While looking through a pile of old Museums Journals recently, I came across the June 1985 issue. It features a number of articles, including one by me, on 20th-century collecting, inspired by an event held by the Social History Curators Group the year before.
At the time I was the keeper of social history at York Castle Museum. I roped in Clare Rose, then keeper of costume, and Jane McKinley, then textile conservator, to make fools of themselves with me, and we got Richard Stansfield, the museum photographer, to take the picture used on the cover. The idea was to provide an overview of what had been collected recently and what we should be collecting. The photo reflects the fact that, thanks to the work of design critics such as Stephen Bayley and Sylvia Katz, social history curators were becoming more aware of the links between social and design history. And of course we were living in the 1980s: “the designer decade”.
Although the picture was taken just 30 years ago, it feels like a different world – interest rates were high, the miners’ strike had recently failed, banks were trusted and “heritage” was a contested word. We were post-punk and pre-digital. York Castle had one computer terminal linked to a mainframe; practically nobody had a PC or a mobile phone, and tablets did not exist. We still used typesetters, and cutting and pasting actually required a scalpel and glue.
We used our own clothes for the photo – Jane raided her older sister’s wardrobe – and posed with an array of objects gleaned from the York collections, interspersed with some of our personal possessions, to represent the interwar and postwar periods.
Collecting our thoughts
To reflect the interwar period we chose a tubular steel chair, an Ekco radio with a Bakelite case, an electric heater and some china. The radio, designed by the Canadian modernist architect Wells Coates, had already entered design history and was displayed for different reasons in the Science Museum and the V&A.
The chair, though not a Bauhaus original was clearly inspired by it. The heater was an HMV model designed by the architect Christian Barman in 1936, donated by the York electrical retailer Cussins and Light, whose collection of redundant stock was presented to the museum in 1984. It was a reminder of the pre-central heating era, but also exemplified a British designer giving an existing product a stylish envelope to stimulate sales. The china we picked included the 1938 Sadler car teapot and an art deco Gray’s vase.
We represented the postwar period with one of the best-known television designs, a Bush TV 22 from 1950-55, and a Hoover vacuum cleaner, to show the postwar rise of affordable domestic appliances. Sitting on top of the TV was a late Kodak Brownie, the most popular camera until the arrival of the same company’s Instamatic in 1963.
Most of the objects we selected are recognisable today – not surprisingly. As the journalist Paul Mason has written: “The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not of new objects but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical elements used to produce them.”
This brings us on to our then-contemporary choices. Did we manage to capture the zeitgeist?
Icons of an era?
Scattered on the floor was a range of objects that were not in the museum collection, but which we felt would be significant and worthy of collection.
From the selection of vinyl, two albums were pretty safe bets: Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) and the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) were both hugely influential and popular – both were awarded gold discs within a year of their release. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was, after Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the last of a trilogy of albums that changed the shape and scope of popular music forever. Jamie Reid’s sleeve design for the Bollocks album was one of the defining images of another paradigm shift in popular culture, the arrival of punk. To avoid offence, the word “bollocks” was partly obscured in the photo, which we would not have done today.
Our third choice was less obvious: New Order’s single Blue Monday in its original, expensive cut-out sleeve, designed by Peter Saville to look like a floppy disk. Blue Monday was released in 1983 and went on to become the world’s biggest-selling 12” single. The sleeve, which does not show the name of the band or the song, is now regarded as a classic design; the record itself was also groundbreaking – linking post-punk guitar to dance-orientated electronic music. In hindsight, this choice was spot-on.
Next to those records lies The Face, the 1980s style bible – essential reading, along with i-D and Blitz magazines, for any self-respecting observer of modern life. This issue featured an androgynous Annie Lennox on its cover, overwritten by the typography of Neville Brody, the Face’s art director.
Founded by ex-NME editor Nick Logan, The Face covered art, design, music, fashion and clubland. Sharp writing by Sheryl Garratt, Robert Elms, Jon Savage, Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill and Miranda Sawyer graced Brody’s revelatory layouts, with photography by the likes of Juergen Teller. It also gave a young Kate Moss her first magazine cover. The Face’s influence far outweighed its circulation. We were right to pick it – the V&A endorsed our choice by giving Brody a major retrospective three years later, in 1988; in 2011 the Design Museum collected a full run of The Face, and prescient costume museums such as Manchester’s Platt Hall took out a subscription from the start.
