International Slavery Museum - a case study for a good museum

What is a museum? The answer to this may at first be obvious - surely it is simply a place where objects and artefacts from the past are preserved and put on show for the public to see. Originating from the Greek Mouseion, which denoted a place or temple dedicated to the Muses (the patron divinities in Greek mythology of the arts), the word evokes grand museums like the British Museum in London and the Smithsonian in Washington DC. With both these, impressive buildings house equally special collections charting thousands of years of civilisation.

But in reality the scope and purpose of museums around the world vary enormously, both in what they conserve and how they present it to the public. In today’s modern age, where the thirst for lifelong learning has never been greater, institutions need to work harder in the way they interact with visitors. Displaying classical objects in dusty museums cases is not enough to win over a demanding public, no matter how rare and significant the pieces. 

Of course a good museum starts with its collection, without that it is not a museum. This however is only the starting point. For me, museums need to use a range of tools and techniques to tell the story of the past. When I visit a museum I want to be able to get a sense of the world in years gone by - presented correctly objects really can speak a thousand words, as BBC Radio 4’s recent Shakespeare’s Restless World proved. Touring galleries, I want to know what people thought, what they would have seen, what they would have smelt and what they would have heard. Objects and artefacts can go a long way to telling the past’s story, but good museums supplement with photos, videos, models and other effects.   

In terms of a case study for a good museum, I think Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum ticks all the boxes, somewhere I had the pleasure of visiting at the weekend. The middle passage gallery, which charts the history of the terrible conditions slaves faced as they were squashed into cramped boats on the torturous journey from Africa to the New World, is particularly effective. The shackles that were put on the enslaved people are displayed in well illuminated cabinets. There is a chilling model of a ship, based on contemporary paintings, that brings home the horrors of the poor conditions victims faced. Accompanying text discusses the magnitude of the crime. During the 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade at least 12m Africans were forcibly transported on ships - but about a quarter died on the passage. Visitors can also feel the full force of the conditions on board ships with a video room featuring wrap-around screens showing the terrible transatlantic journeys that slaves faced below deck.

Those that did make it to the New World were both lucky and unlucky - in that they’d made the passage but faced a pretty bleak future on plantations where they were quite literally worked to their deaths. The museum has an impressive large scale model of a plantation next to which visitors can listen to audio accounts, based on original sources, of daily lives for the enslaved workers. Listening to the accounts of the workers, where they were whipped for not working hard enough, can be contrasted with the lavish daily life lived out by plantation managers and owners.

The slave trade made plantation owners very rich indeed. Attractive returns of 10% a year meant that the entrepreneurs could build themselves great country houses in England. It is particularly fitting that the museum is in Liverpool because by the end of the 1700s it was the slavery capital of the world given the high number of ships sailing to Africa. The profits from the slave trade were invested in many other enterprises such as iron, coal and banking bringing about a boom in the local economy.     
Of course, history needs to be set in context - something that the International Slavery Museum does well. It has a whole gallery dedicated to the legacy of slave and the sad fact that, despite the Abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1807 (which is properly charted in the museum as well), the trade continues today.  

No-one today could ever possibly fully comprehend the horrors that enslaved African faced, but the International Slavery Museum is the best attempt I have seen in the UK to chart this chilling history.

Mapping the Underground - a new exhibition

Travelling on packed Tubes on weekday mornings when you are squashed in to small spaces against closing doors, it is hard to imagine a time when clever marketing was needed to persuade people to get on board. But turn the clock back a few decades and you have a colourful array of beautifully designed posters encouraging those living in the capital to explore the countryside at the weekend or up sticks to a modern housing development on the outskirts of city and use the London Underground to commute in.   

The story of how the London Underground helped serve a growing London (or indeed brought about the growth of London) has been well documented - see for example The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever . Mind the Map, a new exhibition at London Transport Museum, tells the story of how maps and other illustrative artwork in shaping the network. Find out about the origins of the fold-out Tube map and how it has changed little over the years. And see the colourful maps that chart the shopping centres and theatres of London.

But there is much more to Mind the Map as artists have been commissioned to produce special pieces, like Stephen Walter who has mapped out what lies beneath ground. It is a congested map showing secret tunnels, burial sites and disused stations. Other installations graphically chart individuals’ journeys across the capital over the course of many years. What would it look like if your movements were recorded?

Travelling on the Tube in amongst all the congestion it is easy to take this vast transport network for granted - Mind the Map will make you stop and think a little deeper about the world’s first subterranean railway. 

UK high streets struggle while it’s boom time in Dubai

High streets across the UK are struggling: footfall is collapsing and consumers’ spend is going down. Across the UK, there are countless examples of parades of boarded-up shops in what were once-thriving market towns and busy city centres.  Several long-established businesses such as Peacocks and Blacks have been pushed into administration in recent months. And, as I write this, it looks like the greeting card chain Clinton Cards could be next.

The response from many struggling retailers is to invest in digital and benefit from the growing number of people who want to shop from the comfort of their own homes and offices. If the likes of Amazon can create a highly profitable business, then why can’t others emulate it, goes the thinking.

But, why, in other parts of the world, are shopping malls busy and consumers still spending . Take Dubai as an example; I was out there for a few days recently and found shopping malls booming – people were laden with shopping bags from designer stores and out in force after a day in the office. My friend, who lives out there, could identify that many were Saudis who were treating Dubai’s malls as their playgrounds. It is, of course, far quicker to jump on a plane to Dubai or one of the UAE’s other emirates than it is to jet all the way to London. These days many famous British brands, such as Hamleys, are owned by Middle Eastern investors and have outlets in the Gulf anyway.    

And then of course there are the expats from Britain who live permanently out in Dubai. If they were born in the UK then going out and spending money in shops is probably the only way they know. They have the disposable income, so they spend, spend, spend.

But perhaps the biggest reason explaining why shopping malls in Dubai are booming is that online shopping is almost non-existent.  As people in the emirate don’t generally have postal deliveries to their homes making purchases on the Internet becomes very difficult.  Organisations pay for postal boxes at local post offices where they can pick up deliveries on a daily basis, yet this is mainly used for business purposes. In any case, it is hardly worth companies like Amazon investing in somewhere like Dubai when the market is so small – they would be building a distribution centre for a place with a population on par with the likes of Birmingham. All this means that Dubai’s shopping centres, the nearest we have to high streets, have something of a reprieve from the switch to consumers moving online.  

And so we are back at the UK and whether it matters that are high streets are in terminal decline in the face of falling consumer confidence and increasing Internet purchases. On the one hand, we can’t go back to the time when so many purchases were bought using cheap credit – our economy needs to recover and we can’t artificially keep the high street afloat. But at the same time we thrive on nostalgia, with brands like Marks & Spencer and WH Smith helping us connect with the past.  And it is an important place for social interactions – it gives people a place to meet.  

So perhaps we need a compromise. In towns where shop after shop is boarded up, the solution could be to reduce the space given over to retail. If shops are concentrated in one particular area, then the rest of the space could be converted into affordable housing or devoted to community centres, such as libraries. We don’t have the luxury of a shopping monopoly, as bricks-and-mortar shops have in Dubai, so perhaps this idea of matching the supply of shops to demand could prove the best solution?