mistakes of other transport museums.
“Museums of transport have a tendency to be celebratory and also to be inward-looking,” Fitzgerald says. “We are celebrating things that we feel are worth it, but the great men of history story is a bit overdone in technology and transport museums.”
Fitzgerald says the Riverside Museum also avoids the over-emphasis on the technical side of objects that is often apparent in transport museums. Instead, the focus is on personal stories attached to how the public use and experience transport.
“Even social history museums will just talk about the workers and makers, but most people who visit museums are consumers,” he says. “They don’t work in transport, so they tend to see transport from the point of view of the end user.”
Fitzgerald has also tried to make the displays as flexible as possible, taking advantage of the fact that many transport objects can be moved fairly easily, despite their size.
“We have developed a flexible display system that means that we don’t need to wait for the next £20m refurbishment to change things,” he says. “Too often in museums you have these big overriding narratives that, as well as boring people rigid, make it impossible to take anything out.”
Getting it right for the various audiences that visit transport museums is a challenge. This is particularly true for Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey, which claims to be the birthplace of British motorsport and aviation, as well as the home of Concorde.
Cycling was also important at Brooklands and this mix has been further complicated by the recent arrival of the London Bus Museum, which is operated by a separate trust, but will be part of the overall offer to visitors.
Brooklands Museum director Allan Winn says: “Right from the early days, one of the tensions was that there were motor-racing enthusiasts who wanted to see this corner of the original race track returned to how it was in 1939 and the aviation enthusiasts who wanted to capture how this site was in the early 1960s when it was building the biggest airliner ever to be put into production in the UK.
"But as far as we are concerned, these two core areas of motor racing and aviation are inextricably linked on one site.”
Brooklands Museum, which opened in 1991, is working on a lottery bid for a redevelopment of the site and one of the aims is to develop a project that caters to these different audiences.
“When we have done audience research here we have found that there are people who have come here because they just want to look at the racing cars or who just want to visit our Concorde, but there is a huge middle ground of people who are looking for a good day out,” Winn says.
“The enthusiasts know we are here, so it is growing greater numbers in the middle ground that is the focus of everything we do.”
The Heritage Motor Centre (HMC) in Gaydon, Warwickshire, is another organisation that has its fair share of enthusiasts but also works hard to attract a more general audience.
“It is a balance, and the enthusiasts can be quite demanding but you don’t want to alienate them,” says Tim Bryan, the head of collections at the HMC. “We want to attract as many people as possible and part of this is making sure that the displays are as interesting as possible.”
Bryan is working on a plan to create a new collections facility that will offer open storage and will enable visitors to see far more of the cars that the museum owns.
Bryan believes his museum, like many other transport museums, is very different from what many people perceive such places to be like.
Although there are transport museums that still feature rows and rows of vehicles with very little interpretation apart from a few technical details, this is not the norm, particularly among the larger museums.
Many transport museums have realised that they have to move on if they are to attract new audiences. Coventry Transport Museum is a case in point. The city was once the powerhouse of the UK motor industry, but those days are gone following the closure of car plants across the Midlands during the past 30 years or so.
Despite this, there is still a lot of pride in Coventry’s role in car manufacturing, particularly among those who worked in the factories and associated businesses. But many of the younger generation will be unaware of this history.
“A youngster growing up now in Coventry or the region wouldn’t know that it was this big industrial motor city because they would not have experienced it,” says Chris van Schaardenburgh, the curator of vehicles at Coventry Transport Museum.
“We should retain the link, otherwise what’s the point of keeping 250 old cars if no one who walks through the door knows why they are relevant to the city?”
Van Schaardenburgh says some of the museum’s displays are still quite traditional, although the city council-run museum is looking at a major redevelopment project. The venue gets visitor figures of 350,000-400,000 a year, but van Schaardenburgh says it could improve what it offers.
“I’m an enthusiast and it’s nice to see enthusiasts, but you also want to bring normal people in,” van Schaardenburgh says.
“The more recent galleries get more involved in the story and that is where the future should be. I love cars, lots of people love cars, but rows and rows of them won’t do it for everybody. You have to make a bit more effort.”
The Heritage Lottery Fund has provided lots of support for transport museum redevelopments in recent years. But in these harsh economic times, it is not always easy to secure funding.
