And, of course, the US learned about nurturing terrific museum collections from the best -- the Brits, who brought us both Tate Museums, the Victoria and Albert, the Imperial War Museum (my favorite), the Royal Museum and Museum of Scotland, the British Museum (although, in fairness, they borrowed a lot of it from other people). So make sure you don't miss those either.
But in addition to these excellent showpieces, one of the things I love about the UK, one of the things I really treasure, is the beautiful, careful, meticulous way small communities put together tiny museums to honor their special piece of history -- a single battle, a favorite son, a crumbling building. There's at least one in each town, and as you creep through the tiny displays you can feel the community's thoughtful, humble pleasure in curating its own identity. You can feel it like warmth, despite the often drafty, sometimes dim buildings and dog-eared museum guides. I love these museums.
This week, while my parents were here, we visited a truly lovely example of beloved community museums in Dundee, Scotland, called Discovery Point. To be fair, Discovery Point is a rather well-funded version of a community museum. However, like its poorer brethren it spins its tiny piece of history -- as the dockyards for the Scott expeditions to the South Pole -- into an elaborate Odyssey. And it does it well, with entertaining video displays (one, which explores the pole's climate, comes with its own wind), children's activities and the beautifully-preserved HMS Discovery, which Scott took on one of his trips.
Discovery Point tells the story of these journeys, from the planning to the provisioning (3,000 lbs of chocolate, 800 gallons of rum, 45 live sheep) to the successes and sometimes dramatic failures of the boats and their men. One video introduces you to each of the key characters, while another demonstrates through ancient footage what conquering the pole wearing sealskin hoods and wooden skis must have been like. You can smell gunpowder, try to load a ship using a crane, play a video game called Krill Bill. And the designers manage to tie the whole story of Scotland-based South Pole expeditions (which, candidly, was over by the mid-1930s) into the future of a warming planet as illustrated by the dissolving polar ice caps. Drip, drip, drip.
I worry that these tiny demonstrations of community pride, like the polar ice caps, are slowly dissolving into a maze of high street shops and big box stores, even in small-town Scotland. The few visitors they must entertain each year cannot possibly pay for the lights, heat and ticket-taker -- and yet huge museums like I've mentioned above won't ever provide space to conserve history writ small. In some ways, they're big box stores themselves, homogenizing and packaging culture to be accomplishable in an hour and a half with a trip to the museum store. And then, if it turns out I'm not a giant dinosaur or one-earred artist, who will tell my story when I'm gone? Or yours?
If you like boats, or whales, or sailors, or horrific and disappointing death, or, frankly, jute, this is your museum. Or if, like me, you love the fact that a community -- long past its prime as a shipping and ship-building port -- would so honor and conserve its unique story, this is your museum. Even though it's in Scotland.
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