It's fortunate, given the local weather, that by far the best bits of the recently reopened Summerlee - the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life are indoors.
The museum, established in 1985 as the Summerlee Heritage Park, has at its physical and metaphorical heart the remains of the former Summerlee Ironworks, which closed in the 1930s. So here, on the surface at least, we have yet another attempt to capture and restore meaning to an industrially redundant community through a heritage regeneration project.
The approach to the site, which sits in about 22 acres of land squeezed by the railway line, a restored section of a former canal and a newish housing estate, is far from auspicious. The signs from the M8 take you fairly clearly to the outskirts of Coatbridge itself, but thereafter you'll need sharp eyes and swift reactions if you're not to miss the smaller and smaller signs.
On a bleak winter's day, by the time I'd put up the umbrella and run for cover, the place seemed somewhat short of enticing. But that was before I got inside the main exhibition hall.
More than industrial relics
The building itself has been extended to form a wonderfully open yet somehow intimate light-filled space: and it's a space, above all, for people. Yes, the expected industrial relics, reconstructions and deconstructions of processes are all there, but somehow it's the people who overcome them, both figuratively and literally.
Huge rafter-hung screens, photographic backdrops, smaller video and interactive screens, oral testimony, archive film footage, mini-docudrama, paintings, and staff all insist that you view the industrial past through the lens of human experience.
At times, the approach can be a bit crude: one example is the constant thread of ironmaster as sanctimonious hypocrite compared with the iron worker as cheery exploited innocent, which somehow felt rather unsubtle, particularly given the otherwise well-nuanced approach to displays.
Regional history
There's no enforced route around the open-plan displays and to begin with the installation looked rather random. But things begin to make sense fairly quickly with the help of consistently reliable running title-bars on the text panels so you always know pretty much where you are.
Regional pre-history is addressed in a few cases of well-chosen, nicely presented and crisply explained objects together with - nice touch, this - recent photographs of local sites from which they were excavated.
With the Romans, we're again subjected to that slightly crude good guy/bad guy approach: "The Romans came to Britain almost 2,000 years ago. They were angry with the Britons and wanted to take control of their wealth and resources." One of several instances of good, clear language, but vastly over-simplified and patronising content.
A full-height geological reconstruction, based on a real location, offers a great demonstration of the underlying natural riches upon which the industrial barons built their wealth and there are magnifying glasses for examining the mineral specimens. Nearby sections deal with the processing of this resource into the products which fed Scotland's vast industrial output in its imperial heyday.
More or less physically at the centre of the hall is the Core, which puts Scotland in general and Coatbridge in particular unashamedly at the centre of the world, by virtue of its massive dominance of the UK's iron industry.
Simple, fun and - praise be - fully functioning and genuinely interactive interactives allow you to fire up the vast "furnace" and test your skills as an iron worker. You can watch your molten iron run off into pig-beds and then sit down on one of the plentiful seats and watch archive film of its historic production.
Across the other side of the hall, the displays deal with off-duty life and are more generic: wartime, health, leisure and so on, but they are still engaging and wonderfully peopled.
Site unspecific
So what's wrong with Summerlee? It's certainly not the exhibition hall displays, which, barring a few glitches, are very good. No, it's what's been done, or rather not done, to engage us with the remains of the ironworks that are, after all, the reason why the whole site was deemed worth saving.
As a one-time archaeologist, I am still inexorably drawn to holes in the ground with lumps of masonry poking out of them, and here at Summerlee there are holes and lumps in abundance. Furthermore, they're holes and lumps of patently considerable substance and archaeological significance.
But nowhere at all, on or close to the walkway that threads through the site, are you given the slightest help in understanding what you're looking at.
I found myself craving even the most faded, waterlogged and peeling interpretation board to help me out. I appreciate that the excavation of the site is very much a work in progress, but that's no excuse for it also being a work in denial.
A question of balance
I would like to report that enlightenment came once I had squelched back to the exhibition hall, had a hot chocolate in the pleasant and cheerfully-staffed cafe and found my way up to the viewing pod which overlooks this magnificent ruin at first-floor level.
But there is only a vertiginously fast-spinning computer reconstruction, which doesn't appear to help if you do not already understand what it is you're looking at, and a few photos.
The outdoor experience raised some really important questions for me. How should an institution distribute its lottery millions so that the glossy newness of one part doesn't throw the untreated parts into even drabber contrast? What is the value of importing and reconstructing buildings that have only a tangential relationship with a genuinely world-class site?
And how will community meaning be held in such sites once the last vestiges of shared experience have disappeared? This experience was clearly what brought the utterly absorbed male pensioners there on a winter morning when there were few other visitors.
Nichola Johnson is the director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
The museum, established in 1985 as the Summerlee Heritage Park, has at its physical and metaphorical heart the remains of the former Summerlee Ironworks, which closed in the 1930s. So here, on the surface at least, we have yet another attempt to capture and restore meaning to an industrially redundant community through a heritage regeneration project.
