Transport Museum Research Articles

Making Histories in Transport Museums (review)

Making Histories in Transport Museums (review)

Stephen Halliday, Underground to Everywhere: London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital. Stroud: Sutton Publishing in association with London's Transport Museum, 2001. xvii + 230pp. 92 plates. Bibliography. £19.99

Stephen Halliday, Underground to Everywhere: London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital. Stroud: Sutton Publishing in association with London's Transport Museum, 2001. xvii + 230pp. 92 plates. Bibliography. £19.99 - Volume 30 Issue 3

Transport Museums: Another Kind of Historiography

The many purposes of museums and ways in which they communicate with their visitors are not well understood by transport historians. Transport museums are not normally appropriate places in which to raise the finer points of academic debate. However, they appeal to wide audiences and are important as locations in which visitors can explore collective identities grounded in particular readings of the interaction between transport and everyday life in the past. Artefacts are particularly important for this process. The academic historian who realizes this has much to offer the development of a dialogue in the museum between expert and lay knowledge of transport's past.

Obituary

Obituary

Thomas Cecil, the Compleat Islandman? In fond memory of Thomas Cecil, Rathlin Island, 1946–1996

Late in the 1970s, it was agreed that I should undertake fieldwork on Rathlin Island on behalf of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, with a view to recording oral narrative and history of the island extant at that time. As there was then no guest house or similar accommodation on the island, when I set off from Ballycastle in mid-May 1979 I was equipped with a tent as well as a tape recorder. Using a tried and tested technique for finding new contacts in remoter regions, I called in at the shop, where I struck up a conversation with a young woman who soon invited me to visit her home and meet her husband. It was in this way that, on 16 May 1979, I set up my first interview with a very remarkable man. Thomas Cecil was born on Rathlin Island in 1946, in time to see many aspects of traditional life in change and apparent decline.

IATM Aviation Museum Group Takes Flight

From modest beginnings as a sub‐group of the International Association of Transport and Communications Museums (IATM), the Avaiation Museum Group (IATM), the Aviation Museum Group (AGM) has taken on a vigorous life of its own, which is recounted by its chairman.

Resources round-up

London Transport Museum has launched a new educational programme aimed specifically at the under-fives. Every Wednesday nursery and pre-school children can be taken on a half-hour ‘Platform Promenade’ around the museum, led by an actor who uses rhythm, mime and song to bring the buses, trams and tube trains to life.

The contested interpretation of heritage landscapes in northern Ireland

Abstract Because the nature of society is both negotiated and contested, cultural artefacts, including heritage landscapes, will be invested with differing and conflicting meanings by various social groups. This is but one aspect of what might be termed the dissonance of heritage. The present discussion is framed within the context of the argument that relics of the past are a resource to be selectively exploited in accordance with contemporary political and cultural demands. The paper uses the example of Ulster's Folk and Transport Museum to examine these issues. It concludes that while consumers do appreciate the cultural complexity of the Museum's role as one medium of communication of identity in a contested society, the institution's effectiveness in this regard is undermined by the middle‐class bias of those consumers.

