Author Archives: raesquiggles
Zetland – the end of a journey
You’re never more than 3 hours away ( by car) from the sea in the British Isles, and it is to the coast I come for my final post. In small communities up and down the UK there are fishing museums, museums in lighthouses or coastal signal towers, and plenty of art galleries by the […]
The three York museums
There are three museums in the city of York: The Yorkshire Museum, York Castle Museum and the Yorvik Centre, and to some extent they represent the past, present and the possible future of museums. The Yorkshire Museum is old and was founded in 1830 by Yorkshire Philosophical Society to house their collection of geological and […]
The search for a xylophone
I’ve done this A to Z blog challenge for a few years and the biggest challenge remains the letter X. But this year I thought this would be easy, think of an object beginning with X and a museum which has one. X-ray didn’t get me too far, the Marie Curie Museum is in Paris. […]
War museums – the narrators of history
At the height of the First World War, Sir Alfred Mond MP, suggested to the then prime minister Lloyd George that a national war museum should be established. The war cabinet agreed. Mond travelled to the Western Front to study the best way to organise a collection based on war. And after a request from […]
V&A – all the arts
It’s our last trip down Exhibition Road in London, to the bottom corner, to the substantial building that was once known as the South Kensington Museum, then the Victoria and Albert Museum, and now simply the V&A. The V&A blurs the division between the already loose definitions of museum and gallery, it is both. It […]
Underground museums, the secret bunkers of Britain
Deep underground in Uxbridge is a museum. It didn’t begin life as a museum. It was dug out of the ground in 1938, by contractors, who were sworn to secrecy. The construction included pipework, electricity, telephone lines and sewers. The walls are made out of concrete, and a metre thick. Sitting above the ceiling is […]
The four Tates
There isn’t one Tate gallery, there are in fact four: two in London, one in Liverpool, the fourth in St. Ives, Cornwall. But the original Tate galley – Tate Britain – was initially known as the National Gallery of British Art. How did it end up being named after a sugar merchant? Tate Britain is […]
Science Museum – the problem of storage
For my N post I mentioned a road in London, Exhibition Road, that has three national museums situated on it. Today, it is the turn of the Science Museum, which is half way down the street. This is probably my most personal post because many years ago as a student I spent a year working […]
Railway museums, the big and small
Railways were not invented in the 19th Century. If you consider a track made from timber, you have a railway. These kind of trackways have been found on the causeways of the Somerset Levels and dating to around 5000 years ago! Moving forward, miners used wagons drawn by animals on tracks in Cumbria during the […]
The Queen’s Gallery, the royal collections
There are thirteen royal residences, some lived in others not, and the Queen moves from one palace to another, and in her absence, these royal homes are opened and transformed temporarily into Art Galleries. As it happens the Royal Collection is the largest private art collection in the world. The collection is owned by the […]
The Quiet Writer 