On top of the records and the magazine sat a packet of 10 Marlboro Reds and a Ronson lighter. Marlboros (note the lack of health warning) were the 80s brand. Instead of the Ronson, perhaps we should have picked a stainless steel Zippo lighter – an early example of vintage revivalism.
Also nearby was a copy of the then-current Habitat catalogue and a TDK C90 cassette. The influence of Habitat’s home furnishings was huge, and lives on in Ikea and elsewhere. Cassettes have largely disappeared, but are fondly remembered for providing the format for that very 80s expression of devotion – the mixtape, an important means of flirting in the pre-digital era.
We are leaning into an early 1960s cocktail cabinet, chosen to represent popular postwar furniture with a sense of optimism and fun about it; that is probably why we placed a toffee tin and a Monopoly box inside. This example came from a local auction room. And while it has not become a design classic, similar cabinets have appeared in museums – in exhibitions such as the Geffrye Museum’s The West Indian Front Room in 2005.
On the face of it
Though we were trying to catch moments from the 50s, 60s and 70s, we were clearly looking through a very 80s lens. I went for the “You’re never alone with a Strand” look, based on the cigarette advertising campaign of the late 50s and early 60s. The coat was a late 50s original from Affleck’s Palace in Manchester (£8) and I bought the hat at Priestley’s in York, an early example of an edited vintage boutique. The tie was a 1950s Tootal pinched from my dad, while the shirt was from Jonathan Silver in Manchester (where members of Joy Division – the band that evolved into New Order – also shopped).
Clare (on the left of the picture) had been an aficionado of “vintage” since the 1970s, when charity shops and jumble sales provided key pieces in her wardrobe. Her early 1960s home-made skirt (probably from a Horrockses cotton print), flock-printed “paper” petticoat and off-the-shoulder embroidered sweater (both M&S) were purchased from the first vintage shop to open in Oxford. Horrockses, a Preston-based firm, is now a key part of the recent history galleries at the city’s Harris Museum, where the displays feature similar garments.
Collecting secondhand clothes posed some ethical dilemmas for a curator who was also buying for herself: Clare chose first for the museum, then made a separate expedition to do her personal shopping. The exchange between personal wardrobes and museum collections went both ways, of course; several of the curatorial staff donated clothing, supplemented by personal information.
Jane wore a Biba maxi coat and fake fur hat, trophies from her older sister’s time as a young working woman in early 1970s London. Biba, the shop opened by Barbara Hulanicki in 1964, is now recognised as an early incarnation of a lifestyle brand, and its influence on shop design was significant. The brand was relaunched in 2009, and 21st-century reincarnated Biba can now be bought in department stores.
Though we tried to duplicate the past, I think we look of our time, just as 1960s historic films are so clearly of the decade they were made: in fact, apart from the hat everything I was wearing could have been used to illustrate indie style of the early 1980s. But that is not to say that our choices were wrong: museums did collect these clothes, and continue to do so.
Thirty years on I think the cover gives a fair reflection of what museums had collected and was a good pointer to where they could collect in the future.
Mark Suggitt is the director of Derwent Valley Mills in Derbyshire
Thirty years on from the original article about contemporary collecting, as trustees of the Social History Curators Group, we (Catherine Newley, Jemma Conway and Jen Kavanagh) took up the challenge to select items from the past four decades to represent what has been and what could be collected to reflect the social history of our generation. Looking back at what the original curators chose in their article, we’ve tried to reflect similar themes, touching on technology, industry, music and popular culture.
Advances in technology over the past 30 years have had a big influence on the way we act, sleep, keep fit, play, socialise, shop and live. From research to shopping, reading to dating, we can do it all online via the worldwide web, invented in 1989. For this reason, we’ve selected a number of handheld devices, including an iPhone. The phone has instant access to the internet and dozens of apps, including built-in satnav (removing the need for the physical maps we depended on just 10 years ago) and several social networking apps, as well as one of the most popular dating apps, Match.com.
A recent study showed that 27% of new relationships now start online and 93% of UK adults have a mobile phone. The way we maintain and build relationships and interact with friends has changed as social networking online has become a primary way to keep in touch.