Technology Museums in the United Kingdom

TECHNOLOGY MUSEUMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM ALEXANDER HAYWARD A wide range of museums and related organizations preserve and present Britain’s technological heritage. It is not possible here to men­ tion all of them, let alone to give each the attention it might merit. Instead, I will examine in some detail those undertakings that illus­ trate various approaches to museum provision and operation. The largest museum in Britain concerned with technological mate­ rial is the National Museum of Science and Industry, consisting of the Science Museum in London and its outstations: the National Mu­ seum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford and the Na­ tional Railway Museum in York. The Science Museum was founded in 1857, and because of its long history has been able to amass large collections relating to power technology, transport, communications, and manufacturing, all of which combine to serve as a prime taxo­ nomic record of industrialization in the United Kingdom.1 Recent collecting has concentrated on significant post-1960 material. To­ gether with gallery updates and redisplays, new permanent galleries, and “Technology Futures” exhibits, this is improving the representa­ tion of modern science, technology, and medicine throughout the museum. The National Museum of Science and Industry is classified as a “national” museum. Such museums by definition receive the bulk of their funding from central government and hold collections of na­ tional and international significance. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, unlike England, have museums of their “national” cultures: the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, the National Mu­ seum of Wales in Cardiff, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast. They do not specialize in the areas of science, technology, and medicine on the same scale as the National Museum of Science and Industry but do consider them as part of the whole range of subjects that constitute Mr. Hayward is external affairs coordinator for the Science Museum. He is cur­ rently researching the British airplane engine industry during World War I. 'For an overview of the history of the National Museum of Science and Industry and its key exhibits, see N. Cossons, ed., Making of the Modem World (London, 1992).© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3701-0006$01.00 138 Technology Museums in the United Kingdom 139 natural and human history. In addition, the national museums in Scotland and Wales incorporate smaller museums that focus on vari­ ous aspects of technology, such as the Museum of Flight at North Berwick, and the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum in Cardiff. In Northern Ireland, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Holywood is concerned with the transport heritage of the province. England does have other “national” museums whose collections relate to the history of technology. These include the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the National Mari­ time Museum in London, and the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. Their holdings reflect some of the variety of applications of technology and present it within interestingly different contexts such as art and design, and military and economic history. There are many other museums organized on a regional or local basis that complement the national collections of science and technol­ ogy. The funding of all these museums is quite involved. Those funded by local government tend to be long established, generalist in approach (although sometimes with branch museums of technol­ ogy), and based in towns or cities. The majority of recently established museums focus on a particular site or subject area and are often constituted as independent educational charitable trusts. These aim to generate as much of their own income as possible. The best have adopted innovative and entrepreneurial methods of operation that have helped enliven the museum scene generally. Nonetheless, these independent museums are frequently supported to a considerable extent by local and central government grant aid. Major technology collections are located in historic manufacturing centers such as Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Bristol, Glas­ gow, and Leeds. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester had its origins in the late 1960s, when objects demonstrating the industrial history of northwest England were assembled in a museum on the campus of the University of Manchester Institute of Science...

London’s Smaller Technology Collections: A Sampler

LONDON’S SMALLER TECHNOLOGY COLLECTIONS: A SAMPLER JOHN ROBINSON Faced with the rich hyperbole frequently invoked by menu writers in European restaurants, visitors will do well to look for guidance to what the locals are eating at adjacent tables. In London you will be fortunate if this includes steak-and-kidney pie. Properly prepared, this traditional English dish combines cubes of raw beefsteak with a few portions of kidney, diced small to release as much as possible of their flavor and baked slowly under a pastry crust. Each ingredient contributes separately and distinctively to the richness of the whole. Such a dish will fortify you to look at some of the two-hundred-odd museums in Greater London. Like the steak in your pie, the larger institutions will bring a familiar taste to your palate. Their displays reflect London’s many roles as a center of government, an imperial capital, and the hub of the nation’s transport system. They also pro­ vide a showcase for the broad range of cultural, anthropological, and zoological material brought back to London as the fruits of imperial expansion. The complex of national institutions at South Kensington will need no more introduction to visitors than do the British Museum in Bloomsbury, the London Transport Museum recently redisplayed in part of what was Covent Garden’s flower market, or the National Maritime Museum, established in a former royal palace at Greenwich in 1934. The Museum of London, adjacent to the Barbican arts and residen­ tial complex in the City of London, and the Imperial War Museum in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital in Lambeth, similarly exhibit much of technological interest among their displays devoted to wider topics. All these institutions welcome many hundreds of thousands of visitors from overseas each year and are justly popular for the variety of their displays and the excellence of their publications, some Mr. Robinson took early retirement in 1994 after twenty-four years as a technology curator at various museums, including the Science Museum. He now specializes in maritime history and chairs the Technical Committee of the National Historic Ships Committee.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/96/3701-0008$01.00 151 152 John Robinson of which are published in the principal European languages and in Japanese. With such a breadth of choice, it would be easy to overlook those smaller institutions whose distinctive and unfamiliar flavor add a kid­ neylike piquancy to the museum pie that London offers its visitors. Several rely on volunteers to welcome visitors, and their limited open­ ing hours mean that visits have to be carefully planned. One such is the Musical Museum, founded in 1963 in a disused church in Brent­ ford by Frank Holland to preserve and demonstrate an exceptional collection of unusual automata. Guided tours take place each week­ end, when visitors are shown how digitally controlled music repro­ duction had its orgins decades before the compact disc. Conservation of this remarkable collection occupies most of the intervening week­ days, with occasional evening concerts at which rare music rolls are played. Within a few hundred meters of the Musical Museum is the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, housed in a former Metropolitan Water Board pumping station. Since 1973 a small but loyal team of volun­ teers has restored a collection of beam pumping engines, the largest such collection to survive anywhere, and imported other engines from elsewhere to complete their coverage. With the engineering expertise thus built up over twenty-five years, the Kew Bridge En­ gines Trust now tackles dismantling, removal, and restoration proj­ ects for other preservation agencies. The largest of the steam engines working at Kew Bridge, and the largest working anywhere in the world, is a 90-inch Cornish engine (fig. 1). When it was designed, engineers had only an imperfect un­ derstanding of the strength of their materials. The collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879, with the loss of seventy-five lives, horrified engi­ neers into testing the strengths of their materials rigorously. A shrewd Scot named David Kirkaldy (1820—97) perceived an opening for a testing facility independent of contractors and their clients alike. Close to...

