Glasgow’s new Riverside Museum welcomed its 500,000th visitor only seven weeks after its opening on 21 June.
The city council has always supported its museums on a scale way beyond any English (or Scottish) local authority, and it is heartening to see this fine civic tradition maintained in a period of economic gloom.
At the launch, council leader Gordon Matheson pledged to maintain free entry to this and all the city’s museums. The Riverside Museum, he said, “belongs to the people of Glasgow”.
The citizens are flocking to it already, and not just because the museum is free or, as the local tour bus guide quipped when I visited, “to see how they’ve spent our money”. The Riverside Museum is the latest and largest of a series of venues that have housed Glasgow’s extensive transport and technology collections over the years.
When Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1901, its cavernous galleries were used as a shop window for the city’s industrial products as well as its impressive art and natural history collections.
The most popular of these technical displays were the dozens of beautiful scale models of ships built on the Clyde, then Glasgow’s major industry. These were all donated to the city by the shipbuilders, though not entirely out of altruism or civic pride.
As the Scottish journalist and broadcaster Muriel Gray puts it in her entertaining recent history of Kelvingrove, this was also an early case of product placement advertising.
Glasgow’s first transport museum was opened in a former corporation tram depot in 1964 not long after the city’s much-loved tram system was replaced by buses. There were Glasgow-built railway engines as well as trams on display and the large Clyde Room housed the ever-popular ship models.
In 1987 the growing collections were moved again, to a much more suitable home in the refurbished Kelvin Hall, where there was space to create a complete street of reconstructed shops, including part of a Glasgow subway station.
The Riverside Museum is a product of Glasgow’s post-industrial reinvention of itself as a city of culture. Since the 1980s the Clyde has been trying to shed its image as a dirty backwater running through semi-derelict industrial badlands.
The Clyde Waterfront regeneration project has transformed the area, with business, residential and leisure amenities replacing shipyards.
Sleek new museum
The museum is a key part of this redevelopment, and it has been built on an appropriately historic waterfront site where the River Kelvin joins the Clyde. Many ships were built nearby, including the sailing vessel Glenlee, now moored beside the museum and providing a complementary heritage attraction.
The elegant, traditional lines of the tall ship are a dramatic counterpoint to Zaha Hadid’s sleek new museum, which the architect herself describes as “a sophisticated shed”. It is an ingenious steel and glass structure with a distinctive jagged roofline and a tardis-like ability to provide far more room inside than seems possible from the outside.
Its 7,500 sq metres of public space is slightly larger than the old Museum of Transport, which looked enormous because of the great rectangular bulk of the Kelvin Hall. Twenty-five years ago, a giant shed is exactly what a new transport museum here would have been like.
The grim industrial warehouse style of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre just upriver, the first of the new Clyde Waterfront buildings to open in 1985, is a reminder of how important it is to appoint an architect with the flair and imagination to create something distinctive.
Hadid’s sinuously curved silver building at the Riverside Museum is a far more stylish structure, designed to be energy efficient and practical. My only misgiving is the light green interior colour scheme, which casts a bilious glow over everything from the collections to the cafe.
The best exterior view of the museum is probably from over the river in Govan, and now that there is a reinstated passenger ferry service you can approach it from across the Clyde.
Ironically for a transport museum, getting to it is not that easy. The car park is far too small, and the public transport alternatives are poor. There is only one bus route from the city centre, and the nearest railway stations are at least 15 minutes walk away. If only Glasgow still had its trams.
The shape and volume of the Riverside Museum has enabled the designers to break away from serried ranks of vehicles, which so often inhibit creativity in transport museums. Cars and bicycles are dramatically displayed on raised circuits and platforms projecting from the high walls.
Many of the ship models are presented as a passing show in a display case with a moving conveyor. The lines of large, heavy vehicles that featured in the Kelvin Hall have been broken up to present displays in and around individually placed objects such as trams and railway engines.
Dramatic displays
This won’t please traditionalists, who might prefer a tightly packed study collection in a garage, but it does create a great sense of drama in the displays. I really did hear somebody exclaim ‘wow!’ as they walked into the museum, music to the ears of any curator or designer.
The creative team at Glasgow were well aware of the old Museum of Transport’s popularity, and there was extensive public consultation to establish what people would like to see in the new displays.
