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Behind the Scenes at the
Science Museum
MATERIALIZING CULTURE
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Series editors: Paul Gilroy, Michael Herzfeld and Danny Miller

Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space

Gen Doy, Materializing Art History

Laura Rival (ed.), The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on

Tree Symbolism

Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism

Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material

Memories: Design and Evocation

Penny van Esterik, Materializing Thailand

Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management
of Everyday Life

Anne Massey, Hollywood beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture

Judy Attfield, Wild Things

Daniel Miller (ed.), Car Cultures

Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums

David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and

Memory

Eleana Yalouri, The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim

Elizabeth Hallam and Jeremy Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture
Behind the Scenes at the
Science Museum

SHARON MACDONALD

Oxford • New York

First published in 2002 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA

© Sharon Macdonald 2002

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any
means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Macdonald, Sharon.
Behind the scenes at the Science Museum / Sharon Macdonald.
p. cm. — (Materializing culture, ISSN 1460-3349)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-85973-566-5 (cloth) — ISBN 1-85973-571-1 (paper)
1. Science Museum (Great Britain)—Juvenile literature. 2. Science
museums—Educational aspects—England—London—Juvenile
literature. 3. Science—England—London—Exhibitions—Juvenile
literature. [1. Science Museum (Great Britain) 2. Museums.] I. Title.
II. Series.
Q105.G72 L6835 2002
507.4’09421’34—dc21
2001006856

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 566 5 (Cloth)

1 85973 571 1 (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s
Lynn.
For Thomas
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of Figures ix

Thanks and Credits xi

Taster 1

1 Admission: Going In 3

2 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 23

3 A New Vision for the 21st Century: Rewriting the Museum 59

4 A ‘Hot Potato’ for a New Public: A ‘Flagship’ Exhibition on 91

Food

5 ‘Reality Sets In’: Managing and Materialising Dreams (and 131

Negotiating Nightmares)

6 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 157

7 Opening and Aftermath: Ritual, Reviews and Reflection 193

8 The Active Audience and the Politics of Appropriation 217

9 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 245

Appendix 263

Bibliography 267

Index 285

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 List of Figures

All photographs are by Sharon Macdonald unless otherwise stated.

2.1 ‘Modern but soberly British’: the Science Museum.

Courtesy of the Science Museum/Science and Society
Picture Library. 25
2.2 ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’: V&A
advertising campaign. Courtesy of the V&A. 36
2.3 Managerial restructuring in the late 1980s. 44
2.4 Industrial age meets space age: Information desk in the
refurbished East Hall. Courtesy of the Science Museum/
Science and Society Picture Library. 45
3.1 ‘Confusing and without much logical relationship of
themes to one another’: Science Museum layout in 1987.
Courtesy of the Science Museum. 62
4.1 Jane and the food pyramid on opening day. 98
4.2 Jan in the site office on opening day. 100
4.3 Heather (in foreground, with Sue in background) examines
the Lyons Corner House exhibit about three weeks before
opening. 101
4.4 Sue in front of the 1920s Sainsbury’s reconstruction on
opening day. 102
4.5 Cathy by the chestnut seller (part of ‘Snacks’) on opening
day. 103
4.6 Ann at work in the Food offices about three weeks before
opening. 104
4.7 Sharon in the in-store bakery on opening day. Photograph
by Cathy on Sharon’s camera. 104
4.8 The Johns with the juke box on opening day. 106

ix
x List of Figures

4.9 Hands-on preparations: working on an exhibit for food (a

spice cabinet) in the wood workshops about ten weeks
before opening. 107
4.10 Possible exhibit topics from the Feasibility Study. 123
4.11 Timetable. 127
5.1 Object-feel (and smell): Cathy and Heather examine
possible objects for the gallery. 136
5.2 Part of the ‘rigorous conceptual framework’ after the
Rethink. 149
5.3 The naughty sausage machine performing at last with
human assistance. 154
6.1 Empty but shaped space: the gallery about six months
before opening. 164
6.2 Plan of Food for Thought. 165
6.3 Formative evaluation: trialling food exhibits about two
months before opening. 171
6.4 Representing gender, age and race: entrance feature. 172
6.5 Representing gender, age and race: entrance to the gallery,
looking into Food and the Body. 173
6.6 Pasteurised production: clean machines on display. 178
7.1 Inspection time: Jan, Mr Suthers, Jane and John Redman
in the gallery about five weeks before opening. 194
7.2 The exhibit that never was: Sue inspects what there is of
the pea-freezer tunnel about three weeks before opening. 195
7.3 Taking shape: Giant chocolate mousse pot goes into the
gallery six days before opening. 195
7.4 Counting down: the gallery at 24 hours before opening. 198
7.5 Changing names: removing non-Sainsbury supermarket
products, fifteen hours before opening. 199
7.6 Will it be ready?: Fitting a case at 8 a.m. on opening day. 200
7.7 The politics of signatures: the gallery name. 208
7.8 Charging at the check-out: cartoon of Food for Thought.
Courtesy of Colin Wheeler. 210
7.9 Representation as endorsement? McDonald’s in the
Sainsbury Gallery. 211
8.1 Visitors getting their hands-on at the check-out. 218
8.2 Getting the message? Visitors in Food and the Body. 218
9.1 A different answer: the George III collection. 248
 Thanks and Credits

