June 2024

London is a wonderful city. It’s so full of museums that no-one can know about all of them, so you can constantly be surprised by new ones. On a recent visit a friend introduced me to Sir John Soane's museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I was enchanted. Its plan is contrary to all the rules recommended for modern museum displays, but it’s great.

Sir John Soane was a successful architect in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. He also collected antiquities and paintings. He bought three adjoining houses in a Georgian terrace and filled them with his collection. When he fell out with his son and wanted to prevent him inheriting, he paid for a private Act of Parliament which gave the houses and their contents to the nation in perpetuity, and specified that nothing in their display should be changed at all. This means that the present museum is a warren of rooms opening out of each other. Some of them are filled in every corner with objects, others remain arranged as spacious living rooms with period furniture and rather nice paintings on the walls. There is a light well in the centre which runs through the three stories of the building from a skylight in the roof to the cellar. It is lined with shelves of antiquities and has a massive Egyptian sarcophagus at the bottom. There are tiny rooms the size of cupboards, also full of objects. The collection includes Greek and Roman antiquities, a copy of the Apollo Belvedere, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and bits of English medieval stonework. They are all closely packed into every available space, jumbled together without regard to date or provenance, and there is not a single label on any of the pieces. You have to look them up online. And it works! I can’t wait to go back.

My visit got me thinking about museum displays I have seen, and which I have loved or hated for various reasons. Of course different museums are aimed at different cohorts of visitors. Some are intended to be family-friendly, some are for visitors with a more specialist interest, and some are aimed at processing huge numbers of tourist groups who are coming just to get out of the rain and don’t actually have much interest in the past. (For this last group I would recommend a converted aircraft hangar with 12 artefacts, videos all round the walls, a coffee shop and a lot of toilets, rather than an actual museum. And call it “The [name of town] History Experience”).

Having no labels either works – or it doesn’t. About fifteen years ago I visited a museum in a large city in England which had a display of artefacts from Ancient Egypt in one of its galleries. They had attached the objects to the back of a showcase covering most of one wall of the gallery. The artefacts were excellent examples of their type but they hadn’t given them any descriptions at all, not even a one-word name, just a number. Either you had to buy a catalogue or you had to use the single computer at one end of the showcase. Needless to say, the computer was being monopolised by small children playing.  And those were the days before smartphones and apps. I was involved at that time in schools work covering the Ancient Egyptians, so I found this rather disappointing. I knew what most of the objects were, but I would have liked to know how old they were and where they were found.

One of the best displays I can remember seeing was in a national museum I visited in the Far East. It had a large collection of 9^th century CE Chinese stoneware dishes from a shipwreck. They could have put most of them into storage and only displayed a few of the best pieces. Instead they solved the problem most imaginatively by putting a few representative examples into display cases with explanations, and putting the rest onto a forest of Perspex ‘stalks’ standing up from the floor. Speaking as a visitor, I thought it was great. If you wanted the basic information it was there in the showcases, and if you wanted to examine more examples you could do that without having to write to an overworked curator and book an appointment in three months’ time. The display had a most attractive overall effect, and the ceramics were extremely beautiful.

Another major museum of my acquaintance at one time (long ago) summarised the entire Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) period in Britain by displaying a single stone handaxe in a showcase with dramatic lighting. To my certain knowledge, because I had seen them with my own eyes, their basement was stuffed full of stone tools from a variety of classic Palaeolithic sites. The Old Stone Age covers just over 98% of British history. And they only showed one tool, as an art object.

When I was working I was always told that labels should be kept short and written for a reading age of twelve years old. This is apparently the reading age of the average Guardian newspaper reader.  I have learned since then that the average reading age in Britain is eight years old, that of most Sun readers. A temporary exhibition in a museum that I visited in the last few years had pages of text on the walls beside the showcases, resulting in logjams of visitors standing in front of a single case for hours, solemnly reading each label. There is a happy medium between no labels at all and a wall-mounted textbook.

And disabled-friendly doesn’t just mean installing a stair lift. There are other disabilities. I have seen lengthy explanatory text, not just a few names in large font, on the wall behind a wide table-top case. “Visually impaired” visitors, i.e. anyone old enough to need reading glasses, had to keep putting their glasses on and off, or worse, switching from reading to distance glasses, as they tried to look at the objects and then find out about them. I saw one visitor bending over the showcase to get near enough to read the text, leaning their weight on the glass top… 

I think the best panel text I have ever seen was in the on-site museum at Skara Brae, the Neolithic village in Orkney. Their labels differentiated clearly and simply between different kinds of evidence about each artefact.  What the object was; what evidence, such as C14 date or food residues could be obtained from it; and what could be deduced from this evidence, such as date or diet, were stated in different sizes of type. I wish more museums would do that so that the general public could understand how we learn about the past from archaeological evidence, what is fact and what is an educated guess.

