Dan Dare & the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, Science Museum, London

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, was the front-cover feature in the Eagle, the best-selling comic that was published in the UK between 1950 and 1969.

First drawn by Frank Hampson, Colonel Dare travelled throughout space in his personal spaceship fighting his arch-enemy the Mekon, ruler of the Treens, in amazing futuristic landscapes. Alongside Dan Dare, Eagle also featured cutaways - detailed drawings of a piece of the latest British technology.

Dan Dare & the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain at London's Science Museum aims to explore how the country tried to reinvent itself in the postwar period to 1970.

Visitors are introduced to Dan Dare in a huge room overlooking Exhibition Road on one side and a space in the centre of the museum on the other. The windows are covered by blinds printed with scenes from Dan Dare stories, and suspended in the central space is a Bristol Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile.

Here, surely, is a scene to excite all those visitors who read the Eagle as children. Panels explain a little bit about the history of the magazine and its creators. Cabinets house original Dan Dare storyboards, drawings and memorabilia. Over by the missile is a reproduction of one of the Eagle's cutaways explaining the technology involved.

Disappearing Dan

But it isn't clear how Dan Dare is going to guide us through the rest of the exhibition. The display explores postwar British technology up to 1970, but doesn't include the architecture influenced by Hampson's landscapes, and the cutaways get only the briefest of mentions in this room. And then, once past this first room, Dare disappears.

From here visitors have a choice of what to see next. The exhibition is wrapped around three sides of the rectangular central space, with the introductory room on a short side and the other two sections on each of the long sides. Take the right-hand exit from the first room and you can see Building a New Britain; take the left-hand exit and you are taken to Reinventing the Home.

Building a New Britain explores how Britain "set out to reinvent itself as a hi-tech nation". Divided into four sections, it examines themes such as health, industry, transport and the military. The exhibits in each section are densely packed.

There are large-scale objects from dentists' chairs to coal cutters and cars, as well as arrays of smaller items such as hearing aids and NHS glasses. Individually, the objects are interesting, but packed together it is easy to feel overwhelmed.

The contextualisation is also tricky. Text panels acknowledge the postwar social contexts that were relevant to many of the developments on display, but the tone is one of technology solving all. At one point, the halving of child mortality and immunisation seems to be portrayed as the result of new technologies without the role of the newly formed NHS being fully explained.

The museum is trying out some of its own new technology in the exhibition and visitors can test the mobile phone audio-tour. By dialling a UK landline number followed by a three-digit code given on the text panels, visitors can hear a commentary about certain objects.

The commentaries start with a dramatic scenario featuring the object, and then go on to give historical information. They're fun, although they might not satisfy those who want detailed information. The phone audio-tour is a neat idea - it's cheaper and easier than an audio-guide - as long as you have a UK phone and speak English.

Asset no-show

At the end of Building a New Britain, the awkwardness of the U-shaped space comes to the fore. To get to Reinventing the Home, visitors have to either retrace their steps or wade through a section of the Energy gallery.

Taking the latter option, visitors first encounter a bank of computers testing another new Science Museum technology. This one's to do with the Ingenious website and the Object Wiki, although it isn't clear what these are or how they relate to the exhibition.

However, it is quite possible that the terminals are there to fill space because, if Building a New Britain felt overcrowded with objects, this section is almost deserted. It seems rather bizarre that the Science Museum doesn't have many objects to illustrate postwar domestic technology, even if the story is the failure of British manufacturing to respond to more sophisticated foreign competitors. But then again, perhaps all the objects are in Making the Modern World?

Two floors below Dan Dare, Making the Modern World is a permanent exhibition of objects that represent key technological developments in health, industry, transport and the home. This is more international in scope and covers a longer period of time, but it demonstrates that the museum has these objects in its collections, so why not show more of them here?

Rachel Souhami is a freelance curator and a lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London