Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, London
Grass verges spattered with squashed milk cartons and fag packets, and trees festooned with shredded plastic have left me with a rather more malign view of the kind of object that might end up in the Robert Opie Collection at the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising than I think he would entertain. But I only noticed the rubbish because once my mind was on the subject I kept colliding with it.
A recent edition of a Sunday paper disclosed in its glossy pages, after I had extracted them from the plastic wrapper, that one family can get through 50kg of packaging in a month.
Some overpackaged products make me feel quite violent when I'm in the supermarket - then I heard about neuro marketing, where neuro scientists examine your head to locate the parts that stimulate your Coca-Cola/Pepsi preference. It's an environ-mental attack.
I had to go to Notting Hill Gate to find the museum, and the combination of the words Notting Hill and Museum of Brands seemed pretty funny - for what is Notting Hill but a brand?
You approach the museum via a network of streets on the edge of the Portobello Road, ending up in a mews with its very own olive trees, designer clothes studio (Temperley, for the brand experts among you), whiteness and excess glass.
It's a bit of a shock to spot the cheerful sign for the museum, which is tucked into the ground floor of the branding consultancy pi global (which raised funds for the museum and supports it) and even more of a surprise to walk in and be surrounded by a display of supersized Brasso tins and Oxo cubes.
The foyer exudes warmth and friendliness - it's like coming in from the cold. If ever there was a mismatch between the wrapper and its contents, this is it.
You go straight into the time tunnel of Victorian packaging material, housed in blacked-out showcases so that the brightly coloured ephemera is given a theatrical energy. There's an enchanting telescopic view of the Great Exhibition, where you put your eye to a pinhole to reveal a magical world of fountains, trees and elegance.
There's not much interpretation to speak of, apart from some slightly wry captions that characterise the different eras.
Winding through the dark passage of the display reminded me of the late lamented Ripley's Believe It Or Not! (the man who could lift bricks with his eyelids etc) in Great Yarmouth - and the repetitive accumulation of slogans and pretty ladies gets a bit relentless. But then suddenly you experience a flash of recognition, so that your attention is focused almost despite yourself.
For me it was sweets. Did you know that the sensation of 1937 was white chocolate? And how about this list of inventions… Terry's Chocolate Orange 1932, Black Magic 1933, Quality Street 1936, Roses 1938, Milky Way 1935, Maltesers 1936, Kit Kat 1937… (and for connoisseurs, Caramac 1959). The 1930s truly were, as the caption has it, 'a great time for sweet lovers'.
Opie's text for the 1950s describes a mood of national optimism, embalmed in the cosiness of the home. Although much of the entertainment came from America, British families were mostly content with the Archers, Dixon of Dock Green and I-Spy books for the car journey, and that tone pervades the museum.
The juxtaposition of global and personal events in the captions has a kind of truth, which is embodied in the domestic sphere incarnate in this banal, everyday stuff, all 10,000 pieces of it. It works on the level that Opie intends - as a springboard for thought and conversation. Check the Party 7 tin for instance, though perhaps there's not much about that particular object that any of us really care to recall in detail.
As you move towards the light, the display runs out of steam and falters through a series of PR showcases given over to sponsors and the packaging industry, but then the museum is still in the snagging stage. Opie is listening to visitors and tracking their comments. He is planning to install a memory booth, provide a set of discovery trails, and to beef up the environmental story.
He is still actively collecting, and his version of the 2000s will be about climate change, health and healthy products and the growth of self-reflection, as government engages with that agenda and pulls the population along with it. He feels that in a year's time the museum will really start to sing.
This is a difficult place to review, because it isn't really about brands, packaging or advertising. It's about one man's passion for collecting detritus, the non-objects that form the compost for our experience of living through what we consume.
It's pointless to make caveats about the difficult social issues that haven't been addressed or the packaging that isn't included because this is Opie's collection, not some national institution that feels a duty to survey consumer society from every angle.
Opie is providing a space for a benevolent kind of free association, and the very lack of interpretation, the plethora of images and the showmanship of the museum stimulates personal recollection.
My visit will be different from yours, and from his, because I'm interested in sweets and you're hung up on Head and Shoulders (a comprehensive collection from 1968 onwards in case you're interested).
It's like visiting Dennis Severs' house in Spitalfields, east London, when he was still there to bully people through the journey from basement to attic. His tactic was to overwhelm you with information, so that you reached a sort of transcendental state of experiential learning, your critical defences disarmed.
Here you are invited, generously, to lose yourself in your own past, accompanied by those enduring monuments of the modern age, Cornflakes and Bovril, Windolene and Daz.
