Beer, gold, and books

Cheers!

If you've been to Dublin recently--maybe you've had a Guinness at the Guinness Storehouse.

Chorale Midwest a.k.a. (for the tour) Cedar Valley Choral Ensemble stopped there on our tour of the British Isles.  The visit was included with the price of the trip. If it hadn't been, I don't think I would have visited--it had a £16.50 ticket price!

When I tried to explain it to people, I wasn't sure what to call it:  a museum?  an amusement park?  a mall?  I finally settled on "an attraction."

During the early 20th century, the building was a brewery and storehouse. It still retained its industrial look with high, open ceilings, exposed pipes, and brick walls.

It was a nice place to wander around on a slightly damp Dublin day.  They had several eateries; I got a nice warm bowl of Irish stew.

As we walked through the 7-story building, we got a long, drawn-out history of Guinness and a step-by-step explanation of how it's made.  We walked into the huge ovens where long ago the malted barley had been toasted.  And we saw huge copper pots like these.

Mostly, though, we were treated to over-the-top PR messages!  They cracked me up!

I think Guinness is pretty clever to build this attraction.  They get tourists to pay to imbibe beer and promotional copy.  Guinness gets its story out with this attraction!

After visiting this . . . . attraction . . . I thought about how tourist attractions present themselves and tell stories to visitors.  I had a chance to look at another approach when a few of us visited the Irish National Museum in Dublin.  I don't have any pictures from it--no photography allowed--but I found a very few images from the web.  Here's the entrance--it was a cool building!

Now this was very definitely a museum--and kind of an old-fashioned one, too. It had displays in glass cases with very brief tags on things.  Unfortunately, this museum didn't do a very good job of telling an overall story. It was hard to find the important items in the collection, and many items were not curated well--there wasn't much in the way of context or importance or how the items contributed to Ireland's history.

I totally missed the Tara Brooch, an important item in the collection.  It wasn't highlighted in any way.  I only found out about it after I left.

There were lots of gold items from treasure hoards, but they were just labelled, with no explanation of what they were for.

I think this little Victorian museum was just overwhelmed.  It was run by the state, and probably didn't have enough funds to hire someone to create an overarching story and decent curation.  Maybe the Guinness curators could stop by and do some pro bono work . . . 

When I went to London, I knew one place I wanted to visit:  The Dickens Museum.

I'd been there ages ago, in 1980 and it was rather boring:  dusty items in glass cases in a house where Dickens lived from 1837-1839.  But I'd read that it had been renovated just last year.  I'd also just read the marvelous Dickens/Nelly Ternan biography, The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin, which got me in a Dickens mood!

I was sure that I'd have to visit this house alone--just seemed about as geeky as could be: far away from tourist attractions, pretty limited in its appeal . . . but three of my chorale friends joined me, Paul, Nancy, and Laura!  I was thrilled to have the company.  And I think they enjoyed the visit because it was awesome.

Would I call it "a museum?"  Well, I guess so, but it was a modern museum:  lively, interactive, full of personality, and with a true sense of narrative and message.  Dickens would have loved it!  In fact, he was there!

My favorite rooms were the dining room, where the table was set for Dickens and his friends, and where a recording of a dinner party was playing . . . 

and his study--there's his desk!  

Also in his study were books you could pick up--they were facsimiles of books he had in his library with a brief explanation of why they were important. Here's a book he used to do his famous readings, complete with his notes! Recordings of people reading from Dickens novels were playing in the sitting room.

The kitchen had implements you could pick up and look at, and an explanation of what he might have eaten.  Turns out Catherine Dickens, his wife, wrote a cookbook.  (They were still living together in this home.)

The upper floors were the nursery and servants' rooms and they had material related to Dickens' childhood.  Like the rooms themselves, the story of his father's imprisonment in debtor's prison and Dickens's work in the blacking factory were off-limits to his public.  A coverlet on the narrow servant's bed had the moving scene where Jo, the street sweeper in Bleak House, dies.  Gave me chills!

Since visiting these places, I've done some reading about the history of museums, and museum theory on Wikipedia.  Fascinating!  These three places are examples show the wide range of ways that materials from the past can be shared with the public--from a plain display of items in cases, to an interactive narrative, to a walk-through advertisement.  I knew which one I liked best . . .