Earlier this year, the National Railway Museum in York was forced to scrap plans for a £21m upgrade to its Great Hall after the Regional Growth Fund turned down its bid for £7m funding.
But the museum, which is part of the National Museum of Science and Industry, is still using some of the analysis it did for the NRM+ project to develop the museum on a more piecemeal basis.
A £600,000 art gallery opened in July with an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints showing the country’s first railway line, which ran from Tokyo to Yokohama.
In the same month, the museum also opened phase one of a scheme to redisplay Station Hall, which is aiming to create a more immersive railway station experience. Paul Bowers, head of interpretation and design at the National Railway Museum, says the Station Hall project is part of a wider aim to get visitors closer to the objects.
“Access is a major challenge,” says Bowers, who worked on the development of galleries at London’s Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre. “You want to give the most inclusive experience for our visitors but a footplate is up high and that requires steps or long ramps.”
According to Bowers, the scale of the objects also creates challenges. “There are 1,000s of smaller items in the collection, but it is difficult to tell their stories when they are dwarfed by large vehicles,” he says.
But despite all the challenges, Bowers, like others who work with transport collections, feels the objects provide numerous ways to engage visitors.
“One of the great things about the objects is that they prompt conversations,” says Bowers. “For us, promoting that type of dialogue is fundamental. And unless you are creating dialogue about the collections, all you have is a load of dead metal.”
Bryan at the Heritage Motor Centre agrees that transport objects are great for engaging museum visitors.
“The thing about transport museums, with a few exceptions, is that people can connect quite directly with the objects. And that is where all museums succeed – when people can identify with the objects on display.”
Travel in the future city
A temporary exhibition at the London Transport Museum could provide pointers to the way that displays in transport museums might develop. Sense and the City (until 18 March 2012) looks at how emerging technologies are changing the way people access and experience London.
The exhibition opens with a range of past visions of how the future might have been. It features images by architects such as Le Corbusier and Archigram and objects such as the Sinclair C5.
Curator Veronica Dominiak has worked hard to source interesting artefacts for the exhibition, but a huge effort has also gone into the technological side of the show.
The concept was developed by museum consultant Stephen Feber who researched how GPS, smartphones, mobile apps and social media are changing the way we live, work and play in the city.
A centrepiece of the exhibition is an interactive table with eight screens that allows visitors to look at films, animations, and data visualisations on subjects ranging from the cashless society and driverless cars, to reactive buildings and augmented reality.
Visitors can also give feedback about such developments. Feber says one of the aims is to use the platforms created to gather, store and display the digital elements of the exhibition for future work in the museum.
The London Transport Museum has worked with a number of partners on Sense and the City, including students at the Royal College of Art, who have developed a range of practical ideas about how today’s technology might be applied on tomorrow’s street.
The exhibition also features data visualisations from such developers as Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aaron Koblin of Google Creative and students at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London.
“This will be a platform to look at new ways of thinking about cities,” says Feber.
Rehabilitating electric trains
Many of the UK’s transport museums have their roots in the passions of a few committed enthusiasts. The Electric Railway Museum in Baginton, near Coventry, is one such place.
The museum’s volunteer team argue that electric railways have a long history, rich in technical innovation and socio-economic impact, yet remain largely marginalised in existing museum collections, where there has been a traditional focus on steam trains.
Its aim is to provide the UK with a location where the success and heritage of its electric railways can be recognised. Originally established as the Coventry Steam Railway Centre, the Electric Railway Museum site was taken over by the Suburban Electric Railway Association in 2004.
In 2008 plans were put in place that saw the coming together of other nationwide projects involved in electric traction preservation to create a charity with a view to establishing a permanent home for an electric railway museum.
To achieve this, the Electric Railway Museum was created in 2009 as an independent registered charity. Graeme Gleaves, the chairman of the museum, has secured many of the electric multiple units for preservation, while the organisation’s heritage adviser is Richard Gibbon, the former head of engineering and collections at York’s National Railway Museum.
The museum is open to the public by prior booking and the site has free open weekends throughout the year that feature various activities and demonstrations. It is all outdoors at the moment, but there are plans for a covered hall to house the railway collection.
www.electricrailwaymuseum.co.uk