No longer in decay

JUST opposite my Cambridge office is the main entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum. I look out of my window and see people pouring in and out all day. Parties of school children from the area come on visits organised by the museum's skilled and experienced education officer.

The Fitzwilliam, founded in 1816 by a bequest to the University of Cambridge, is a teaching and research institution within the University, but it is open - free - to the public and it has a high reputation as one of the country's finest museums.

Last year I was visiting New York, and spent an enthralled Saturday afternoon in the Frick Museum there. Established through the munificence of a private individual, and located in what was his house, the Frick has a strong "personality". Visitors can hire audio cassettes which provide an excellent expert description of each picture or other exhibit on the click of the appropriate number: click on a pic at the Frick.

Earlier this year I was taken back vividly to the Victorian era through a special exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V and A) in London - and incidentally was able to enjoy an excellent meal in its restaurant. (The V and A was recently described as a "prime caff with a museum attached"!)

Visit any of the large number of former stately homes in the United Kingdom which are now owned by the National Trust, and open to the public, and you are likely to find hundreds of fellow visitors. You are also likely to find a good restaurant or tea shop, serving well presented, and locally cooked, meals of high quality, sometimes serving food appropriate to the historical period to which the building belongs.

When I was young, museums were frequently collections of objects, displayed with little imagination. They might be of interest to specialists and scholars, but they were most unlikely to capture the enthusiasm of the general public. They were worthy, but deadly dull, and indeed they sometimes left you with the impression that worthiness and dullness went inevitably together.

There has been a huge change in the past half century in the way in which museum curators have approached their task of making our heritage accessible to us. Museums, stately homes and art galleries are now inviting, often exciting.

The reasons why the change was needed are not difficult to find. The period during which they have taken place coincides with the period of rapid development of television. It coincides also with big changes in the way in which teaching and learning take place, with much more emphasis on using facts rather than simply acquiring them. The presentation of information, in short, is much more sophisticated than it used to be, and we are much more critical of what is presented to us.

This is certainly true in my own experience. I was at a boarding school in the 1940s, in the last years of World War II. Life in the school was, frankly, extremely dull, but it was enlivened on Saturday evenings by film shows - black and white of course - shown through a 16-millimetre projector. As an exciting experience, it left much to be desired, and today's teenagers would doubtless respond to such an offering with rebellious rejection.

Those responsible for museums might well have let such developments pass them by, continuing as they had traditionally done, seeing themselves as curators, looking after their collections, but not as developers and presenters. Fortunately most of them did not. To the contrary, they responded to the challenge, seeing the changes which faced them as a marketing opportunity.

Essentially it is a matter of attitude, and what comes across above all with most of the U.K.'s museums today is enthusiasm. I meet the Director of the Fitzwilliam from time to time outside his "empire", and invariably he is bubbling with excitement about what is happening, or about to happen, inside it. In the current issue of Cambridge, the magazine which I edit, the director of another of Cambridge's museums, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, has contributed an article. In it she, too, conveys enthusiasm and excitement.

Those who feel that it is important that people should understand and appreciate the heritage which marks the development of any nation must take pleasure in the way in which our museums have been adapted to today's world.

Enthusiasm, of course, is infectious. Fortunately in the U.K. museum world, the infection is widespread.

BILL KIRKMAN

The writer is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. E-mail him at wpk 1000@cam.ac.uk

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