Laura Drysdale is a writer and consultant
Project data
Main funders: Kellogg's, Cadbury Trebor Bassett, Twinings, pi global
Grass verges spattered with squashed milk cartons and fag packets, and trees festooned with shredded plastic have left me with a rather more malign view of the kind of object that might end up in the Robert Opie Collection at the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising than I think he would entertain. But I only noticed the rubbish because once my mind was on the subject I kept colliding with it.
A recent edition of a Sunday paper disclosed in its glossy pages, after I had extracted them from the plastic wrapper, that one family can get through 50kg of packaging in a month.
Some overpackaged products make me feel quite violent when I'm in the supermarket - then I heard about neuro marketing, where neuro scientists examine your head to locate the parts that stimulate your Coca-Cola/Pepsi preference. It's an environ-mental attack.
I had to go to Notting Hill Gate to find the museum, and the combination of the words Notting Hill and Museum of Brands seemed pretty funny - for what is Notting Hill but a brand?
You approach the museum via a network of streets on the edge of the Portobello Road, ending up in a mews with its very own olive trees, designer clothes studio (Temperley, for the brand experts among you), whiteness and excess glass.
It's a bit of a shock to spot the cheerful sign for the museum, which is tucked into the ground floor of the branding consultancy pi global (which raised funds for the museum and supports it) and even more of a surprise to walk in and be surrounded by a display of supersized Brasso tins and Oxo cubes.
The foyer exudes warmth and friendliness - it's like coming in from the cold. If ever there was a mismatch between the wrapper and its contents, this is it.
You go straight into the time tunnel of Victorian packaging material, housed in blacked-out showcases so that the brightly coloured ephemera is given a theatrical energy. There's an enchanting telescopic view of the Great Exhibition, where you put your eye to a pinhole to reveal a magical world of fountains, trees and elegance.
There's not much interpretation to speak of, apart from some slightly wry captions that characterise the different eras.
Winding through the dark passage of the display reminded me of the late lamented Ripley's Believe It Or Not! (the man who could lift bricks with his eyelids etc) in Great Yarmouth - and the repetitive accumulation of slogans and pretty ladies gets a bit relentless. But then suddenly you experience a flash of recognition, so that your attention is focused almost despite yourself.
For me it was sweets. Did you know that the sensation of 1937 was white chocolate? And how about this list of inventions… Terry's Chocolate Orange 1932, Black Magic 1933, Quality Street 1936, Roses 1938, Milky Way 1935, Maltesers 1936, Kit Kat 1937… (and for connoisseurs, Caramac 1959). The 1930s truly were, as the caption has it, 'a great time for sweet lovers'.
Opie's text for the 1950s describes a mood of national optimism, embalmed in the cosiness of the home. Although much of the entertainment came from America, British families were mostly content with the Archers, Dixon of Dock Green and I-Spy books for the car journey, and that tone pervades the museum.
The juxtaposition of global and personal events in the captions has a kind of truth, which is embodied in the domestic sphere incarnate in this banal, everyday stuff, all 10,000 pieces of it. It works on the level that Opie intends - as a springboard for thought and conversation. Check the Party 7 tin for instance, though perhaps there's not much about that particular object that any of us really care to recall in detail.
As you move towards the light, the display runs out of steam and falters through a series of PR showcases given over to sponsors and the packaging industry, but then the museum is still in the snagging stage. Opie is listening to visitors and tracking their comments. He is planning to install a memory booth, provide a set of discovery trails, and to beef up the environmental story.
He is still actively collecting, and his version of the 2000s will be about climate change, health and healthy products and the growth of self-reflection, as government engages with that agenda and pulls the population along with it. He feels that in a year's time the museum will really start to sing.
This is a difficult place to review, because it isn't really about brands, packaging or advertising. It's about one man's passion for collecting detritus, the non-objects that form the compost for our experience of living through what we consume.
It's pointless to make caveats about the difficult social issues that haven't been addressed or the packaging that isn't included because this is Opie's collection, not some national institution that feels a duty to survey consumer society from every angle.
Opie is providing a space for a benevolent kind of free association, and the very lack of interpretation, the plethora of images and the showmanship of the museum stimulates personal recollection.
My visit will be different from yours, and from his, because I'm interested in sweets and you're hung up on Head and Shoulders (a comprehensive collection from 1968 onwards in case you're interested).
It's like visiting Dennis Severs' house in Spitalfields, east London, when he was still there to bully people through the journey from basement to attic. His tactic was to overwhelm you with information, so that you reached a sort of transcendental state of experiential learning, your critical defences disarmed.
Here you are invited, generously, to lose yourself in your own past, accompanied by those enduring monuments of the modern age, Cornflakes and Bovril, Windolene and Daz.
Laura Drysdale is a writer and consultant
Project data
Main funders: Kellogg's, Cadbury Trebor Bassett, Twinings, pi global