Post-millennial shopping habits have become increasingly centred around internet shopping, which led to our choices of an Amazon packing envelope. Websites such as Amazon and eBay (both launched in 1995) have completely changed the way we shop. Almost anything we require can be delivered to our homes at the click of a button. And when we do go out shopping now, changes in the law require many shops to charge 5p for plastic carrier bags; as a result, “bags for life” are becoming more common. A blue bag represents the impact of Swedish furniture and home-furnishing giant Ikea.
During the past few decades it has become easier to capture every moment of our lives, as camcorders have evolved from large handheld devices to become neatly encased in smartphones. We can share our videos with the world in the blink of an eye. The challenge for social historians will be how to capture this record of everyday life – should we be collecting videos from Snapchat, or dialogue from Twitter?
We have represented popular culture and entertainment with objects culled unashamedly from our personal collections: Friends, shown here on VHS, was one of the biggest TV shows of the 1990s and the inspiration for the popular hair style, “The Rachel”.
The Harry Potter series of books sold in record numbers, so we included these because of their influence on a generation of children and adults. Seven books were published from 1997 to 2007, all predating 2011’s Kindle Fire, the first of its kind to hold hundreds of e-books. We’ve chosen this to illustrate how advances in technology have even had an impact on the way we read books.
Sony’s original PlayStation, which appeared in the UK in 1995, brought the idea of games on discs into the mainstream. That advance has led to the evolution of games consoles as entertainment hubs marketed to families, not just individuals, as they were back in the 90s. Families can now actively spend time together around a games console – “active” being the operative word, with the latest technology allowing players to use their bodies to control things and play online with people around the world.
Indeed, so much over the past 30 years has been geared towards us, as a nation, getting fit: there has been, and is, a proliferation of advertising, television programming and equipment designed to help us exercise, keep healthy and think more about our health. New exercise regimes and fad diets have come and gone, but some have stuck, and we’ve picked a yoga mat and digital pedometer to represent this. Even the journey for schoolchildren has become more active, with scooters and Heelies (shoes with wheels) to motivate them. We also have a cycling helmet, representing the growing popularity of two-wheeled travel.
Our equivalent of the 1980s Marlboro cigarette packet is an e-cigarette. England’s 2007 ban on smoking in enclosed public places, which followed similar bans in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, marked a real shift in social norms.
Past, present, future
The “coal not dole” pit helmet, from Barnsley Museum’s collection, represents the changing nature of industry and working lives. Though the miners’ strike ended 30 years ago, it still defines the generation who were affected by it, and seems particularly relevant following the recent closure of the last UK deep mine at the end of last year.
We’ve also witnessed the largest migration of people across Europe since the second world war, something that is having a profound effect on the political landscape. Reflecting on this, we decided to include a protest placard about cuts to the NHS as a symbol of the ways in which social and political change can provoke strong feelings among the population at large.
We also wanted to represent the impact of seminal events on everyday life in Britain. Since 2001, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric around terrorism and security. We’ve included the Museum of London’s 7/7 Book of Tributes to symbolise the changes brought about by terrorist attacks, such as the one in London in 2005 – from news stories on television and in newspapers, to the security checks that have become more commonplace, even in museums.
Representing the past 30 years of music was tough. The way we listen has changed drastically, from vinyl (we have records by Dire Straits, a Smash Hits compilation and the soundtrack from the film Top Gun) and tape cassettes, to CDs, mp3s, and now streaming. In the photo, we’ve illustrated this shift from physical media to digital content with a CD Walkman and an iPod Nano.
Instead of including an album by the Spice Girls, Oasis or Blur, Beyoncé or an X Factor winner, to represent the biggest- selling artists of the 1990s and 2000s, we decided to include David Bowie’s greatest hits because of the huge impact he’s had on multiple generations and music of all genres. This is also timely, given the shock of the nation over his death earlier this year.
What this exercise has made clear is that it is a challenge to represent contemporary culture in an era of mass globalisation and interconnectedness. Moreover, as we find ourselves in an increasingly throwaway culture, where objects come and go at an alarming pace. While a particular object may represent a whole era to one person, for another it may have no connection at all.
As social history curators, we are not at all surprised to find that it is the personal stories and experiences that accompany objects and artefacts that can help inform future generations about how we lived at the turn of the 21st century.
