RAMM

We paid our first visit to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Gallery (http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/) last week, the first for many years and certainly the first since its extensive refurbishment. A refurbishment which has struck a generally good balance between the Victorian museum it once was and the sort of museum which people might visit today - a good balance considering that it was also teetering on the uncomfortable edge of the precipice of being a museum about museums, rather than a museum about shells, birds, aboriginals and all the rest of it. The second time I have come across such a thing, the first being the Enlightenment Room at the British Museum (see March 6th 2012 at the other place). The British Museum pulled the trick off rather better, the Enlightenment Room only being a couple of large rooms among a lot of other large rooms, other rooms which had retained the traditional museum format: I guess they have size and money going for them. That said, the refurbishment at Exeter must have cost a lot more than Exeter City Council could have afforded; they had clearly tapped central funds. Perhaps Lottery Funds, those funds mainly drawn from the pockets of the lower orders to pay for the entertainments of the higher orders, or so it sometimes seems.

One got the impression that the museum is only displaying a small fraction of all the fascinating stuff that they have got, a rather smaller fraction than was the case before. Not clear where all the space has gone. So the once proud collections of stuffed birds and of small sea animals were represented by remnants. But I was interested by the old-style display of small sea animals that there was - shells, starfish and the like - presumably the work of one of the many Victorian naturalists who paved the way for Darwin - in part because I had recently picked up a couple of second hand nature books, one of which was by a Victorian biologist all about the evolution of the hand, evolution which I suspect he is going to claim as evidence of a divine hand in the erection of all these natural wonders. But more of that on another occasion. Meantime, I am impressed by the amount of time that these people must have given to nature: they knew their bit of it in a way not now given to many of us; tasteful moving pictures of lions smashing into a herd of wildebeest with voice of attabore over not being quite the same thing.

Artefacts which were both interesting and impressive from around what used to be our empire. A surprisingly small collection of pictures: places of this sort usually have more. But there was a nice water colour of the Turf Hotel, a useful terminal for a walk from Exminster. And one of our number was pleased to find that Gerald the Giraffe was still present and correct, even if he had been moved out of his proper home, now a café. A fond memory from childhood.

I was pleased with the attempt to display the geological history of Devon, a display illustrated by a nice range of geological specimens, but which they only partly pulled off. Also a display which included a large screen - actually four screens, maybe 12 feet by 3 feet overall - which displayed a reconstruction of that history. A valiant attempt, but I didn't think they had got it quite right; maybe version 2 will be better. My advice, for what it might be worth, would be to try to make more of the pictures of the globe showing the place of Devon in the evolution of the continents. Maybe one could turn that evolution into a short cartoon film showing the continents, Devon highlighted, on the move. Maybe small pop-up windows overlaying some of the main window and containing pictures of relevant bits of Devon now, probably mainly coastal cliffs and such like. Hopefully beauty spots which visitors are going to know and love. Maybe some sections showing the sequences of strata. But for all that I guess they would need an imaginative sponsor with a long pocket.

All in all a much happier place than Ipswich Museum, a place which might once have been in much the same league, but which looked a bit tired and short of money when we visited it a couple of years ago. See September 23rd 2010. Let's hope that Ipswich has managed to tap some central funds since then.

PS: an added bit of fun was going by train, more or less door to door. They still have local trains with two carriages in this part of the world, local trains which offer an entirely satisfactory half hour service through the day. And we found that Exeter Central was not quite the den of iniquity it used to be.