Sad Wisbech

 

North Brink, Wisbech

Sad Wisbech. The Saturday we visited, there were plenty of people in the town centre, but Wisbech Museum had no other visitors than us, and Peckover House, the town’s other historical attraction, had just six people for the second and final guided tour of the day. 

Peckover House is managed by the National Trust, and it seems to have fallen on hard times. There used to be a café, but that didn’t attract enough visitors, it seems. Now the café is closed, even fewer visitors arrive. There is a lovely garden, surprisingly large (it includes much of the gardens of surrounding houses), yet without a café, there isn’t a great deal to attract visitors. Our guided tour lasted an hour but I cannot say I was excited by much in the presentation or by the house. The house was left to the Trust without any contents, and in any case, it was clear the style of the house was not to the taste of the Quaker Peckover family. There was a room decorated vaguely as a  bank manager’s office, to suggest the Peckover Bank; there was the usual downstairs kitchen, where the servants lived; but I didn’t get a feel for a any of it. We were told the library was worth millions; but nothing about which books were actually in the library. You felt that, apart from the garden, the National Trust had given up with Peckover House.  

Wisbech Museum

Wisbech Museum was in a way even sadder. Last time we visited, the Museum was shut, because of roof reconstruction – thanks to a grant from English Heritage, after the Museum had been placed on an “at risk” register. But fixing the roof is only solving one of the museum’s many problems, as explained to me by one of the chatty staff, who were wonderfully informative and friendly. The museum is currently only accessible via some steps, so there is a plan to build a new access at the rear of the site. Even then, that leaves the wonderful original building from the 1840s, but that is part of the problem: the presentation of the exhibits gives the impression of a 19th-century approach. Wisbech Museum is almost entirely glass cases, with a collection covering a vast range from geology to archaeology to ethnology to the cabinet of curiosities, just like the early Ashmolean Tradescant collection, and the Oxford Pitt-Rivers collection (and it is interesting that at the Pitt-Rivers they seem to have acknowledged that the museum is such a time capsule it would be foolish to try to change it now). The collection is fascinating to observe, for me, but almost useless for educational purposes. Where do you start with a collection like this?

This lump of stone is actually a hole - read the caption

In another room, there is a library, with books from the 19th century, but again, these books are of almost no interest to young visitors (if there were any). Almost next door to the museum is a modern library building, but although the library was open, it looked deserted.

Outside the museum, there was the usual groups of drinkers on the park benches; we heard that kids had been responsible for removing all of the finials from the original metal railings outside  - so another repair expense.

As before, Wisbech parish church remained stubbornly shut.

Yet again we had seen Wisbech, but not really grasped it. Wisbech, after all, has one of the most spectacular urban sights in Britain, with North Brink. But nothing seems to remain from this era, nor from the pioneering anti-slavery and local improvement movement of the 19th century. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place so resistant to the ghosts of the past, and without replacing it with anything positive of the present-day. Perhaps I should finally visit Great Yarmouth and compare.