A seven-tonne Rolls-Royce jet engine hangs in the lofty glass atrium of Derby’s new Museum of Making, suspended above a wall of objects that cascade down the stairs towards the entrance, as if propelled by the mighty turbofan of the engine. It is a junk-shop tsunami of clogs and clocks, spoons and street signs, telephones and tights, harnesses and horsetails, with one thing in common: they were all made in Derby.
There might be no better place to tell the story of manufacturing than this Midlands city, and specifically this building: a redbrick mill on the River Derwent that was the first fully mechanised factory in the world when it opened in 1721. Built by industrialist John Lombe for spinning silk, it has produced everything from cough sweets and skin ointment to fly paper and ice cream powder over the last 300 years – and burned down twice in the process. After an £18m makeover, it has been reborn as a shrine to all of these things and more, as well as an active site of production, in a radical new concept for what a museum can be.
“We don’t ever want it to be finished,” says Tony Butler, director of Derby Museums. “It’s a permanent work in progress.” On the expansive factory floors around him, volunteers arrange objects in an open archive, while others dab paint on model railway scenery and one wrestles with a machine for folding paper aeroplanes, in a lively scene of doing. “It should be something that is continually being made and remade,” Butler says, “a place where things are produced.”
In a first for this country, the museum’s vast workshop is not a back-of-house space reserved for technicians but an open-access facility for members of the public to use, fully equipped with table saws, laser cutters, CNC milling machines and more. Up and running while the museum was under construction, and used to build the exhibition display cases, the workshops have seen people making skateboards, others making stools, and a retired chap known as Nuclear Steve who busies himself with no one quite knows what.
“We tried to develop the museum as a real co-production with residents and local industries,” says Hannah Fox, director of projects and programmes at Derby Museums, who has led the project since its inception. An industrial museum had occupied part of the mill since 1975, but it closed in 2011, struggling to lure visitors with its dusty, staid air.
“It was very much a ‘great men of industry’ place,” says Butler, “full of engines and propellors.” It had originally been turned down for lottery funding, and told to come back with a more ambitious plan, taking in the wider context of the region. While Derby trumpets itself as the UK capital for innovation, home to manufacturing giants such as Rolls-Royce, Toyota and Bombardier, the companies struggle to hire locally, often importing skilled workers. Part of the museum’s new remit is to raise sights and inspire a new generation of midlands makers.
Working with Leeds-based architects Bauman Lyons, Fox and her team ran a series of workshops and drop-in days to test curatorial methods and trial exhibition displays, creating a DIY museum with the help of more than 1,000 volunteers. Along with the fully equipped workshop, there is a co-working space and a floor for designers and craftspeople to sell their wares, providing a showcase of new Derbyshire talent. But perhaps the most radical thing is the attitude to the objects and how they are treated.
For the first time, all 30,000 things in the collection will be on display – and not in the way you might expect. The visitor experience begins with a relatively conventional introductory exhibition, explaining Derbyshire’s pivotal role in the industrial revolution, as a centre of railways, ironworks, mining and ceramics, and later aerospace, engineering and video games, ranging from the ubiquitous red pillar box to Lara Croft. But, on the second floor, visitors are unleashed into a sprawling open archive. Arranged by material, rather than period or type, the artefacts are piled high on storage racks, free for visitors to rummage.
A row of dazzlingly painted early lawnmowers stands on a top shelf, above an array of lamps, typewriters and telescopes. Ticket machines sit alongside letterpress type, carriage clocks jostle for position with weighing scales, and fine Derby porcelain shares a shelf with chamberpots and sewage pipes. (Before archivists cry heresy, the more fragile and valuable things are safely protected behind acrylic cases.)
“It is a common problem for museums in general that we’ve all got too much stuff,” says Butler. “It has taken two generations, but we’re gradually learning to be less reverential and precious about these things.”
Volunteers will be on hand to explain the stories behind the items, while touch-screen displays provide further info and allow visitors to create their own menu of objects with a “trail maker”. Searching with thematic keywords, you can print out a receipt that gives aisle numbers and shelf references and embark on your own antique shop treasure hunt.
For train set enthusiasts there’s a treat in store on the next floor, where an entire room is devoted to a 1951 model railway landscape, built to commemorate Midland Railway when the network was nationalised after the second world war. Set in the fictional Derbyshire village of Kirtley, but featuring real local landmarks, the model is known for its obsessive technical detail, with modellers building the locomotives from scratch according to the original engineers’ drawings. Restorers will carry on working away, their bodies incongruously poking up through the landscape of Lilliputian hillocks, and hobbyists will be on hand to show the behind-the-scenes workings of the model. In a room next door, the Midland Railway Study Centre enjoys a big purpose built archive space, complete with bespoke plywood cabinetry built by volunteers in the workshop downstairs.
Finally, on the top floor, a temporary exhibition gallery opens with a show on scale, featuring exquisite cases of tiny clay limbs, used to make porcelain figures in the 1700s, alongside miniatures of ovens and toilets from the 1800s. It looks like doll’s house furniture, but these mini appliances were props used by travelling salesmen to impress clients interested in buying the full-size versions.
As well as rethinking the role of the museum as a place for making, the overall tone has shifted from the familiar industrial museums of yore. In the main exhibition, the curators have been keen to counter the usual narrative of British exceptionalism and the lone-inventor genius. The displays shed light on how the industrial revolution was fuelled by colonial exploitation and slavery, child labour and environmental destruction, leaving a legacy we are still reckoning with.
They explain how many of the region’s great innovators were foreign immigrants, such as Andrew Planché, the son of protestant Huguenot refugees from France, who founded the first porcelain works, and the Swiss chemists Henri and Camille Dreyfus, who set up a factory producing cellulose acetate “dope” to waterproof the wings of aircraft in the first world war. Even the origins of the silk mill are owed to our European neighbours: in one of the earliest documented cases of industrial espionage, Lombe stole the designs for his silk throwing machines from water-powered mills he visited in Piedmont.
We can only hope that visitors might be inspired to steal the idea for the museum, and we’ll see many more such hubs of education, production and innovation copied around the world.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion