The Mystery of Museums: Year 10 Scholars
Members of the Year 10 Athenaeum recently visited the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre in Kidbrooke and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The Prince Philip Centre, which opened in 2018, gave the students a fascinating insight into the world ‘behind the scenes’ of a museum. Following a group exercise that considered all the many and varied roles of those working at the Centre, they toured the facility, exploring how artefacts are evaluated, conserved, stored and maintained. One of the highlights was seeing the painstaking restoration work being carried out on several oil paintings.
The visit to the Maritime Museum allowed the students to think about issues of commemoration, remembering, and how the ‘stories’ that museums tell are constantly shifting in light of both new evidence and the reappraisal of narratives from the past that are selective and misrepresentative. As the students explored the Maritime Museum’s ‘Traders’ and ‘Atlantic Worlds’ galleries, they considered what curatorial choices had been made, issues of audience and interpretation, and particularly how museums often demonstrate to us that history is a dialogue between the past and the present.
The NMM’s gallery on the Atlantic, which deals with various aspects of the transatlantic slave trade, has a message next to the exhibition saying, “work in progress”. An accompanying information panel explains how this display (only created in 2007) “…no longer reflects the approaches of ambitions of the National Maritime Museum”. The students therefore explored the museum not only to study the exhibits but also to reflect on how museums operate: why do they include what they do? Are they presenting a particular narrative? How might that narrative change over time? To what extent do museums shape, or reflect, opinion?
In the spirit of the Scholarship Programme, the day encouraged students to think across many disciplines and to constantly question and look “behind the scenes.”
