A visit to Manchester Museum

 

This is what you see in the South Asian Gallery: members of the Manchester community with links to South Asia, and objects that are significant to them (but not chosen for high artistic value). 

A visit to the Manchester Museum – my first – was quite an eye-opener. The place was full of visitors! This kind of popularity for museums is only seen in a few exceptional locations, such as the Tate Modern, the British Museum, and so on; but outside London it is rare. The Whitworth in Manchester, for example, however good a museum it might be, never gets this kind of footfall. But equally surprising were the collections themselves. Whether a temporary exhibition (“Wild”) or a quick tour to the presumably permanent galleries for China and South Asia, there was little to be seen from the Museum’s own collection. This is probably the future for museums.

I guessed that the Manchester Museum would be full of glass cases and old pots. It was very different – and it made me wonder what the museum actually about.

You won’t find this out immediately from the “about” section of the Museum website. Here is stated  proudly: “Manchester Museum is on a mission to become the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit.” That much was clear, when you see the exhibitions. But it doesn’t tell you what the remit of the museum is. You have to go to Wikipedia for this:

Manchester Museum is a museum of archaeology, anthropology and natural history, owned by the University of Manchester.

So ancient implements and exotic peoples, reimagined for the present day, is what I would expect – that is, after all, what I see at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, but perhaps with a few stuffed birds added in Manchester.

But in Manchester, there was an almost total abandonment of precious objects, concentrating instead on topics of current interest (rewilding rare or extinct species), or on the communities living within and around Manchester. Various communities are represented by a big picture of someone from that community, alongside some everyday objects that are significant for them, such as an old LP, or a parent’s military uniform. In other words, this is the anthropology of the present-day, the ethnic groups in our midst. There were almost no precious objects on show. The Wild exhibition, similarly, had very little from the Museum’s own collection (although you could stroke a  stuffed badger).

It was quite a surprise, but  you couldn’t deny how popular it was. This is the museum, not as a display of fine objects, but as a tool for reflection and consideration, and for recognition – hey, that’s us!

What do I like about the Manchester museum?

-          It’s free

-          It’s popular (around 430,000 visitors per year, or 35,000 per month. By comparison, the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is around 30,000 per month; the Tate Modern is 401,000 visitors per month, the British Museum around 550,000 per month. The Cambridge MAA has around 8,000 visitors per month.

-          The Manchester Museum makes a genuine effort to engage with the many groups that exist outside its doors. Art galleries increasingly attemp to do this, but their efforts to engage with other communities than art historians is frequently pitiful. The Fitzwilliam does little to engage with Cambridge communities, although you could say that Cambridge (and Oxford) is a special case, with no immediate parallels with other major English cities. The Manchester Museum provides stories, and we all love narratives. 

One major factor in the growth of the Manchester Museum seems to be the director, Esme Ward, who joined the Museum in 2018 after being Head of Learning at Whitworth Museum, just down the road, where she set up the education service. The entire museum seems to have been transformed in the last few years.

Still, I can’t help feeling a touch of regret that the museum has abandoned the principle of making objects explained and interpreted. It has substituted for this providing individual accounts, which provide some immediacy, but which lose the principle of showing exceptional artefacts. Of course, this is an approach that befits an anthropological collection, showing the familiar, rather than the exceptional,  but it makes the museum a kind of one-time only experience. Perhaps it is true that most people only visit a museum once, so this is the best way to use the museum experience: to make the most of that one visit. But I’d like to think that at some point the Museum can begin, alongside the community stories, to tell the stories of its own collections, rather than just being embarrassed by them and hiding them.