Gnome and Away at the Garden Museum

The Garden Museum has always been a firm favourite with us here at The Ministry of Curiosity, so it's sad and exciting to report that from the 30th October 2015 the museum will be closing up, cataloguing objects and packing them away for a redisplay due to open early in 2017. But before it does, you need to take a long look at their Gnome and Away exhibition that ingeniously shows off some of the processes of decanting, packing and moving objects from the gallery and into storage.

So many hoes in here where do I begin? 

Largely funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund the development of the Museum currently housed in the deconsecrated and beautiful parish church of St Mary-at-Lambeth will give the collection more space in the doubling of gallery spaces, new pavilions for earning spaces and the much needed but not so sexy work on the electrics and drainage. There is even an exciting plan to resurrect some of John Tradescant’s ‘Ark’ an infamous cabinet of curiosities that became the first museum to open to the public in the seventeenth century. With many objects collected by the naturalist and traveller now owned by the Ashmolean museum the garden museum are working closely with the Oxford institution to bring the objects back to Lambeth and closer to the collector himself whose tomb lies in the garden of the museum.

But of course, the museums intent to show off the history of the nation’s gardens from 2017 comes at no small cost. To reach their target they need to take an additional £500,000 in donations and thus have asked the public to contribute by adopting an object, not a fresh idea but an effective one. The donor will not only get the satisfaction of helping out a small museum but also attend a special private view of the new galleries and be credited on object labels. Here are a few special objects up for donor grabs including a miniature flower pot for £250.

 

Does this have your name on it? 

However before opening the new galleries the staff of the museum have to take on a museum mission that is a full decant of the building - no easy feat. In anticipation of this workload the curatorial team have provided visitors a sneak peak of what closing a museum entails. Offering visitors a ‘last chance’ to see the Garden museum's unique collection, the Gnome and Away exhibition invites visitors to rifle through the drawers of photographs, peer at the salon hang of their impressive art collection and gaze into open crates with objects ready to be packed. An even more delightful touch is that they have used catalogue cards instead of labels and each card details storage guidelines, conservation considerations and the standard reference of collection and accession number. For the fellow museum professional the exhibition even boasts a cataloguing table complete with gloves, cards, and tissue paper, hopefully reminding the public that the considerations of temporarily closing a museum go further than stopping visitation. A clear and concise plan of action for the objects is vital to any decant and the opportunity to catalogue, conserve and reconsider the collection during this downtime is vital for the longevity of any collection.

Here at The Ministry we urge you to visit the museum, and treat yourself to a bit of cake in the cafe. The beetroot and chocolate cake in the garden is a brilliant treat.

The Museum, Café and shop are open 10:30 - 17:00 Sunday to Friday and 10:30 - 16:00 on Saturdays; last orders in the cafe are 30 minutes before we close.

What the frack is going on with SMG?

Having recently returned from my holiday (hey even Ministers of Curiosity need time off) there is only one question on my mind: what the frack is going on with the Science Museum Group?

It all appears to have started with an article in the Manchester Evening News claiming that the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester was under threat from the big bosses of the Science Museum Group (SMG). MOSI has only recently joined SMG in 2011 after a round of government funding cuts. Closing one of SMGs northern museums (the Media Museum in Bradford, MOSI in Manchester and the Railway Museum in York) is just one of the options SMG is considering addressing its enormous budget deficit.

The outcry from this announcement has been enormous in the museum community. Some have pointed out that a strong North-South divide has been dredged up in the ensuing finger pointing. Why aren’t London museums closing? Why is it only the North that must suffer?

The Museums Association had a sniff around as well to see if the story that the Evening News was reporting had any legitimacy. The answer is, well yes. The statement from Science Museum Director Ian Blatchford that started all the arguments came as a response to an additional 10% proposed cut in government spending for museums, “I would rather have three world class museums than four mediocre ones.’

I think it’s probably worth pointing out that a) the Science Museum Group could well sell on one of their museums rather than closing it and b) maybe I have missed something, but why are we focusing on MOSI here? Where did anyone say the Manchester site is the one that would be closed down? To be honest, I’d be more nervous if I was the National Media Museum. MOSI has an enormous amount of community support and impressive visitor numbers. The NMeM has…well it has the lowest visitor numbers in the group and shares specialties with the core collections in London. In fact, the Science Museum planning to open not one but two galleries based around media technology: the Information Age Gallery and the ‘Media Space’ specifically meant to show off the NMeM’s collections.

Plans for Media Space at the Science Museum 

I cannot help but wonder if the announcement wasn’t actually a brilliant piece of strategy on the part of Ian Blatchford. Sure, people are now vilifying him and the big bad South Kensington museum, but he had to do something to get SMG noticed. We have now arrived at the point where spending cuts are biting not only regional museums but the nationals as well. That’s not to say the past several years haven’t been terrible for each museum in the sector, but we are starting to see real consequences for even the most established of museums.

But why is the Science Museum suffering more than its South Kensington neighbours? Probably for the same reason the Royal Institution is always under threat. Science is just not sexy to funders. You can’t possibly compare the amount of corporate funding somewhere like the National Gallery or the V&A receive to the Science Museum. And yes you can talk about mis-managing money or whether MOSI should have been brought on in the first place. But at the end of the day, there’s only one culprit here and it’s not Ian Blatchford. Maybe now the government will listen when we say you cannot cut funding to the bone and ask for ever higher performance indicators. UK museums are being brought to their knees and the façade of business as usual is starting to crack.

This is not to say we in anyway agree to the idea of closing any SMG sites- only to say that the blame lies with the relentless cuts for the arts. Something has to change. At the Ministry we love anything that gets people talking about museums but don’t waste your breath on the big bad SMG. Get out there and do something about it- sign the petitions, use the twitter hashtags (#savemosi), talk to your MPs, and visit your local museums as much as you can. I for one am happy to see SMG all over the news. Maybe people will finally start to see that something needs to be done.

Petitions to the HM Treasury can be found here:

http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-national-media-museum-bradford

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/indepth/savethenrm/petition/

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/science-museum-group-save-the-museum-of-science-and-industry-mosi

If you want to read more, we would recommend this piece in the Guardian by Alice Bell and Kieron Flanagan http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2013/jun/06/science-museum-group-manchester-london

And now we brace ourselves for a torrent of jokes at the Science Museum’s expense at the next Museums Showoff….