Peterborough had long been on my list of places to spend a day, but I’d never got round to it until I visited the recently reopened museum.
I’ve long-admired the cathedral from the train between the north east and London; it sits in a glorious sequence with Durham, York, and Doncaster’s cathedral-sized minster church of St George’s.
There’s also a famous prehistoric site at Flag Fen and many years ago I’d been intrigued by a report that Peterborough Museum had opened a children’s gallery for about £300, which sounded rather enterprising.
Now, our expectations have changed. The museum has just spent £3.2m tidying itself up. That’s about 10,000 times the cost of the former children’s gallery.
In many ways, Peterborough has the archetypal large town/small city museum. It was founded by a local society in the 19th century, and occupied a variety of locations until, in about 1930, it ended up in what had once been “the grandest house in Peterborough”.
The museum society finally handed over responsibility to the city council in 1968 – after negotiations that had continued intermittently since 1897! Then, in 2010 the council handed it over to a trust, called Vivacity (a potentially strong brand, more appealing than alternatives such as Peterborough Leisure and Culture).
It’s a classic tale of private endeavour, nationalised when local authorities were expanding and partly privatised now they are shrinking.
Peterborough Museum is typical in other ways, too. It has a slightly unsuitable building (now in an urban backstreet, just off the main drag), a mixed collection, with a few stellar areas, and a track record of achievement, culminating in a large lottery grant.
Highlights of the refurbishment include brand spanking new natural science galleries. One is devoted to fabulous Jurassic marine fossils, retrieved from the area’s brick-making clay.
The other looks at local wildlife. Both are well interpreted with plenty for children and a sensible amount of text for adults. Pleasingly, the wildlife gallery displays its specimens of birds, mammals, insects and fungi in a diorama, divided into woodland, wetland and urban sections.
Model guillotines
In another new gallery, there’s a superb selection of things made from straw and bone by Napoleonic French captives in the world’s first purpose-built prisoner of war camp. My favourite items were intricate, decorative model guillotines.
I also learned how animal bone is worked, which I didn’t know before. However, the gallery is marred by the inclusion of a tacky “life in a barracks experience”, which is reminiscent of a 1980s heritage centre.
The social history gallery is a bit of a cliché too, with its Victorian and 1950s kitchens and sections on the impact of the railways and world war two. It seems to peter out somewhere around the 1980s.
The story of migration to Peterborough is addressed largely through text (rather than objects). There’s a quaint and probably misjudged case showing traditional Polish crafts and costume, rather than life as experienced by Poles in Peterborough today.
The building was once used as a hospital and the refurbishment opened up access to a rare, perhaps unique, late-Victorian operating theatre. It’s a striking and memorable space – high up the building, top lit and white tiled. Sick patients were winched up the central stairwell to receive their treatment. The room is crying out for a creative intervention by an artist, film-maker or dramatist.
Instead, the decision was made to fit the room out with “recreated operating table, surgical furniture and gas lighting” – and some unconvincing fake blood.
“Recreations” appear elsewhere in the museum. In the otherwise impressive wildlife diorama there are nasty plastic leaves – and I’ve no idea whether some of the things I saw there, such as fungi, were real or repro. In a former doctor’s consulting room, touchscreens on the history of the building are set unnecessarily into a nasty reproduction desk of vague period.
This kind of reproduction is not unusual and raises some wider questions about authenticity. I was left slightly unsure about what in the museum is real and what is, frankly, fake.
I’m uneasy about lottery money being used to “recreate” heritage, rather than conserve it. Sadly, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has spent millions of pounds in this way.
Along with Peterborough’s desk, trees and surgical furniture – and benches, bollards and cabinets around the land – other far more expensive examples of HLF-funded fakery include the infamous portico in the British Museum Great Court and railings round Birmingham Cathedral.
If nothing survives from the past to acquire or conserve, lottery money would be better spent on contemporary work that responds imaginatively to heritage, rather than on recreations.
Prognosis
This, of course, is a criticism of our business in general, not of Peterborough Museum in particular, where the cafe is comfortable and friendly, the toilets are fantastic, and the building is smart and bright, inside and out. The interpretation is crisp and clear, there are some fantastic objects and there are a decent number of seats.
There were, sadly, some shortcomings in the visitor experience. The Vikings exhibition, advertised outside on a big banner, was inexplicably closed.
The entry-desk displayed children’s activity backpacks, but I didn’t see a single child using them, perhaps because staff spent much of their time loudly discussing who was covering lunchtime breaks, rather than welcoming visitors. Judging by symbols around the building there is some kind of audioguide, but nothing seemed to be available for people to use.
Peterborough Museum is good compared with similar institutions, but with increasingly discerning audiences, and funders expecting excellence and impact, I’m still not sure it’s good enough to thrive in the long term. (That of course means many others are nowhere near good enough, which is the challenge of the Museums Association’s Museums 2020 initiative.)
So, is a trip to Peterborough worth a day of your time? The city turned out to have an unexpectedly elegant centre, with the smart Cathedral Square and surroundings intelligently modernised, and there’s the cathedral itself. And the museum itself is certainly well worth an hour or two.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
I’ve long-admired the cathedral from the train between the north east and London; it sits in a glorious sequence with Durham, York, and Doncaster’s cathedral-sized minster church of St George’s.