Catherine Newley is the audience development manager at St Albans Museums; Jen Kavanagh is a freelance curator and oral historian; Jemma Conway is an audience development officer at Barnsley Arts, Museums and Archives
At the time I was the keeper of social history at York Castle Museum. I roped in Clare Rose, then keeper of costume, and Jane McKinley, then textile conservator, to make fools of themselves with me, and we got Richard Stansfield, the museum photographer, to take the picture used on the cover. The idea was to provide an overview of what had been collected recently and what we should be collecting. The photo reflects the fact that, thanks to the work of design critics such as Stephen Bayley and Sylvia Katz, social history curators were becoming more aware of the links between social and design history. And of course we were living in the 1980s: “the designer decade”.
Although the picture was taken just 30 years ago, it feels like a different world – interest rates were high, the miners’ strike had recently failed, banks were trusted and “heritage” was a contested word. We were post-punk and pre-digital. York Castle had one computer terminal linked to a mainframe; practically nobody had a PC or a mobile phone, and tablets did not exist. We still used typesetters, and cutting and pasting actually required a scalpel and glue.
We used our own clothes for the photo – Jane raided her older sister’s wardrobe – and posed with an array of objects gleaned from the York collections, interspersed with some of our personal possessions, to represent the interwar and postwar periods.
Collecting our thoughts
To reflect the interwar period we chose a tubular steel chair, an Ekco radio with a Bakelite case, an electric heater and some china. The radio, designed by the Canadian modernist architect Wells Coates, had already entered design history and was displayed for different reasons in the Science Museum and the V&A.
The chair, though not a Bauhaus original was clearly inspired by it. The heater was an HMV model designed by the architect Christian Barman in 1936, donated by the York electrical retailer Cussins and Light, whose collection of redundant stock was presented to the museum in 1984. It was a reminder of the pre-central heating era, but also exemplified a British designer giving an existing product a stylish envelope to stimulate sales. The china we picked included the 1938 Sadler car teapot and an art deco Gray’s vase.
We represented the postwar period with one of the best-known television designs, a Bush TV 22 from 1950-55, and a Hoover vacuum cleaner, to show the postwar rise of affordable domestic appliances. Sitting on top of the TV was a late Kodak Brownie, the most popular camera until the arrival of the same company’s Instamatic in 1963.
Most of the objects we selected are recognisable today – not surprisingly. As the journalist Paul Mason has written: “The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not of new objects but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical elements used to produce them.”
This brings us on to our then-contemporary choices. Did we manage to capture the zeitgeist?
I think we look of our time, just as 1960s historic films are so clearly of the decade they were made"
Icons of an era?
Scattered on the floor was a range of objects that were not in the museum collection, but which we felt would be significant and worthy of collection.
From the selection of vinyl, two albums were pretty safe bets: Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) and the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) were both hugely influential and popular – both were awarded gold discs within a year of their release. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was, after Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the last of a trilogy of albums that changed the shape and scope of popular music forever. Jamie Reid’s sleeve design for the Bollocks album was one of the defining images of another paradigm shift in popular culture, the arrival of punk. To avoid offence, the word “bollocks” was partly obscured in the photo, which we would not have done today.
Our third choice was less obvious: New Order’s single Blue Monday in its original, expensive cut-out sleeve, designed by Peter Saville to look like a floppy disk. Blue Monday was released in 1983 and went on to become the world’s biggest-selling 12” single. The sleeve, which does not show the name of the band or the song, is now regarded as a classic design; the record itself was also groundbreaking – linking post-punk guitar to dance-orientated electronic music. In hindsight, this choice was spot-on.
Next to those records lies The Face, the 1980s style bible – essential reading, along with i-D and Blitz magazines, for any self-respecting observer of modern life. This issue featured an androgynous Annie Lennox on its cover, overwritten by the typography of Neville Brody, the Face’s art director.
Founded by ex-NME editor Nick Logan, The Face covered art, design, music, fashion and clubland. Sharp writing by Sheryl Garratt, Robert Elms, Jon Savage, Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill and Miranda Sawyer graced Brody’s revelatory layouts, with photography by the likes of Juergen Teller. It also gave a young Kate Moss her first magazine cover. The Face’s influence far outweighed its circulation. We were right to pick it – the V&A endorsed our choice by giving Brody a major retrospective three years later, in 1988; in 2011 the Design Museum collected a full run of The Face, and prescient costume museums such as Manchester’s Platt Hall took out a subscription from the start.