Changing Routes? The New London Transport Museum

CHANGING ROUTES'? THE NEW LONDON TRANSPORT MUSEUM COLIN DIVALL London Transport (LT) has provided some of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the city it serves. The red, double-decker, open-platformed bus; silver “tube” trains burrowing through the soft London clay and traveling through suburbia to the fringes of the countryside; the diagrammatic Underground map—all are linked in the mind’s eye by LT’s “bull’s eye with a bar” symbol. Since 1980, the story of LT and its predecessors has been told in one of the splendid cast-iron and glass buildings erected in the 1870s to house the fruit, flower, and vegetable stalls of Covent Garden. Located in one of the most fashionable and popular parts of London, the museum rapidly became a favorite with tourists and Londoners alike. But this popularity brought its own problems. Packed with old vehicles, the building was very cramped. Moreover, there was little control over the internal environment, and prospects for the conser­ vation of artifacts were bleak. In 1993, the museum took the bold decision to close for nine months to allow a complete refurbishment. Costing £4 million, the result was nearly a third more display space, amounting now to some 25,000 square feet, several air-conditioned galleries, much-improved facilities for visitors—and the opportunity to recast the museum’s philosophy of interpretation. Although the museum is a wholly owned subsidiary of LT, the curatorial staff say they were given a free hand in reviewing the content of the galleries. Project developer Mark Dennison, assisted by designers from the Donald Janssen Design Office of The Hague, wanted a greater emphasis on people and their journeys, both for work and pleasure, and on the contribution of public transport to the social and physical development of London. London Transport’s head office should be pleased with their efforts. The new exhibition subtly questions the notion, much favored by the present governDr . Divall, formerly a lecturer in social studies of technology at Manchester Metro­ politan University, recently assumed ajoint appointment in the Department of History at the University of York and the Institute of Railway Studies at the National Railway Museum.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3603-0008$01.00 630 The New London Transport Museum 631 ment, that London’s transport problems can be solved by requiring LT to run at a profit, splitting up the organization, and selling off the dismembered pieces to the private sector. By virtue of sheer bulk, the old trams, buses, railway locomotives, and Underground cars inevitably dominate the museum. Always pop­ ular, their attractiveness to visitors is now enhanced by a much greater freedom to board several of the vehicles. They do not stand alone, however. Well-established techniques of interpretation place the tech­ nical development of each vehicle in the social, economic, legislative, and regulatory context of its period. Textual panels, many liberally interspersed with large photographs, accomplish this task, along with small touch screens (the work, along with other audiovisual treat­ ments, of Robert Lansdown) that offer a short selection of slides and brief texts relating to individual vehicles. London Transport’s contribution to the social, economic, and phys­ ical development of London and the surrounding regions is another important theme. It is most obviously treated in the section “Beyond the Suburbs” and in an eight-minute video wall on “The Growth of London.” But many of the panels and touch screens in the other displays also tell of the social and economic purposes and impact of the system. Mannequins in several vehicles give a more immediate sense of period and purpose, enhanced by the occasional use of suit­ ably attired actors who “crew” some of the vehicles (fig. 1). The technical mysteries of operation are not neglected. Several archival films, mostly of LT publicity material, combine with the lib­ eral use of audio recordings to convey some idea of the method of working the obsolete systems. (Only the sulfurous fumes of the steamworked , subsurface railway lines of the 19th century and the stench of the manure-infested streets of the era of horse-drawn vehicles are missing!) Looking...