Inevitably, there was a strong element of “like the old museum, but better” about this: more information, more hands-on displays, more access to vehicles and a re-creation of Kelvin Street, with its shops and subway station.
The museum delivers all this with the characteristic storytelling approach to interpretation that Glasgow Museums applied so successfully in the redisplay of Kelvingrove in 2006.
There is very little on the technical specification of vehicles, and the collections are focal points for well-presented stories about how transport has affected people’s lives, such as the once familiar experience of taking the tram to a dance hall on a Saturday night.
Everyday tales of Glasgow life are evocatively told through story panels, touchscreens and multimedia.
Lockerbie bombing
Some of the stories are curious choices. I’m not convinced that the giant South African steam locomotive built in Polmadie and exported to South Africa in 1945 is best used to illustrate the evils of apartheid, which was introduced soon after the engine went into service.
Surely the museum’s largest exhibit, specially brought back to Scotland at considerable cost, is there primarily to represent Glasgow’s once huge locomotive building industry, which involved entire communities in the city.
Here, the museum has chosen to override the local aspect with a wider story that is only tangentially related to the exhibit.
There is a rather bizarre display about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, built around an airport luggage scanner. An important and emotive subject to be sure, although for Scotland rather than Glasgow, and perhaps not best considered in the far corner of a transport museum.
Other odd exhibits feature accidents and road safety. These themes feel as though they have been introduced to satisfy a particular social or education agenda, but they simply don’t work as museum displays.
The Riverside Museum has no recommended visitor route or clear thematic structure, perhaps deliberately. Exploring the museum in a random way is very enjoyable, though I would have appreciated a little more guidance and help in putting the displays into context.
The landscape of the Clyde has changed so much that on emerging from the museum it is still difficult to imagine the busy shipyards that were on this site only a few years ago.
One visit will definitely not be enough for most visitors. Glasgow Museums and Zaha Hadid have taken a novel and creative approach to the traditionally staid presentation of transport and technology at Riverside. It is already a deservedly popular success.
Oliver Green is a research fellow for London Transport Museum
Moving stories, Museums Journal October 2011, p22
The city council has always supported its museums on a scale way beyond any English (or Scottish) local authority, and it is heartening to see this fine civic tradition maintained in a period of economic gloom.
At the launch, council leader Gordon Matheson pledged to maintain free entry to this and all the city’s museums. The Riverside Museum, he said, “belongs to the people of Glasgow”.
The citizens are flocking to it already, and not just because the museum is free or, as the local tour bus guide quipped when I visited, “to see how they’ve spent our money”. The Riverside Museum is the latest and largest of a series of venues that have housed Glasgow’s extensive transport and technology collections over the years.
When Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1901, its cavernous galleries were used as a shop window for the city’s industrial products as well as its impressive art and natural history collections.
The most popular of these technical displays were the dozens of beautiful scale models of ships built on the Clyde, then Glasgow’s major industry. These were all donated to the city by the shipbuilders, though not entirely out of altruism or civic pride.
As the Scottish journalist and broadcaster Muriel Gray puts it in her entertaining recent history of Kelvingrove, this was also an early case of product placement advertising.
Glasgow’s first transport museum was opened in a former corporation tram depot in 1964 not long after the city’s much-loved tram system was replaced by buses. There were Glasgow-built railway engines as well as trams on display and the large Clyde Room housed the ever-popular ship models.
In 1987 the growing collections were moved again, to a much more suitable home in the refurbished Kelvin Hall, where there was space to create a complete street of reconstructed shops, including part of a Glasgow subway station.
The Riverside Museum is a product of Glasgow’s post-industrial reinvention of itself as a city of culture. Since the 1980s the Clyde has been trying to shed its image as a dirty backwater running through semi-derelict industrial badlands.
The Clyde Waterfront regeneration project has transformed the area, with business, residential and leisure amenities replacing shipyards.
Sleek new museum
The museum is a key part of this redevelopment, and it has been built on an appropriately historic waterfront site where the River Kelvin joins the Clyde. Many ships were built nearby, including the sailing vessel Glenlee, now moored beside the museum and providing a complementary heritage attraction.
The elegant, traditional lines of the tall ship are a dramatic counterpoint to Zaha Hadid’s sleek new museum, which the architect herself describes as “a sophisticated shed”. It is an ingenious steel and glass structure with a distinctive jagged roofline and a tardis-like ability to provide far more room inside than seems possible from the outside.