On top of the records and the magazine sat a packet of 10 Marlboro Reds and a Ronson lighter. Marlboros (note the lack of health warning) were the 80s brand. Instead of the Ronson, perhaps we should have picked a stainless steel Zippo lighter – an early example of vintage revivalism.
Also nearby was a copy of the then-current Habitat catalogue and a TDK C90 cassette. The influence of Habitat’s home furnishings was huge, and lives on in Ikea and elsewhere. Cassettes have largely disappeared, but are fondly remembered for providing the format for that very 80s expression of devotion – the mixtape, an important means of flirting in the pre-digital era.
We are leaning into an early 1960s cocktail cabinet, chosen to represent popular postwar furniture with a sense of optimism and fun about it; that is probably why we placed a toffee tin and a Monopoly box inside. This example came from a local auction room. And while it has not become a design classic, similar cabinets have appeared in museums – in exhibitions such as the Geffrye Museum’s The West Indian Front Room in 2005.
On the face of it
Though we were trying to catch moments from the 50s, 60s and 70s, we were clearly looking through a very 80s lens. I went for the “You’re never alone with a Strand” look, based on the cigarette advertising campaign of the late 50s and early 60s. The coat was a late 50s original from Affleck’s Palace in Manchester (£8) and I bought the hat at Priestley’s in York, an early example of an edited vintage boutique. The tie was a 1950s Tootal pinched from my dad, while the shirt was from Jonathan Silver in Manchester (where members of Joy Division – the band that evolved into New Order – also shopped).
Clare (on the left of the picture) had been an aficionado of “vintage” since the 1970s, when charity shops and jumble sales provided key pieces in her wardrobe. Her early 1960s home-made skirt (probably from a Horrockses cotton print), flock-printed “paper” petticoat and off-the-shoulder embroidered sweater (both M&S) were purchased from the first vintage shop to open in Oxford. Horrockses, a Preston-based firm, is now a key part of the recent history galleries at the city’s Harris Museum, where the displays feature similar garments.
Collecting secondhand clothes posed some ethical dilemmas for a curator who was also buying for herself: Clare chose first for the museum, then made a separate expedition to do her personal shopping. The exchange between personal wardrobes and museum collections went both ways, of course; several of the curatorial staff donated clothing, supplemented by personal information.
Jane wore a Biba maxi coat and fake fur hat, trophies from her older sister’s time as a young working woman in early 1970s London. Biba, the shop opened by Barbara Hulanicki in 1964, is now recognised as an early incarnation of a lifestyle brand, and its influence on shop design was significant. The brand was relaunched in 2009, and 21st-century reincarnated Biba can now be bought in department stores.
Though we tried to duplicate the past, I think we look of our time, just as 1960s historic films are so clearly of the decade they were made: in fact, apart from the hat everything I was wearing could have been used to illustrate indie style of the early 1980s. But that is not to say that our choices were wrong: museums did collect these clothes, and continue to do so.
Thirty years on I think the cover gives a fair reflection of what museums had collected and was a good pointer to where they could collect in the future.
Mark Suggitt is the director of Derwent Valley Mills in Derbyshire
Thirty years on from the original article about contemporary collecting, as trustees of the Social History Curators Group, we (Catherine Newley, Jemma Conway and Jen Kavanagh) took up the challenge to select items from the past four decades to represent what has been and what could be collected to reflect the social history of our generation. Looking back at what the original curators chose in their article, we’ve tried to reflect similar themes, touching on technology, industry, music and popular culture.
Advances in technology over the past 30 years have had a big influence on the way we act, sleep, keep fit, play, socialise, shop and live. From research to shopping, reading to dating, we can do it all online via the worldwide web, invented in 1989. For this reason, we’ve selected a number of handheld devices, including an iPhone. The phone has instant access to the internet and dozens of apps, including built-in satnav (removing the need for the physical maps we depended on just 10 years ago) and several social networking apps, as well as one of the most popular dating apps, Match.com.
A recent study showed that 27% of new relationships now start online and 93% of UK adults have a mobile phone. The way we maintain and build relationships and interact with friends has changed as social networking online has become a primary way to keep in touch.