My research continues. Museums of the world, I'm still out there. Watch this space…

Reader, when you hear the word ‘pottery’, what do you think of? A tasteful piece of Clarice Cliffe on the Antiques Roadshow? An archaeologist telling us how Grooved Ware has overturned all our ideas about the Neolithic in Britain? Well, I think of rats.

Long ago, when my son was young, we kept guinea pigs. In summer, they had a run on the lawn, but in winter they lived in the garden shed, well supplied with hay and guinea pig food. After a while I noticed that the bottom of the shed door had been gnawed until there was a hole there. There were clear tooth marks. Rats! A common pest in suburbia, where people feed the birds and aren’t always careful about what they put on the compost heap. Of course it was only to be expected that they would enjoy guinea pig food, which is mostly grain. I wasn’t surprised by their efforts on the wooden door, but I was impressed by their determined work on the lid of the plastic bin where we stored the food. Did they actually swallow shavings of red plastic and did it really do them no harm? This incident got me thinking about pottery. They couldn’t have knawed through that. If I had stored my grain in a thick-walled ceramic bucket with a stone lid on top the rats wouldn’t have stood a chance.

And that got me thinking about how easy it is to make pottery, if you are not too particular about what it looks like, or its fire-resistant and water-retaining properties.  Although you can improve a leaky piece of ceramic by burning a bit of milk inside it.

I was once employed by a local authority which was having a family day in a country park. At that time I was known to be working on medieval pottery at a museum nearby and they wanted me to run an activity making pots. They supplied a shed and a pile of timber offcuts and I sourced the clay. The families spent the morning kneading this clay and mixing in various tempering materials such as sand and crushed shell and chaff, which I obtained from the local pet shop. They made pinch pots and in the afternoon we put the pots into a haphazard heap of wood and set light to it. As the activity only covered one day we didn’t even have time to dry the pots first, which is normally regarded as vital. If you don’t dry them out thoroughly the pots have a tendency to explode when tiny pockets of water reach boiling point.

The wonder of it was that after only a few hours in that inadequate bonfire some of the pots had actually fired (some had only fired in parts). Clay has to be heated to a temperature of at least 500 degrees C to make the irreversible change to ceramic, albeit rather grotty ceramic. If we had had twice as much wood and twice as much time I think our pots would all have fired into real ceramic vessels. They probably wouldn’t have been suitable for boiling porridge over a fire, but they would have kept the rats out.

And what do you do in areas without trees, like the Northern and Western Isles? Well, if you don't have wood for the firing you can use peat. Derek Hall in " The Scottish Medieval Pottery Industry: a pilot study" (Tay & Fife Archaeological Committee 2016) considered that peat was a perfectly likely fuel for medieval pottery kilns in Scotland. According to a Wikipedia entry, peat was used to fire pottery kilns in the Netherlands, which was another area without trees. For example, the potteries established at Gouda in the 18^th century used peat as fuel.

And you really don’t need an elaborate kiln. My crude bonfire has historical parallels. In the Hebrides, 19^th century housewives made a type of pottery called ‘craggan’ or ‘crogan’ ware in the cooking hearths of their crofts. They used local clay, tempered simply by leaving in the sand and fine gravel which it contained naturally, and only removing larger stones. The pots were handmade, coil-built, sometimes with simple impressed decoration, and left to dry for twenty-four hours. Incidentally, you don’t need sun to dry them either: a craft potter in the Orkney island of Westray told me that he found a strong wind dried his products quite adequately. Then the craggans were fired in the ordinary cooking hearth in the centre of the farmhouse, with burning peats put inside and around them. When they had been fired for long enough to turn them into ceramic, milk was poured over them inside and out to seal the porous surfaces. They were usually used for liquids (beer, water, buttermilk and so on) and had a neck over which a piece of sheepskin could be tied as a lid.

From the mid-19C until the 1930s, at the small village of Barvas on Lewis in the Hebrides, a peculiar ware was made by the same process but copying the forms of the factory-made china tea sets which were starting to appear in Scotland. It was known as Barvas ware. It may have been made largely for tourists.

Pottery can be an exquisite and subtle art form, requiring great skill and technical knowledge to reach perfection. From Chinese porcelain and Japanese tea bowls to Wedgewood and Bernard Leach, it rightly fills our museums and art galleries today. But remember that if you just want to keep out rats, it’s  fairly simple to make.