One of the many delights of Manchester is the sheer variety of museum experiences available. There always seems to be something new to enjoy. This is not innovation and novelty for its own sake, but part of the city’s strong sense of a distinctive urban history and cultural identity that has been reasserted in the past 15 years or so.
Whatever the reasons for this (and it is not just that old chestnut civic pride, which the Victorians practically invented here), it seems to give the many museums and galleries of Manchester a mutual creative spark.
Living Worlds recently opened at the Manchester Museum and is the latest example of this cultural creativity.
The marketing blurb for the gallery on the museum’s website is nothing if not aspirational: “Living Worlds explores the connections between all living things, including us, and shows how we can all shape the future by the choices we make... together, lots of tiny actions can change the world.”
This rather off-putting promo sounds ominously like a cross between Live Aid and the big society, but fortunately the gallery turns out to be something completely different and wholly enjoyable.
Living Worlds is an ingenious and arty revamp of one of the original museum galleries designed by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse in the 1880s.
The new displays are on the lower floor above which three galleried storeys rise dramatically along a central open well to the rooflights. The original layout and wooden showcases have been retained and the cast-iron architecture revealed and renovated.
The building is on a modest scale compared with Waterhouse’s extravagantly decorated Manchester Town Hall or his museum masterpiece, the Natural History Museum, London, but it fully deserves this careful refurbishment.
The new displays work beautifully within a very elegant and practical Victorian ambience, rather than fighting against it. One of the museum’s old favourites, a huge sperm whale skeleton, has been left hanging in its original position looming over the whole gallery just as it did when first installed in the 1890s.
Neon titles
Living Worlds redisplays a very traditional natural history presentation of mounted specimens (or stuffed animals, as the museum insists on calling them) in a new context. Someone had the inspired idea of inviting Belgian art and fashion show producer Villa Eugénie to design the new displays and it has responded in a creative way that is a visual feast.
Each of the showcases is dramatically headlined on top with a neon single word in capital letters that leaps out of the darkness: Disasters, Symbols, Domination, Resources, Connect – all concepts rather than titles and with the feel of a modern art show.
Below, the large built-in cases are internally lit with fibre optics to highlight individual objects or groups, mostly without labels so that the viewer concentrates on the items and their inter-relationship, not the captions.
Text panels on the side walls are short and suggestive rather than descriptive. The stated intention is to help visitors explore the natural world and their relationship with it. I’m not sure that this works entirely as a communication strategy, and the approach is, perhaps deliberately, inconsistent.
Gallery visitors tend to bounce around a display like this, drawn to different exhibits in a random way, so any attempt to establish a sequence of interpretation and learning through theme, chronology or lifeform would probably be doomed to failure. I found this more fun and there are some well-chosen and thought-provoking
ideas here that are much more interesting than tickbox learning outcomes.
Natural history displays often have “family friendly” running through them like a dumbed-down Blackpool rock, so it was a treat to see some thoughtful but accessible input from university academics to this exhibition.
“Space clockwork”
I was particularly taken with a contribution from Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, whose text panel comment on why he was drawn to study lifeforms is worth quoting in full:
“I want to know why animals behave the way they do. We can use Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, discovered 400 years ago, to put a satellite around Jupiter but we cannot be sure which way a fly will move. This is because living things are amazingly complicated.
The earth’s eco-system has many millions of species and individuals interacting in the most varied of ways. Because of this it is difficult to be certain how animals and plants will respond to change. The solar system runs on a kind of ‘space clockwork’ but living things are weirder than chemistry and physics.”
At a time when bullish telehistorians such as Niall Ferguson and David Starkey are confidently lecturing us with misplaced certainty about human history, it is refreshing to have a scientist cheerfully acknowledging how much we still don’t know, and probably never will, about nature.
Unusually, Living Worlds is not about facts and certainties. It encourages the visitor to look and think. The most visually arresting exhibit is a showcase containing one large bird, a Chinese crane.
All around it are white folded paper cranes that appear to be flying through the glass of the showcase. A short text panel describes the significance of cranes in Japanese folklore as an example of how humans can take inspiration from nature.
A thousand origami cranes, called senbazuru, are apparently an established good luck gift at Japanese weddings, and this tradition has been reinforced by the popular story of Sadako Sasaki, a teenage girl who believed she would recover from the radiation sickness she suffered after the attack on Hiroshima, if only she could fold 1,000 cranes.
As an inspirational tale it is a curious choice to feature in the exhibition as she died after she completed the 644th crane, although the caption leaves her fate open-ended. Whatever the truth of the incident, the text and display does inspire reflection.
Myths and stories can be more powerful than facts, and I saw one mother reading out the label to her young son as an explanation of a striking exhibit.
Dead groovy
After I left the museum I suddenly realised what is missing from Living Worlds. Despite the gallery’s title, this is actually a rather arty display of dead things, which has a slightly Damien Hirst feel about it.
Where is the life? This is a familiar problem for natural history displays, which usually have to resort to videos or aquaria to introduce a bit of movement.
The ideal solution came to me in a flash. The last time I visited the Manchester Museum, some years ago, I seem to recall a live beehive display, possibly on an upper floor of this very gallery, where there is now an impressive activity and collections centre.
Bees have always been big in Manchester: that old hive of industry symbolism was incorporated in the design of the city’s coat of arms years ago, and bees feature strongly in the Victorian mosaic floors of the town hall. Last year the council even considered a proposal to put beehives on the roof as part of its greening the city strategy.
