In the summer, I went to Derby to visit three museums. One was a multi-million pound regeneration of a UNESCO heritage site, another, a local museum and gallery with a special exhibition about the town’s most famous artist, and the third, a house museum that included the UK’s largest toy theatre collection, an exhibition about the Tomb Raider games and a Victorian bathroom the visitors can use at their convenience. The third museum was my favourite, it was also the shonkiest. I love a shonky museum.
My favourite museum, one of my favourite places in the world, is Doctor Johnson’s House. It is a small museum, probably underfunded (at least, I’d like to see it have more money) but it’s not shonky, probably due to the principles established by its founder. So what is shonky museum? It’s a museum with a confused collection that shows residues of past fads in accumulation and presentation.. and I love them.
My Platonic idea of a shonky museum
This imaginary museum is in a medium-sized town, housed in an old library or mid-sized late Victorian building. It may have a small modern addition, probably with toilets and a school visitor’s room.
It started as a local antiquary society and the original museum was in their meeting place or the house of a leading member. This leading member had an interest in something fairly obscure, say Etruscan pottery, which forms the core of the collection. This has been bulked up over the years by the various donations of other members and often a bunch of stuff the town council had which they didn’t know what to do with. There will be fossils and ammonites, some stuffed animals, items brought back by members in colonial service, some old toys and packaging, a few neolithic axe-heads and maybe a hoard discovered by some local detectorists. There will always be at least one shard of Roman Samian-ware. If the original collector had the funds and contacts, some of the Etruscan pottery may be significant but generally it will be full of the odds and ends found in any local museum. The modern curator will be faintly embarrassed of their collection and squeamish about providence.
In the early days, a person would have needed to book a visit to the collection but some time in 1934 it became available to the general public on weekends and bank holidays. Leading up to the Diamond Jubilee in 1977, it moved to some defunct library or council building where they now open Saturdays and weekdays, except Mondays and Wednesday afternoons. It had a long, cumbersome name but the locals called it something shorter (if not merely, The Museum).
At some point in the early 90s, the museum won a grant from the National Lottery and used it to modernise. They changed the name to something cool and flashy, but the locals kept calling it the name they always had. They invested in a new, immersive, themed part of the building, probably setting up a Victorian kitchen. This allowed them to display all the old packets of things they had laying around, use the old mangle and set up the cast iron cooking range that had been clogging up storage space. They filled it with replica cooking utensils and that plastic food you only ever see in museums. (I’ve been to so many of these places I now recognise the exact types of bread rolls, cabbages and meats, they all seem to be from the same place. They are expensive, a small mediaeval pie costs £35). This food will not be very well maintained, the tastier items will display a child’s bite mark and the drinks will be covered in a layer of grey dust.
They have also installed my favourite item in a shonky museum, a mannequin with a repeating speech track near it. In this case the mannequin has been dressed as a Victorian maid in a mob cap, the costume now looking slightly threadbare and seedy. The voice track is of the woman complaining about all the chores and tasks she has to do, there may also be the sound of servant’s bells. She will have been played by an actor putting on a poor accent, full Eliza Doolittle if near London, Vera Duckworth if near Manchester - you get the idea. The mannequin will be just that, no animatronics or anything and the looped speech track will mean that spending too long in the Victorian kitchen will be unbearable.
Coming up to the millennium, out museum received a grant for the big two-zero-zero-zero. They renamed the museum again, to a shorter version of the original name. The locals still call it what they always have. They updated their explanation cards and signage to make it more visual, but made it less informative. They brought in a small section where children can try on old clothes, top hats and mob-caps but many of these are now a little ripped and tatty. They also installed a number of interactive features, either with screens of mechanical sliding foors or pop ups - most of which no longer work.
And since then, that’s it, because the new rejuvenation was canceled after the 2008 crash, then there was austerity, then Brexit and councils don’t have the money to spend on nice things anymore.
The council will hire a curator, who may have a number of sites to oversee but most of the day-to-day running will be by volunteers. These will mostly be retired folk, maybe the odd student for a few months. There will be two types of volunteers; the ones who do it to get out the house and talks to people, and the ones who have an obsessive knowledge of the town or some of the items in the collection (that Etruscan pottery again). The volunteers will incessantly snipe and bicker at each other for updating the visitor book wrong or setting out the souvenir pencils incorrectly. However, all the volunteers will be warm and welcoming to visitors and will be a good percentage of the museum’s charm.
I’m not sure I’ve been to anywhere that is all of this, but I’ve been to many that are some of it. I may have been taking the piss a little but I love these places and I hope they keep muddling through for decades to come.
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