Its 7,500 sq metres of public space is slightly larger than the old Museum of Transport, which looked enormous because of the great rectangular bulk of the Kelvin Hall. Twenty-five years ago, a giant shed is exactly what a new transport museum here would have been like.
The grim industrial warehouse style of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre just upriver, the first of the new Clyde Waterfront buildings to open in 1985, is a reminder of how important it is to appoint an architect with the flair and imagination to create something distinctive.
Hadid’s sinuously curved silver building at the Riverside Museum is a far more stylish structure, designed to be energy efficient and practical. My only misgiving is the light green interior colour scheme, which casts a bilious glow over everything from the collections to the cafe.
The best exterior view of the museum is probably from over the river in Govan, and now that there is a reinstated passenger ferry service you can approach it from across the Clyde.
Ironically for a transport museum, getting to it is not that easy. The car park is far too small, and the public transport alternatives are poor. There is only one bus route from the city centre, and the nearest railway stations are at least 15 minutes walk away. If only Glasgow still had its trams.
The shape and volume of the Riverside Museum has enabled the designers to break away from serried ranks of vehicles, which so often inhibit creativity in transport museums. Cars and bicycles are dramatically displayed on raised circuits and platforms projecting from the high walls.
Many of the ship models are presented as a passing show in a display case with a moving conveyor. The lines of large, heavy vehicles that featured in the Kelvin Hall have been broken up to present displays in and around individually placed objects such as trams and railway engines.
Dramatic displays
This won’t please traditionalists, who might prefer a tightly packed study collection in a garage, but it does create a great sense of drama in the displays. I really did hear somebody exclaim ‘wow!’ as they walked into the museum, music to the ears of any curator or designer.
The creative team at Glasgow were well aware of the old Museum of Transport’s popularity, and there was extensive public consultation to establish what people would like to see in the new displays.
Inevitably, there was a strong element of “like the old museum, but better” about this: more information, more hands-on displays, more access to vehicles and a re-creation of Kelvin Street, with its shops and subway station.
The museum delivers all this with the characteristic storytelling approach to interpretation that Glasgow Museums applied so successfully in the redisplay of Kelvingrove in 2006.
There is very little on the technical specification of vehicles, and the collections are focal points for well-presented stories about how transport has affected people’s lives, such as the once familiar experience of taking the tram to a dance hall on a Saturday night.
Everyday tales of Glasgow life are evocatively told through story panels, touchscreens and multimedia.
Lockerbie bombing
Some of the stories are curious choices. I’m not convinced that the giant South African steam locomotive built in Polmadie and exported to South Africa in 1945 is best used to illustrate the evils of apartheid, which was introduced soon after the engine went into service.
Surely the museum’s largest exhibit, specially brought back to Scotland at considerable cost, is there primarily to represent Glasgow’s once huge locomotive building industry, which involved entire communities in the city.
Here, the museum has chosen to override the local aspect with a wider story that is only tangentially related to the exhibit.
There is a rather bizarre display about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, built around an airport luggage scanner. An important and emotive subject to be sure, although for Scotland rather than Glasgow, and perhaps not best considered in the far corner of a transport museum.
Other odd exhibits feature accidents and road safety. These themes feel as though they have been introduced to satisfy a particular social or education agenda, but they simply don’t work as museum displays.
The Riverside Museum has no recommended visitor route or clear thematic structure, perhaps deliberately. Exploring the museum in a random way is very enjoyable, though I would have appreciated a little more guidance and help in putting the displays into context.
The landscape of the Clyde has changed so much that on emerging from the museum it is still difficult to imagine the busy shipyards that were on this site only a few years ago.
One visit will definitely not be enough for most visitors. Glasgow Museums and Zaha Hadid have taken a novel and creative approach to the traditionally staid presentation of transport and technology at Riverside. It is already a deservedly popular success.
Oliver Green is a research fellow for London Transport Museum
Moving stories, Museums Journal October 2011, p22
Project data
- Cost £74m
- Main funders Glasgow City Council £47.4m; Heritage Lottery Fund £21.6m; Riverside Museum Appeal £5m
- Architect Zaha Hadid Architects
- Exhibition design Event Communications
- Exhibition fit-out Mivan
- Software, AV, interactives 55 Degrees
- Building construction BAM
- Engineer Buro Happold
- Display cases Conservation by Design/Rothsteins