Post-millennial shopping habits have become increasingly centred around internet shopping, which led to our choices of an Amazon packing envelope. Websites such as Amazon and eBay (both launched in 1995) have completely changed the way we shop. Almost anything we require can be delivered to our homes at the click of a button. And when we do go out shopping now, changes in the law require many shops to charge 5p for plastic carrier bags; as a result, “bags for life” are becoming more common. A blue bag represents the impact of Swedish furniture and home-furnishing giant Ikea.
During the past few decades it has become easier to capture every moment of our lives, as camcorders have evolved from large handheld devices to become neatly encased in smartphones. We can share our videos with the world in the blink of an eye. The challenge for social historians will be how to capture this record of everyday life – should we be collecting videos from Snapchat, or dialogue from Twitter?
We have represented popular culture and entertainment with objects culled unashamedly from our personal collections: Friends, shown here on VHS, was one of the biggest TV shows of the 1990s and the inspiration for the popular hair style, “The Rachel”.
The Harry Potter series of books sold in record numbers, so we included these because of their influence on a generation of children and adults. Seven books were published from 1997 to 2007, all predating 2011’s Kindle Fire, the first of its kind to hold hundreds of e-books. We’ve chosen this to illustrate how advances in technology have even had an impact on the way we read books.
Sony’s original PlayStation, which appeared in the UK in 1995, brought the idea of games on discs into the mainstream. That advance has led to the evolution of games consoles as entertainment hubs marketed to families, not just individuals, as they were back in the 90s. Families can now actively spend time together around a games console – “active” being the operative word, with the latest technology allowing players to use their bodies to control things and play online with people around the world.
Indeed, so much over the past 30 years has been geared towards us, as a nation, getting fit: there has been, and is, a proliferation of advertising, television programming and equipment designed to help us exercise, keep healthy and think more about our health. New exercise regimes and fad diets have come and gone, but some have stuck, and we’ve picked a yoga mat and digital pedometer to represent this. Even the journey for schoolchildren has become more active, with scooters and Heelies (shoes with wheels) to motivate them. We also have a cycling helmet, representing the growing popularity of two-wheeled travel.
Our equivalent of the 1980s Marlboro cigarette packet is an e-cigarette. England’s 2007 ban on smoking in enclosed public places, which followed similar bans in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, marked a real shift in social norms.
While a particular object may represent a whole era to one person, for another it may have no connection at all"
Past, present, future
The “coal not dole” pit helmet, from Barnsley Museum’s collection, represents the changing nature of industry and working lives. Though the miners’ strike ended 30 years ago, it still defines the generation who were affected by it, and seems particularly relevant following the recent closure of the last UK deep mine at the end of last year.
We’ve also witnessed the largest migration of people across Europe since the second world war, something that is having a profound effect on the political landscape. Reflecting on this, we decided to include a protest placard about cuts to the NHS as a symbol of the ways in which social and political change can provoke strong feelings among the population at large.
We also wanted to represent the impact of seminal events on everyday life in Britain. Since 2001, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric around terrorism and security. We’ve included the Museum of London’s 7/7 Book of Tributes to symbolise the changes brought about by terrorist attacks, such as the one in London in 2005 – from news stories on television and in newspapers, to the security checks that have become more commonplace, even in museums.
Representing the past 30 years of music was tough. The way we listen has changed drastically, from vinyl (we have records by Dire Straits, a Smash Hits compilation and the soundtrack from the film Top Gun) and tape cassettes, to CDs, mp3s, and now streaming. In the photo, we’ve illustrated this shift from physical media to digital content with a CD Walkman and an iPod Nano.
Instead of including an album by the Spice Girls, Oasis or Blur, Beyoncé or an X Factor winner, to represent the biggest- selling artists of the 1990s and 2000s, we decided to include David Bowie’s greatest hits because of the huge impact he’s had on multiple generations and music of all genres. This is also timely, given the shock of the nation over his death earlier this year.
What this exercise has made clear is that it is a challenge to represent contemporary culture in an era of mass globalisation and interconnectedness. Moreover, as we find ourselves in an increasingly throwaway culture, where objects come and go at an alarming pace. While a particular object may represent a whole era to one person, for another it may have no connection at all.
As social history curators, we are not at all surprised to find that it is the personal stories and experiences that accompany objects and artefacts that can help inform future generations about how we lived at the turn of the 21st century.
Catherine Newley is the audience development manager at St Albans Museums; Jen Kavanagh is a freelance curator and oral historian; Jemma Conway is an audience development officer at Barnsley Arts, Museums and Archives