There’s also a famous prehistoric site at Flag Fen and many years ago I’d been intrigued by a report that Peterborough Museum had opened a children’s gallery for about £300, which sounded rather enterprising.
Now, our expectations have changed. The museum has just spent £3.2m tidying itself up. That’s about 10,000 times the cost of the former children’s gallery.
In many ways, Peterborough has the archetypal large town/small city museum. It was founded by a local society in the 19th century, and occupied a variety of locations until, in about 1930, it ended up in what had once been “the grandest house in Peterborough”.
The museum society finally handed over responsibility to the city council in 1968 – after negotiations that had continued intermittently since 1897! Then, in 2010 the council handed it over to a trust, called Vivacity (a potentially strong brand, more appealing than alternatives such as Peterborough Leisure and Culture).
It’s a classic tale of private endeavour, nationalised when local authorities were expanding and partly privatised now they are shrinking.
Peterborough Museum is typical in other ways, too. It has a slightly unsuitable building (now in an urban backstreet, just off the main drag), a mixed collection, with a few stellar areas, and a track record of achievement, culminating in a large lottery grant.
Highlights of the refurbishment include brand spanking new natural science galleries. One is devoted to fabulous Jurassic marine fossils, retrieved from the area’s brick-making clay.
The other looks at local wildlife. Both are well interpreted with plenty for children and a sensible amount of text for adults. Pleasingly, the wildlife gallery displays its specimens of birds, mammals, insects and fungi in a diorama, divided into woodland, wetland and urban sections.
Model guillotines
In another new gallery, there’s a superb selection of things made from straw and bone by Napoleonic French captives in the world’s first purpose-built prisoner of war camp. My favourite items were intricate, decorative model guillotines.
I also learned how animal bone is worked, which I didn’t know before. However, the gallery is marred by the inclusion of a tacky “life in a barracks experience”, which is reminiscent of a 1980s heritage centre.
The social history gallery is a bit of a cliché too, with its Victorian and 1950s kitchens and sections on the impact of the railways and world war two. It seems to peter out somewhere around the 1980s.
The story of migration to Peterborough is addressed largely through text (rather than objects). There’s a quaint and probably misjudged case showing traditional Polish crafts and costume, rather than life as experienced by Poles in Peterborough today.
The building was once used as a hospital and the refurbishment opened up access to a rare, perhaps unique, late-Victorian operating theatre. It’s a striking and memorable space – high up the building, top lit and white tiled. Sick patients were winched up the central stairwell to receive their treatment. The room is crying out for a creative intervention by an artist, film-maker or dramatist.
Instead, the decision was made to fit the room out with “recreated operating table, surgical furniture and gas lighting” – and some unconvincing fake blood.
“Recreations” appear elsewhere in the museum. In the otherwise impressive wildlife diorama there are nasty plastic leaves – and I’ve no idea whether some of the things I saw there, such as fungi, were real or repro. In a former doctor’s consulting room, touchscreens on the history of the building are set unnecessarily into a nasty reproduction desk of vague period.
This kind of reproduction is not unusual and raises some wider questions about authenticity. I was left slightly unsure about what in the museum is real and what is, frankly, fake.
I’m uneasy about lottery money being used to “recreate” heritage, rather than conserve it. Sadly, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has spent millions of pounds in this way.
Along with Peterborough’s desk, trees and surgical furniture – and benches, bollards and cabinets around the land – other far more expensive examples of HLF-funded fakery include the infamous portico in the British Museum Great Court and railings round Birmingham Cathedral.
If nothing survives from the past to acquire or conserve, lottery money would be better spent on contemporary work that responds imaginatively to heritage, rather than on recreations.
Prognosis
This, of course, is a criticism of our business in general, not of Peterborough Museum in particular, where the cafe is comfortable and friendly, the toilets are fantastic, and the building is smart and bright, inside and out. The interpretation is crisp and clear, there are some fantastic objects and there are a decent number of seats.
There were, sadly, some shortcomings in the visitor experience. The Vikings exhibition, advertised outside on a big banner, was inexplicably closed.
The entry-desk displayed children’s activity backpacks, but I didn’t see a single child using them, perhaps because staff spent much of their time loudly discussing who was covering lunchtime breaks, rather than welcoming visitors. Judging by symbols around the building there is some kind of audioguide, but nothing seemed to be available for people to use.
Peterborough Museum is good compared with similar institutions, but with increasingly discerning audiences, and funders expecting excellence and impact, I’m still not sure it’s good enough to thrive in the long term. (That of course means many others are nowhere near good enough, which is the challenge of the Museums Association’s Museums 2020 initiative.)
So, is a trip to Peterborough worth a day of your time? The city turned out to have an unexpectedly elegant centre, with the smart Cathedral Square and surroundings intelligently modernised, and there’s the cathedral itself. And the museum itself is certainly well worth an hour or two.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
Project data
- Cost £3.2m
- Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund; Peterborough City Council; Vivacity
- Exhibition design Haley Sharpe Design
- Architects Matz
- AV, audio and interactive interpretation Centre Screen
- Interactives Realm Projects
- Decant and store Alban Shipping
- Build contractors Murray & Willis
- Surveys Stirling Maynard
- Display cases Meyvaert
