Cheltenham. Gloucestershire

In praise of museums

Over the years I’ve blogged several times about museums, large and small. Although I’ve sometimes thought about this blog as a kind of virtual or imaginary museum in its own right, I’m convinced that what are sometimes called ‘online resources’, good as they are, will never replace the real thing. Marvellous as it is to have, for example, images of and documentation on great swathes of the V&A collection online, there’s nothing like going to South Kensington and looking for oneself. On a few, hugely educative, occasions, I’ve had the good fortune not just to visit a museum as a member of the public, but also to get access behind the scenes and to meet curators, who’ve told me much about the objects in their care and their work with them. I remember fondly, meeting one person who not only cared for objects in the British Museum but who regularly travelled to places such as Jordan to work as an archaeologist; an afternoon at the Wallace Collection with the man who cared for their collection of arms and armour, who gave me not just a scholar’s but a also craftsman’s insight into how an elaborate Renaissance suit of armour was made; and a day with an anthropologist in Oxford, who told me about certain African tribes for whom the resource of fire was so precious that they’d carry it around inside enormous leaves.

I have many reasons to be grateful to Britain’s museums, and was very pleased to be asked to be guest speaker at the AGM of the Friends of the Wilson, the group that gives invaluable support to Cheltenham’s museum, The Wilson. I didn’t have time in my short talk to mention the meetings I’ve just remembered, but I did say how important this particular museum was to me, especially when I was a child, growing up in Cheltenham – this museum, which didn’t then have its current name, was the first one I ever visited. I’ve dwelt in previous posts on objects held by the Wilson that mean something to me personally. And Cheltenham has much to be grateful to the Wilson for – for a start: a stellar collection of Arts and Crafts Movement objects, archives of the eponymous Wilson family, including its most famous son the antarctic explorer Edward Wilson, and vast amounts of material on one of England’s most interesting towns. 

When I first went to Cheltenham’s museum in the 1960s, it seemed like an ancient place, full of dingy corners and objects that cried out for more explanation (from an eight-year-old’s perspective they did, anyway). Today, the place is transformed, with not one but two extensions and better displays, information, lighting, a new gallery created specially for young people, and more. This process of change is symbolised from the outside by the series of architectural phases visible from the street.

The first phase, which accommodates the public library, is visible in the distance. It’s a quite punchy Jacobethan design of 1887–9 by local firm Knight & Chatters. In the middle is the first part of the museum, which replaces an earlier art gallery that had been built a decade after the library. This 1987–9 rebuild is by Borough Architect David Ross, but with Sir Hugh Casson as consultant. It’s a facade of stucco and stone banding, paying tribute in these materials to Cheltenham’s older buildings while embracing a new, but not assertively new, architectural style. Pevsner sees a touch of Art Deco influence in it, which is true. But I also see, in that great sweeping curve over the entrance, a nod in the direction of the great Art Nouveau architect, Charles Harrison Townsend, who loved such shapes and such embracing entrances, especially for public buildings such as galleries and museums.

Then comes the most recent extension, by Berman Guedes Stretton, completed  in 2012. This added 1250 square metres of gallery and ancillary space, as well as allowing for better circulation. Not all my readers will appreciate its exterior grid facade, but the addition has done the museum good service in giving it the improved facilities it needed. For what it’s worth, I think the facade works well. It manages to sit near Victorian and Regency buildings without dominating them, it manages to both respect the building line and step back from it, it makes you wonder what’s inside, through that broad entrance, and the screen at the front makes one question whether there’s a building there at all. 

There is a building there, of course, and it’s full of wonderful things. While spending half an hour giving a talk about what I do, I was very pleased also to give tribute to this excellent museum, which even in times when ‘austerity’ is a watchword and ‘funding’ has become a cry for help, is thanks to its collections, its buildings, its curators, and its Friends, very much alive and kicking.


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The photograph above is taken from the website of the Civic Trust, because this is a better image than I have in my own files. I cannot see a copyright line on it, but if my using it infringes anyone's copyright, I'll be pleased either to add a credit or remove the image.