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

 

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

A lovingly recreated 1970s Amsterdam cafe 

The Nederlands Openlucht Museum, near Arnhem, is huge operation. More than 150 reconstructed buildings, over an area of 44 hectares, in fact an area so big there is a regular tram service (with vintage trams) all around the site (staffed by very welcoming tram drivers, I should add). It is a whole-day visit, since it will take you several hours just to get round the site. A major bonus is that several of the buildings don’t just have volunteers to describe that house and activity, but several of the major buildings are fully operational, such as the butter factory, powered by a boiler driving a pulley system for all the various activities involved with making butter and cream, and the steam laundry.

Is it an unqualified success? Not quite. The scope of an open-air museum is incredibly broad. Sadly, one challenge of the open-air museum is because its very existence is the least of all evils. Open-air museums came into being to house the buildings that planners and authorities wanted to demolish. The resulting resiting of the building is often in a meaningless location, for example, a water pump where there is no natural need for water to be pumped. The most recent example for the Netherlands Museum is a residential block from Amsterdam that was for years inhabited by immigrant workers, largely Turkish. It was rebuilt here because Amsterdam didn’t want it at the original site. However, in recreating the buildings, it was difficult to recreate the original living conditions, which are in contradiction to the rather grand façade of the building. Only a handful of the rooms are open to the visitor; there is one room, with bunk beds for multiple workers, which is moving; but I can’t help feeling that some eye-witness and/or autobiographical accounts would be better still. Some things just can’t be recreated very well.

There is a guidebook, but this simply repeats the information on the captions for each building. This information is very light on regional patterns and variations, and indeed there does not seem to be any attempt to create a representative survey of all the regional building types. Nor, of course, are the buildings from one region placed near each other. But the Museum makes things more difficult still by trying to accommodate all views. Thus, they try to consider the users of the buildings, as well as the buildings. This means a 17th-century building used as a Chinese restaurant is recreated as the restaurant, not for its original use, and the result is quite confusing. Similarly, the first Italian ice cream parlour (from the 1960s) is loving recreated, even though it was situated in a fascinating 17th-century building. This takes the museum into anthropology and social history, and the result is something of a hotchpotch. The hotchpotch is summed up by a house devoted to Indonesians in the Netherlands, that doesn’t attempt to give any idea of Indonesian or Dutch colonial history, but instead includes a few items of nostalgic value for that community – popular LPs by Indonesian artists that were released or at least available in the Netherlands.

If you want to find out any more about the building history of the Netherlands, you will have problems finding anything in the bookshop. The Museum guide (available only in Dutch) tells you only what is already shown on the captions available at the site.

I could find nothing in the Museum shop that provided background information on the buildings, the social history of the Netherlands, the everyday life of the people. Such books (and websites and stories) no doubt exist, but the shop seems devoted to games and trivia.

Similarly a “Green Cross” building shows public health provision from around 50 years ago. The building is of little interest, but the recreated interiors and fascinating. You can smell the surgery-like atmosphere, and even see a man (discreetly arranged) having a bath in the bathhouse.

So, I loved the site. I loved the dedicated staff and volunteers, who were unfailingly helpful in answering questions in a foreign language. I can’t really complain if the incidental items overwhelm the bigger picture. Young people can get excited by the former and, hopefully, they can revisit the subjects in more detail later. I object to the story-book view of history, and the jumbling of periods between the original buildings and their later users. But I don’t doubt that the museum probably turned more people into historians than any number of textbooks.