Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, Shropshire - Museums Association

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Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, Shropshire

Shrewsbury's new museum has great volunteers but Maurice Davies is disappointed by the displays and interpretation
Maurice Davies
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A lovely summer’s day in Shrewsbury, England’s finest Tudor town, according to the Pevsner Architectural Guide.

It’s a time when the government is busily promoting “British values”, in a burst of Islamophobia, inspired by things that probably didn’t happen in a few Birmingham schools, which are under an hour away from Shrewsbury.

Coalition enthusiasm for Britishness is also motivated by competition from the UK Independence party (Ukip), who came top in the European elections in Shropshire.

Shrewsbury itself does not appear to be quite so isolationist and fearful. On the electoral map the town’s constituencies are mainly red and yellow, in a sea of blue, turning towards purple.

So, what can Shrewsbury and its new museum tell us about Britishness or, perhaps more accurately, Englishness?

Heading west, Shrewsbury is the final staging post in England. It is bustling and prosperous. Cars snake slowly up the hill into the centre, where most shops are spick and span. The town feels wealthier than on my last visit three or four years ago.

Luckily for locals, conservative-run Shropshire Council still has a sense of common good and has invested heavily in creating a new museum and art gallery in an early Victorian music hall and adjacent 13th-century grand house.

The same council recently helped create the £32m Theatre Severn to expand activities that had previously taken place in the building now occupied by the museum. The museum cost around £10m, probably cheap given its size and the complexity of building restoration, which delayed opening by several years.

Adaptations


A broad stone-paved passageway leads from the busy market square past a new visitor information centre towards a bright cafe. This has a wall of glass leading onto a smart courtyard with a large digital artwork.

Apart from the Roman Gallery, hidden away at the back of the cafe, the museum displays are mainly upstairs. Sadly, they are poorly promoted at ground-floor level. Opportunities are missed to entice people in, or even let them know that the museum exists.

Why do so many museums give up prime ground-floor space to a cafe? If the catering is any good then surely word would get around and people would climb a few stairs to use it?

Still, I know why I’m here, so rather than wandering back into the street, as I suspect many people do, I buy a ticket from the helpful person in the visitor information centre, show it to the friendly volunteer ticket collector and head upstairs.

I pass a selection of artworks old and new, not all displayed to best effect. One hangs next to a door and above a fire extinguisher.

The building has been nicely adapted, with stylish additions, notably a light and airy link corridor, one of several elegant interventions by architects Austin-Smith: Lord. However the details are often scrappy.

For example, on initially arriving on the first floor, visitors are greeted by an apparently randomly deployed selection of cheap notices, fire alarm, thermostat, plug socket and switch.

The new link corridor displays one of several artworks commissioned by the museum, mainly with a Darwin(ian) theme in homage to the town’s favourite son, even though he’d pretty much moved away by the age of 16.

These artworks are ambitious but an opportunity has been missed to present them better. They are badly interpreted, with text that is too wordy and too small.

Things improve in the Medieval Gallery. A well-informed and talkative volunteer gauges my interests well and chats with me about the remarkable medieval hall and the complexities of its restoration.

Surreal juxtapositions

Next is the small Tudor Gallery, dominated by the Corbet Bed, on long loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, with dazzlingly bright new hangings made by some 200 volunteers between 1997 and 2010. The process is described in a series of graphic panels, but an opportunity is missed to bring in the volunteers’ voices.

The Stuart Gallery is really a landing and a bit of left-over space. An intriguing picture of Prince Rupert, with an African servant, is displayed over an inaccessible staircase.

The servant is ignored on the label, which is a lost opportunity. Or perhaps ignoring the other is just another modern English value, a tragedy after centuries of welcoming the displaced and dispossessed.

The museum’s central pièce de résistance is the astonishing Shropshire Gallery. It’s as large as many museums and is a mixture of rocks, frocks, county history, country houses, ceramics, Darwin and engineering. I could not identify an organising principle, and some of the juxtapositions verge on the surreal.

Some of the mini-displays, such as the ceramics, are engaging. But like most of the rest of the museum, it’s old fashioned, with not much for children and little opportunity for interaction. A sad “your memories” clothes line had one solitary label tied on it.

The design is uneven, with some areas cluttered while others are bare. On the plus side, most of the graphics are fairly restrained, and some are quite smart. However, others are, frankly, incompetent, with ridiculous line lengths on panels about industry.

Frank Cohen show


A temporary exhibition of recent art from the collection of Frank Cohen (the answer to Charles Saatchi in the Midlands and the north west) is much better. Loosely themed around Darwinism, a few dozen works are sensitively displayed.

In one corner, a beautiful four-screen Bill Viola video of intertwining hands is thoughtfully placed next to a harrowing set of black and white photos of South African rural poverty in the 1990s by Roger Ballen. I hadn’t seen these before and their intelligent pairing still haunts me.

A well-written interpretation booklet was prepared by the museum’s young curators and another bright volunteer chatted with me about some of the works on show.

Missed opportunities


In spite of the extensive role played by volunteers, Shrewsbury is not a people-led social history museum. So what is it? I guess it’s best described as “antiquarian”. A 21st-century cabinet of curiosities, perhaps. That may or may not be deliberate, but it doesn’t work for me.

There were not many visitors when I was there, even though it was only a few months after opening, and the atmosphere was flat, in spite of the best endeavours of the volunteers.

One problem is that late in the redevelopment process the council decided to charge for admission, so a new approach to circulation and access had to be cobbled together. A result of this is that a grand historic staircase is roped off to visitors.

Charging remains controversial locally and means the visitor target for the first year is a paltry 50,000.

But not all problems can be blamed on charging. There are too many missed opportunities to engage local people in the development process and to provide visitors with engaging, interactive, participatory experiences.

There are even lost opportunities to save energy. In places single-glazed sash windows aren’t draught-stripped and the place is full of energy-hungry halogen lighting.

In 2014, how can it be possible for a new museum to miss so many opportunities and make so many basic mistakes?

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has to take some responsibility as it funds, monitors and sees more museum redevelopments than any other organisation. To put it in terms HLF might respond to, the lottery players of Shropshire have been shortchanged.

Or perhaps it’s just those pesky English values. Muddling through, refusing to learn from others and accepting the third rate, while believing we’re the best in the world.

Maurice Davies is a partner in the Museum Consultancy and a senior research fellow in the department of management at King’s College London

Project data

  • Cost £10m
  • Main funders Shropshire Council; Heritage Lottery Fund; Arts Council England; European Regional Development Fund; Art Fund; Walker Trust; Friends of Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery
  • Architect Austin-Smith:Lord
  • Main contractor ISG Construction


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