The approach to the site, which sits in about 22 acres of land squeezed by the railway line, a restored section of a former canal and a newish housing estate, is far from auspicious. The signs from the M8 take you fairly clearly to the outskirts of Coatbridge itself, but thereafter you'll need sharp eyes and swift reactions if you're not to miss the smaller and smaller signs.
On a bleak winter's day, by the time I'd put up the umbrella and run for cover, the place seemed somewhat short of enticing. But that was before I got inside the main exhibition hall.
More than industrial relics
The building itself has been extended to form a wonderfully open yet somehow intimate light-filled space: and it's a space, above all, for people. Yes, the expected industrial relics, reconstructions and deconstructions of processes are all there, but somehow it's the people who overcome them, both figuratively and literally.
Huge rafter-hung screens, photographic backdrops, smaller video and interactive screens, oral testimony, archive film footage, mini-docudrama, paintings, and staff all insist that you view the industrial past through the lens of human experience.
At times, the approach can be a bit crude: one example is the constant thread of ironmaster as sanctimonious hypocrite compared with the iron worker as cheery exploited innocent, which somehow felt rather unsubtle, particularly given the otherwise well-nuanced approach to displays.
Regional history
There's no enforced route around the open-plan displays and to begin with the installation looked rather random. But things begin to make sense fairly quickly with the help of consistently reliable running title-bars on the text panels so you always know pretty much where you are.
Regional pre-history is addressed in a few cases of well-chosen, nicely presented and crisply explained objects together with - nice touch, this - recent photographs of local sites from which they were excavated.
With the Romans, we're again subjected to that slightly crude good guy/bad guy approach: "The Romans came to Britain almost 2,000 years ago. They were angry with the Britons and wanted to take control of their wealth and resources." One of several instances of good, clear language, but vastly over-simplified and patronising content.
A full-height geological reconstruction, based on a real location, offers a great demonstration of the underlying natural riches upon which the industrial barons built their wealth and there are magnifying glasses for examining the mineral specimens. Nearby sections deal with the processing of this resource into the products which fed Scotland's vast industrial output in its imperial heyday.
More or less physically at the centre of the hall is the Core, which puts Scotland in general and Coatbridge in particular unashamedly at the centre of the world, by virtue of its massive dominance of the UK's iron industry.
Simple, fun and - praise be - fully functioning and genuinely interactive interactives allow you to fire up the vast "furnace" and test your skills as an iron worker. You can watch your molten iron run off into pig-beds and then sit down on one of the plentiful seats and watch archive film of its historic production.
Across the other side of the hall, the displays deal with off-duty life and are more generic: wartime, health, leisure and so on, but they are still engaging and wonderfully peopled.
Site unspecific
So what's wrong with Summerlee? It's certainly not the exhibition hall displays, which, barring a few glitches, are very good. No, it's what's been done, or rather not done, to engage us with the remains of the ironworks that are, after all, the reason why the whole site was deemed worth saving.
As a one-time archaeologist, I am still inexorably drawn to holes in the ground with lumps of masonry poking out of them, and here at Summerlee there are holes and lumps in abundance. Furthermore, they're holes and lumps of patently considerable substance and archaeological significance.
But nowhere at all, on or close to the walkway that threads through the site, are you given the slightest help in understanding what you're looking at.
I found myself craving even the most faded, waterlogged and peeling interpretation board to help me out. I appreciate that the excavation of the site is very much a work in progress, but that's no excuse for it also being a work in denial.
A question of balance
I would like to report that enlightenment came once I had squelched back to the exhibition hall, had a hot chocolate in the pleasant and cheerfully-staffed cafe and found my way up to the viewing pod which overlooks this magnificent ruin at first-floor level.
But there is only a vertiginously fast-spinning computer reconstruction, which doesn't appear to help if you do not already understand what it is you're looking at, and a few photos.
The outdoor experience raised some really important questions for me. How should an institution distribute its lottery millions so that the glossy newness of one part doesn't throw the untreated parts into even drabber contrast? What is the value of importing and reconstructing buildings that have only a tangential relationship with a genuinely world-class site?
And how will community meaning be held in such sites once the last vestiges of shared experience have disappeared? This experience was clearly what brought the utterly absorbed male pensioners there on a winter morning when there were few other visitors.
Nichola Johnson is the director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Project data
Cost: £10m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £4.8m, Museums Galleries Scotland, European Regional Development Fund, North Lanarkshire Council
Exhibition design: Redman Design
Contractor: Carillion
Fit out: Beck Interiors
Cost: £10m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £4.8m, Museums Galleries Scotland, European Regional Development Fund, North Lanarkshire Council
Exhibition design: Redman Design
Contractor: Carillion
Fit out: Beck Interiors