I’m not sure what happened to that idea, but here is my suggestion for the Manchester Museum to get one step ahead and develop the next stage of Living Worlds: bring back the bees, but with a groovy postmodern hive.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Whatever the reasons for this (and it is not just that old chestnut civic pride, which the Victorians practically invented here), it seems to give the many museums and galleries of Manchester a mutual creative spark.
Living Worlds recently opened at the Manchester Museum and is the latest example of this cultural creativity.
The marketing blurb for the gallery on the museum’s website is nothing if not aspirational: “Living Worlds explores the connections between all living things, including us, and shows how we can all shape the future by the choices we make... together, lots of tiny actions can change the world.”
This rather off-putting promo sounds ominously like a cross between Live Aid and the big society, but fortunately the gallery turns out to be something completely different and wholly enjoyable.
Living Worlds is an ingenious and arty revamp of one of the original museum galleries designed by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse in the 1880s.
The new displays are on the lower floor above which three galleried storeys rise dramatically along a central open well to the rooflights. The original layout and wooden showcases have been retained and the cast-iron architecture revealed and renovated.
The building is on a modest scale compared with Waterhouse’s extravagantly decorated Manchester Town Hall or his museum masterpiece, the Natural History Museum, London, but it fully deserves this careful refurbishment.
The new displays work beautifully within a very elegant and practical Victorian ambience, rather than fighting against it. One of the museum’s old favourites, a huge sperm whale skeleton, has been left hanging in its original position looming over the whole gallery just as it did when first installed in the 1890s.
Neon titles
Living Worlds redisplays a very traditional natural history presentation of mounted specimens (or stuffed animals, as the museum insists on calling them) in a new context. Someone had the inspired idea of inviting Belgian art and fashion show producer Villa Eugénie to design the new displays and it has responded in a creative way that is a visual feast.
Each of the showcases is dramatically headlined on top with a neon single word in capital letters that leaps out of the darkness: Disasters, Symbols, Domination, Resources, Connect – all concepts rather than titles and with the feel of a modern art show.
Below, the large built-in cases are internally lit with fibre optics to highlight individual objects or groups, mostly without labels so that the viewer concentrates on the items and their inter-relationship, not the captions.
Text panels on the side walls are short and suggestive rather than descriptive. The stated intention is to help visitors explore the natural world and their relationship with it. I’m not sure that this works entirely as a communication strategy, and the approach is, perhaps deliberately, inconsistent.
Gallery visitors tend to bounce around a display like this, drawn to different exhibits in a random way, so any attempt to establish a sequence of interpretation and learning through theme, chronology or lifeform would probably be doomed to failure. I found this more fun and there are some well-chosen and thought-provoking
ideas here that are much more interesting than tickbox learning outcomes.
Natural history displays often have “family friendly” running through them like a dumbed-down Blackpool rock, so it was a treat to see some thoughtful but accessible input from university academics to this exhibition.
“Space clockwork”
I was particularly taken with a contribution from Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, whose text panel comment on why he was drawn to study lifeforms is worth quoting in full:
“I want to know why animals behave the way they do. We can use Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, discovered 400 years ago, to put a satellite around Jupiter but we cannot be sure which way a fly will move. This is because living things are amazingly complicated.
The earth’s eco-system has many millions of species and individuals interacting in the most varied of ways. Because of this it is difficult to be certain how animals and plants will respond to change. The solar system runs on a kind of ‘space clockwork’ but living things are weirder than chemistry and physics.”
At a time when bullish telehistorians such as Niall Ferguson and David Starkey are confidently lecturing us with misplaced certainty about human history, it is refreshing to have a scientist cheerfully acknowledging how much we still don’t know, and probably never will, about nature.
Unusually, Living Worlds is not about facts and certainties. It encourages the visitor to look and think. The most visually arresting exhibit is a showcase containing one large bird, a Chinese crane.
All around it are white folded paper cranes that appear to be flying through the glass of the showcase. A short text panel describes the significance of cranes in Japanese folklore as an example of how humans can take inspiration from nature.
A thousand origami cranes, called senbazuru, are apparently an established good luck gift at Japanese weddings, and this tradition has been reinforced by the popular story of Sadako Sasaki, a teenage girl who believed she would recover from the radiation sickness she suffered after the attack on Hiroshima, if only she could fold 1,000 cranes.
As an inspirational tale it is a curious choice to feature in the exhibition as she died after she completed the 644th crane, although the caption leaves her fate open-ended. Whatever the truth of the incident, the text and display does inspire reflection.
Myths and stories can be more powerful than facts, and I saw one mother reading out the label to her young son as an explanation of a striking exhibit.
Dead groovy
After I left the museum I suddenly realised what is missing from Living Worlds. Despite the gallery’s title, this is actually a rather arty display of dead things, which has a slightly Damien Hirst feel about it.
Where is the life? This is a familiar problem for natural history displays, which usually have to resort to videos or aquaria to introduce a bit of movement.
The ideal solution came to me in a flash. The last time I visited the Manchester Museum, some years ago, I seem to recall a live beehive display, possibly on an upper floor of this very gallery, where there is now an impressive activity and collections centre.
Bees have always been big in Manchester: that old hive of industry symbolism was incorporated in the design of the city’s coat of arms years ago, and bees feature strongly in the Victorian mosaic floors of the town hall. Last year the council even considered a proposal to put beehives on the roof as part of its greening the city strategy.
I’m not sure what happened to that idea, but here is my suggestion for the Manchester Museum to get one step ahead and develop the next stage of Living Worlds: bring back the bees, but with a groovy postmodern hive.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Project data
- Cost £400,000
- Main funders Northwest Regional Development Agency; DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund
- Exhibition design Villa Eugénie
