Hey, that’s cracking news that Dundee museum is opening an outpost in South Kensington. It must obviously be housed in a full scale recreation of the Beautiful Railway Bridge Of The Silvery Tay, spanning the gap from the Natural History Museum’s Grub to Baden Powell House across the road.
Obviously some treasures are too important ever to leave Dundee, but they might be gracious enough to lend their Famous Tay Whale to the benighted southerners for a few months.
Maybe a lottery bid could be launched to fund the animatronics people from the Natural History Museum to recreate for Dundee@Kensington the scene so nobly described by the poet McGonagall.
The whale “lashing the water with its tail all its might, And making the water ascend like a shower of hail, With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail. Then the water did descend on the men in the boats, Which wet their trousers and also their coats.”
Dundee hopefully, will lead a cross-border invasion of dynamic, hard working, and thrifty Scottish museums. Shetland could row down in its gorgeous reconstructed sixareen, and it would be excellent if the National Museum of Rural Life brought its splendid flock of Scots Dumpy chickens – last a hit in London at an exhibition in 1852.
I remember being awed back in 2007 when Perth Museum, and textile conservator Tuula Pardoe, won the national conservation award, for their exhibition, designed, built and installed for probably the price of a new doormat for one of the southern nationals. And I reckon Kilmartin House could sort out the problems at Stonehenge in about half an hour flat.
If they come they will all unquestionably serve the best fruit cake in London, and haggis ciabattas, and clootie dumplings with lemongrass, and latte with a shot of neeps and whisky, and proper tea with tea leaves.
Oh hang on, sorry, how embarrassing, I read the press release back to front. It’s just another London museum proposing a colonial outpost.
That’s hardly news.