Changing Routes? The New London Transport Museum

Le Musee des Transports de Londres qui represente l'un des plus celebres symboles de la ville, a ferme, en 1993, durant 9 mois pour une complete remise a neuf, et pour replacer le developpement technique de chaque vehicule dans le contexte social et economique de sa periode

Museums and the Appropriation of Culture

Part 1: Please don't touch the ceiling - the culture of appropriation museum theatre in the 1990s - trailblazer or camp-follower? childhood's pattern - appropriation by generation presenting a divisive culture - two exhibitions at the Ulster folk and transport museum appropriating the visitor by addressing the second person mobile museum in India labour history in museums Briton, Boer and black savage South Africa an archaeology of the DeWitt Wallace gallery at colonial Williamsburg museums and indigenous peoples in Canada. Part 2 Reviews, edited by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill: museums and galleries and their audiences - a literature review the museum and education - a new gallery at the British Museum, London Snibston Discovery Park - a review from an Indian perspective the alchemy of play - Eureka! the Museum of Children archaeologists and aesthetes call for papers for forthcoming volumes.

Using STATUS at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum for a radio archive

This paper will discuss the development of an information management system providing access to radio archive material. A formal television and radio archive agreement between the BBC in Northern Ireland and the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in 1989 led to the decision to use STATUS for the management of the radio archive. An example of the record structure is given and some details of ways of searching.

Conflict‐resolution in Northern Ireland: the role of a folk museum

Open‐air museums recall and honour the past. Some, at least, strive to heal present‐day community antagonisms. Such is the case of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, located near Belfast, whose Director since 1988 wrote the following article. Dr Gailey is interested in seasonal customs and ethnological cartography, among other things, and wrote Rural Houses of the North of Ireland and Irish Drama.

The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History. Edited by Michael McCaughan and John Appleby. Pp viii, 177. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies and Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. 1989. £12.95 hardback; £7.50 paperback.

The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History. Edited by Michael McCaughan and John Appleby. Pp viii, 177. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies and Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. 1989. £12.95 hardback; £7.50 paperback. - Volume 27 Issue 108

Tube Centenary: 100 Years of Underground Electric Railways Exhibition at the London Transport Museum, 18 May 1990 to 6 October 1991

Tube Centenary: 100 Years of Underground Electric Railways Exhibition at the London Transport Museum, 18 May 1990 to 6 October 1991

Tube Centenary: 100 Years of Underground Electric Railways Exhibition at the London Transport Museum, 18 May 1990 to 6 October 1991

Tube Centenary: 100 Years of Underground Electric Railways Exhibition at the London Transport Museum, 18 May 1990 to 6 October 1991

On the Railway Museum Symposium held by the Commission on Transport Museum of Omiya City(Correspondence)

On the Railway Museum Symposium held by the Commission on Transport Museum of Omiya City(Correspondence)

The National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham, England

These are not good times for the British economy. Many of the industries that Britain formerly dominated are now in decline, hobbled by inefficiencies and undercut by foreign competition. In some cases, they have all but disappeared. So it has been with the British motorcycle industry, once the world leader in technological development, market share, and success on the racetrack. A few specialist manufacturers soldier on, but the commanding position now is occupied by Japan. Britain today has little more than its memories and the surviving examples of the machines that once put it at the forefront of the world motorcycle industry. Until recently, there was no adequate memorial to these past glories, although representative collections of motorcycles could be viewed at London's Science Museum, at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, and in several transport museums. In 1984, the British motorcycle finally received its proper due with the opening of the National Motorcycle Museum. Situated on the outskirts of Birmingham, the historical center of the industry, the museum is the culmination of the dedicated efforts of individual enthusiasts who have been supported financially by the city of Birmingham and by private contributions. The museum occupies a new building that is divided into a main hall and four smaller ones. Visitors enter through the main hall, where they can view a few motorcycles on rotating turntables and make purchases in a well-stocked book and souvenir shop. The first smaller hall displays a collection of motorcycles intended to depict Sixty Glorious Years (1901-61) of British motorcycles. The second and third halls contain machines with engine capacities of under and over 500 cc, respectively. The last hall is devoted to competition machinery. Altogether, nearly 300 motorcycles are on display. All are in excel-