The Museum of London

Today we had the benefit of a presentation on the formulation and evolution of the Museum of London’s prehistory display, excellently explicated by the museum’s senior curator of prehistory, Jon Cotton. Mr. Cotton explained a bit about the history of the museum and its displays, as well as its aim to be the “one-stop shop” for the history of the city proper. The institution of the Museum of London really began in 1976, when the Guildhall museum, set up by the City Corporation library committee in the 1820’s, and the Museum Commission of 1911 joined forces on the museum’s current site. While the city proper museum does display artifacts and information that is connected to the Thames (how could it not?), the second location, by Canary Wharf in Docklands, specifically deals with the history of London as a port city. Their third site, in conjunction with the London Archaeological commission, has over 5000 sets of site records for the archaeological work that has been done in the city, and the museum archaeologists are based there. The main location, though, is the world’s largest urban history museum, and views London primarily as an urban settlement.

The other two sites, and the stated aims of the main location, make Mr. Cotton’s work a little bit more complicated, since his subjects are intimately connected with both the port and archaeological finds. His particular difficulty is in the conventional conception that London did not begin until the Romans landed, when thriving communities of pre-historic peoples had already settled the area long before the invaders arrived. Even in the English national curriculum, the history coursework begins with settlers and does not deal with prehistory except cursorily.

The museum has done a great deal of surveying and statistic gathering work, so they have a very precise view of their visitor demographic, what they visit the museum for, and what they respond to. Their survey results show that they have a great deal of English-speaking foreign visitors from what the Museum affectionately calls “the old colonies,” but they also have visits from increasingly more Londoners. The Museum boasts about 400,000 visitors per year, of which 50% are Londoners and schoolchildren, 40% are tourists, and the rest are from the non-London United Kingdom. This museum makes absolutely no concessions for non-English speakers, unlike many other libraries and museums that we visited, but they do try to avoid text-heavy displays.

Out of over 2000 “vox pop” surveys done by the museum, about 30% of the respondents immediately referred to dinosaurs when asked what first came to their minds when they thought about prehistory. Only about 5% of those surveyed said something like “the time before written records.” The museum and Mr. Cotton’s job is to educate their visitors about their conception of prehistory as the time before the Romans landed in Londinum, although prehistory usually has different meanings for different countries and cultures. They had three ideas in mind that they wanted to communicate to the average visitor to the prehistory display: to think of prehistoric humans as thinking, intelligent human beings, just like us; that the power of landscape affects all human beings, and how the place affects us; and the orientation of humanity around the river Thames, as a force connecting prehistory to the present.

To this end, the Museum set out to create a new exhibit that drew on the strengths of the original prehistory exhibit while updating and refining it, as well as creating an entirely new, comfortable, and interactive space. The early exhibits were panel dominated with a great deal of reading, but there was a way for people to interact with the exhibit, through tactile observation of the artifacts. They hired a group of retail outlet designers and worked with them very closely to create an exhibit that ended up signaling a move away from the traditional museum exhibit to more of an art gallery display. The designers were very concerned with the feel of the space and the textures that informed that space; and the museum curators had four notions for the design—the climate, the river, the people, and the legacy of prehistoric London. Together, they created three overriding design elements that draw together the display: that of the design wall, which was done from the point of view of the prehistoric peoples and features imagined dialogue of those peoples; the River Wall, featuring the “gifts to the water” display, which flows through the exhibit just as the Thames flows through the city; and the six island displays that guide the viewer through the prehistory experience, all featuring thick-cut glass with oak finishes.

To hear about the development of the display and to actually see it were totally different experiences, of course, and the effect was surprising in many ways. The librarian purist in me cringed at the thought of retail designers doing this museum work, but this was possibly the reason for the ease with which the display was navigated and interpreted and the extreme aesthetic appeal. The prehistory display was, by far, the best in the museum, and it is beautifully done. The wood and glass, accented with blues and greens, creates exactly the feel of the cold natural space before the city was built. One element that Mr. Cotton did not mention when telling us about the design was the addition of the overhead speakers with precision projection of sound that was often surprisingly pleasant and coordinated with the text of the displays. This was an excellent exploration of the time, work, and money that goes into creating an informative and engaging museum display and introduced many ideas that can and should be used in the same endeavors in the library environment.