Opinion
Letters: January 2010
Disappointed to find discrimination in a museum… again I was curious what the Ashmolean experience would be like for casual visitors who are blind or deaf or who have a learning difficulty. There, I witnessed blatant exclusion as I did at the Darwin Centre (Museums Journal, December 2009, p18). There is no touch tour for …
Vox pop
Is the decision to move the National Football Museum from Preston to Manchester the right one?
Don’t ever be afraid to make a fuss – just make sure it’s a big fuss
In January 2009, a campaign began in the Stourbridge area of the west Midlands. An award-winning museum set in a Grade II-listed building, with a hot glass studio, was under threat of closure. Staff had been told that the museum would be closed by March 2010 and they would be deployed somewhere else in the …
What lies at the heart of creative curatorial practice?
Are museums and galleries palaces of things, or resorts for people? When I was a museum studies student in Leicester in the 1990s, this was the almost endlessly debated question. A satisfactory, if unexciting, conclusion that we often reached held that the two were inseparable – people in museums could best be reached through things. …
Letters: December 2009
Dark ages at the Darwin Centre For blind visitors, the sloping voyage down the egg-shell shaped Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum is a descent into pervasive barriers. None of the dozens of flat touchscreens have been designed with blind people in mind. Nowhere are tactile models and verbal descriptions to be found. Neither …