It was a remarkable display: fridges neatly in line, some with doors primly closed, some akimbo revealing their rich variety of rack, shelf and drawer. Counter top fridges, svelte galley kitchen models, fridge freezers, white fridges, grey fridges, fridges with plastic woodgrain trim and retro Festival of Britain style chrome lettering.
I felt that familiar museum store ripple of panic. It gripped me at Beamish, confronted by a tower of bicycles rising to the ceiling far above; in a V&A store where a rusting angel shed sad flakes of gilt over a giant ball, sole survivor of a long-lost theatre; at the Science Museum's Wroughton store as a giant printing press joined tonne upon tonne of properly conserved, neatly labelled, safely stored stuff, steel and iron and bronze and copper and nickel and brass buried alive stuff.
It got me again when I read the list of acquisitions across the UK for which the Heritage Lottery Fund somehow found £3m from its shrivelled budget: bits of the Titanic and Peter Jones 1970s wallpaper, luckenbooth silver brooches, hobnailed boots from Northampton, Inuit carvings and 200-year-old bagpipes - stuff.
In David Lodge's novel The British Museum is Falling Down, a character will never finish his thesis on sanitation in Victorian fiction, not because he has to read every book dealing with sanitation, but because he realises he will also have to read every book which significantly fails to mention it.
If the proper role of museums is to preserve and display interesting things, and everything is interesting to somebody, and if things that are not interesting are interesting pointers to why the interesting things are interesting - then don't worry about climate change and sea levels, the rising tide of stuff will drown us all.
The fridge collection was not in fact at the Geffrye, but at my local dump, one fine recent Sunday afternoon. The appalling thought struck me that somebody should be saving them. But we must resist the rising tide of panic. Take a deep breath and a beta-blocker. We need more stuff, really we do. Only collect.
I felt that familiar museum store ripple of panic. It gripped me at Beamish, confronted by a tower of bicycles rising to the ceiling far above; in a V&A store where a rusting angel shed sad flakes of gilt over a giant ball, sole survivor of a long-lost theatre; at the Science Museum's Wroughton store as a giant printing press joined tonne upon tonne of properly conserved, neatly labelled, safely stored stuff, steel and iron and bronze and copper and nickel and brass buried alive stuff.
It got me again when I read the list of acquisitions across the UK for which the Heritage Lottery Fund somehow found £3m from its shrivelled budget: bits of the Titanic and Peter Jones 1970s wallpaper, luckenbooth silver brooches, hobnailed boots from Northampton, Inuit carvings and 200-year-old bagpipes - stuff.
In David Lodge's novel The British Museum is Falling Down, a character will never finish his thesis on sanitation in Victorian fiction, not because he has to read every book dealing with sanitation, but because he realises he will also have to read every book which significantly fails to mention it.
If the proper role of museums is to preserve and display interesting things, and everything is interesting to somebody, and if things that are not interesting are interesting pointers to why the interesting things are interesting - then don't worry about climate change and sea levels, the rising tide of stuff will drown us all.
The fridge collection was not in fact at the Geffrye, but at my local dump, one fine recent Sunday afternoon. The appalling thought struck me that somebody should be saving them. But we must resist the rising tide of panic. Take a deep breath and a beta-blocker. We need more stuff, really we do. Only collect.
