After Banksy’s blockbuster exhibition last year, are museums finally cool? asks Laura Dixon
I’m not sure what I think about museums. On the one hand, I love things to do. Once my out-of-town friends have been to the Suspension Bridge, the Arnolfini and Ashton Court, I’m not sure exactly what to show them of Bristol. So the new M-Shed museum, opening next spring, could be a great solution. On the other hand, I find local history really boring. Last year’s Banksy exhibition did some really great things for the City Museum, but really, underneath it all, wasn’t the excitement all about the fact that he’d broken all the rules and brought anarchy to a dry and dusty establishment? That act of rebellion was right up my street but I’m not sure I’d go back to check out the geological exhibits I missed.
I was thinking about this when I started investigating what’s going on at Princes Wharf. The former Industrial Museum building, on the railway tracks across the bridge from the Arnolfini, has had a full-scale £26.5m revamp dedicated to creating a museum all about Bristol. My heart sank a bit – what on earth is all that money going on? And when I heard that the old bus that was in the Industrial Museum was to play a key part in the new M-Shed, it sank even further. Hardly a revolution, I thought. But that’s before I knew the full picture.
“It’s a really innovative project,” explains Lucie Edmonds, exhibition interpreter at Event Communications. The exhibition design company was tasked with the role of creating the displays inside and certainly has the credentials to pull it off, having previously been contracted to work for the V&A, Natural History Museum and many other world-class galleries. “The challenge is to make it more than a local history museum, and with its strong focus on community, it’s really unusual. The content, for a start, is open-ended and we’re using iconic items from around the city but reinterpreting them, so you can experience what it was like at great moments of history in the city and find out about its people.”
Once the dust has cleared from the renovation work in the next month, the former 1950s transit shed will be unveiling its new look. Already above the graffitied hoardings you can see repointed brickwork, newly painted sliding doors and some stunning floor to ceiling windows. These are a key part of the design, according to Rebecca Burton, deputy head of Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives.
“What strikes you most is the amazing picture frame views of Bristol,” she says. “You can’t get them anywhere else. We’ve also got some real feature spaces in the museum: the galleries are large, the foyer areas are huge and there’s a real sense of arrival. We’ve got hanging cantilevered staircases built by a local engineering company in Taunton and the views are a huge part of it. They provide an interesting context set against the exhibits.”
The museum is set on three floors, with three permanent exhibition spaces, a cafe, the obligatory museum shop and an event space at the top. The first gallery, on the ground floor, is about Place. It will include the old Lodekka bus from the Industrial Museum, reinterpreted by Event Communications to explore Bristolians’ journeys around the city, as well as a 19th century fire engine and models of ships. “It’s more than transport,” says Lucie, “it’s about people and how they interacted with their landscape. This gallery is about place and physical Bristol, and how people have overcome the city’s hills and rivers to get around.”
Upstairs in the second gallery, the focus is on People. “It includes the famous people who lived and worked in Bristol, from Brunel to Banksy,” says Rebecca, ”but also the ordinary people and their roles in Bristol’s key industries, such as the tobacco industry.”
If you’re as bored as I am with celebrity culture, don’t worry. This gallery isn’t a celebration of the people we already know everything about – it’s more about how Bristol’s people have touched the wider world, in all its aspects, from trading to travel and transatlantic slavery. They haven’t shied away from the big issues, and lessons were learned from the Commonwealth and Empire Museum’s recent slavery exhibition, as well as community consultation, to make sure that such a sensitive issue was handled correctly.
The final gallery is called Living Bristol and is all about social lives in the city. In the past year, the museum has called out to the wider public for contributions to help illustrate what life was like in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, and these rich contributions form part of this exhibition, from winkle pickers and teddy-boy suits to magazines and interior design. Key events like the last flight of Concorde, living through the Blitz and the Beatles playing at Colston Hall form part of the experience – you’ll be able to join the crowd as the historic events happen.
What feels particularly exciting about the project is the creation of a living museum. At several points through the building, visitors will be able to contribute their ideas and experiences of the city, either on paper or via computer terminals to be stored in the archives for use at a later date. The museum won’t feel dried out and dusty, full of exhibits you’ve seen before, but instead will retain a vibrancy and relevance for all of us, whether locals or visitors to the city.
And talking of locals, it would be remiss of me not to mention the local media’s views on the subject. Over the past few years, there has been an enormous amount of vitriol spewed about the new museum, how it’s wasting money on nonsense, a project doomed to failure and a burden on our future tax bills. (For the record, the museum didn’t spend any money on creating the name M-Shed – it paid a company to test the name with community groups and get their approval, which sounds fair enough.)
I’m not sure what’s to be gained from knocking a project that seeks to celebrate the many ways in which Bristol has changed the world. And with such a wide-ranging remit, from the Romans to the Bristol Sound, it’s got enough sources of civic pride to impress anyone, even local history snobs like me. The real shame about this museum is not that it’s cost £26.5m but that we didn’t have a way of celebrating our city and its people already.