The Food Museum, Stowmarket

     

A travellers caravan, restored and repainted at the Food Museum - but not much to do with food

Some museums change their name during their history, but few change their entire collection and display policy. The Food Museum is one of the few examples. It is really an open-air museum that changed its name, and its remit as it approached its 50th anniversary. It opened as the Museum of East Anglian Life, but in 2022 became the Food Museum. Their reason (according to the museum website) was “there was no food museum in the UK and we felt this was a gap we were well placed to fill.” However, despite a shiny new kitchen and display area, the museum doesn’t really cover aspects of food production outside of East Anglia. Nor does it really cover food very comprehensively. The change in title looks somewhat cosmetic – and confusing. When we visited, there was an exhibition of photographs of Lake District farms.

What’s in the Food Museum?

There is a fine collection of historic buildings, even if relatively few compared to other open-air museums: here there are 17, while the Chiltern Open-Air Museum has 37, and the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 40. Perhaps the golden age of open-air museums is now over, as the trend has moved towards preserving buildings in their original settings. Whatever the case, it doesn’t look like Stowmarket has had any new buildings in the last ten years or so. But the focus now seems to have changed from old buildings – there is little mention of accepting new buildings in the museum five-year plan.

Does it have enough space?

One great asset of open-air museums is that you can spend all day there, take a picnic, and not feel hurried around to see all the sights. There is no shortage of space in Stowmarket: the Food Museum has 34 hectares, while the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 44 – not so much bigger.

Is an open-air museum no longer relevant?

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum follows a similar pattern of demonstrations and working exhibits, including a dairy farm and a laundry. The Food Museum, when we visited, had a group of what looked like families and children doing some cookery, and there was feeding of the animals. But for whatever reason, the Netherlands equivalent is vastly more popular. Visitors to the Food Museum are just 63,000 per year, according to the Vision and Development Plan 2023,  while the Netherlands equivalent welcomed around 560,000 visitors per year in 2022.  That discrepancy is vast, and perhaps explains why the trustees (or the executive) decided to change the name, and the focus, of the museum: if the punters don’t come to see the old buildings, perhaps they will come for interactive encounters around food. But that’s a big if. When we visited, on a Saturday in August, there were more people on the site for a private wedding than there were visitors to the Museum.

 

The Food Museum is not just about food

It has a collection of Travellers’ caravans, wagons and memorabilia. It has a lovely non-conformist 19th-century chapel. It has a display about a local asylum. It has a 19th-century Fen drainage pump. What happens to all these? In a way, calling itself the Food Museum restricts the Museum to one theme, whereas the Netherlands Open-Air Museum is gloriously eclectic. They have a railway warehouse, a tram depot, working trams, a demonstration of 1950s healthcare, an Indonesian house – they interpret their brief very widely. The result is a glorious confusion, but it certainly brings the visitors in.

Lack of government support

Clearly, the UK is strapped for cash. The latest Charity Commission financial statement shows that the Food Museum had an income of £1.33m for the year ending March 2023. This compares with the Netherlands Open-Air Museum income of €12.5m, plus government subsidies of €14m, in all, a total of around €28m, or £24m, some 20x greater. It seems astonishing to me, given Suffolk County Council’s moratorium on any funding of museums, that the Food Museum survives at all. It certainly doesn’t get the level of subsidy available in other countries.

What is the future of the Food Museum? I wish it well, but I think the decision by the board to change the title and scope has increased the problems faced by the museum. Perhaps the answer is just to install a tram, like the Netherlands Open-Air Museum.

A vintage tram takes the visitors around the Netherlands Open-Air Museum