O ne of the things that I learned in the Science Museum was that

authorship is distributed: behind any supposed ‘author’ are all kinds
of others whose participation, sometimes unwittingly, shapes what is
produced, though in the end, it is the acknowledged ‘author’ who,
rightly, bears responsibility. I also learned that credits and acknowledge-
ments are difficult and inevitably selective matters. Here is my undoubt-
edly inadequate attempt to offer my very sincere thanks to all of those
who helped me in writing this book and carrying out the research on
which it is based.
Numerous staff in the Science Museum made the research possible
and enjoyable: thank you all. I would particularly like to acknowledge
the extraordinary generosity, openness, intelligence, good humour and
encouragement of the Foodies: Jane Bywaters, Ann Carter, Heather
Mayfield, Jan Metcalfe, Sue Mossmann and Cathy Needham, and (demi-
Foodies) John Hall and John Redman. Thanks too for invaluable
reflective feedback on the manuscript. Robert Bud deserves especial
gratitude for his role in making the research possible and for giving
support and intellectual insight. Thanks are also due to Sir Neil Cossons,
then Director of the Science Museum, for allowing the research to go
ahead when directors of many other museums surely would not, for
his willingness to explain his own vision and for his comments on the
manuscript; and to Terry Suthers, then Head of Public Services, for so
generously assisting me to gain access to many different corners of the
Museum organisation. John Durant, Assistant Director at the Museum
and Professor of Public Understanding of Science, also played a vital
role at times as a go-between and provider of encouragement. I would
also like to thank my neighbours in the Design office and the following
who went more than usually out of their way to help me with the
research: Robert Anderson, Sandra Bicknell, Roger Bridgman, Sue
Cackett, Robert Fox, Jane Insley, Ghislaine Lawrence, Peter Mann, Alan

xi
xii Thanks and Credits

Morton, Derek Robinson, Doron Swade, Anthony Wilson, Tom Wright.

Perhaps here is the right place to say that I have tremendous respect
and admiration for Science Museum and for those who work in it. I
would also like to express my gratitude to those many others whom I
met on my museum travels and who took time to talk with me and
show me around their institutions.
I was not the original ‘author’ of this research. The idea of carrying
out an ethnography of a science exhibition was Roger Silverstone’s and
he did all of the difficult business of setting up the research, only to
have it appropriated by its ethnographer. For not only accepting this
with good grace but also helping me to cope with, think through and
write (sometimes jointly) about the research, and for offering support
and critical insight on my work, I am extremely grateful. I also thank
Gilly Heron who carried out most of the visitor interviews discussed
in chapter eight. Financial support for the research was provided by
the Economic and Social Research Council and Brunel University.
I have been very fortunate in the academic homes which I have had
since beginning this research: the Centre for Research into Innovation,
Culture and Technology at Brunel University, the Department of
Sociology and Social Anthropology at Keele University and the Depart-
ment of Sociological Studies, Sheffield University. In all of these I have
had great colleagues, thoroughly committed to understanding the social
world even while the scope for doing so sometimes seemed to be
increasingly institutionally fraught. I would particularly like to acknow-
ledge the following fellow researchers of science, organisations, muse-
ums and culture whose ideas and conversations have helped me work
out where I stood: Andrew Barry, Georgina Born, Jeanette Edwards,
Gordon Fyfe, Penny Harvey, Kevin Hetherington, Eric Hirsch, Richard
Jenkins, Adam Kuper, John Law, Maurice Roche, Ursula Sharma, Nick
Stevenson, Pnina Werbner and Steve Woolgar. Jeanette Edwards,
Gordon Fyfe and Andrew Barry also gave me fantastically encouraging
and helpful comments on my book manuscript. I am also grateful to
Bob Franklin, Pete Marsh and Alan Walker for support, to Gillian Brown
and Jesrine Clarke for help with some technical matters, and to Barbara
Carey for lending me Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
I have also had the opportunity to work out my ideas in seminars
and in previous publications. Thanks are due to audiences and seminar
organisers in the Association of Social Anthropologists conferences at
the Universities of Hull and Oxford, the Anthropology and Archaeology
section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in
Leeds, Brunel University Department of Human Sciences and CRICT,
 Thanks and Credits xiii

the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt Institute of

Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, Goldsmith’s College
Joint Anthropology, Sociology, Communications and English seminar,
Keele University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,
Lancaster University Department of Sociology, Leeds University Muse-
ums Forum, Manchester University Department of Social Anthropology,
Oxford University Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Read-
ing University Department of Sociology, the Science Museum, Sheffield
University Department of Geography, and the Women Heritage and
Museums/Social History Curators Group workshop on Women and
Science Museums. In their capacity as editors (and sometimes more)
of my work, the following have also provided me with valuable feed-
back: Mary Bouquet, John Durant, Sara Franklin, David Gellner, Eric
Hirsch, Alan Irwin, Allison James, Les Levidow, Joelle LeMarec, Philip
Schlesinger, Brian Wynne and Robert Young. A version of chapter three
was previously published in focaal. tidschrift voor antropologie (number
34, 1999) and in Mary Bouquet (ed.) Academic Anthropology and the
Museum: Back to the Future (Berghahn 2001). I am grateful to the editors
and publishers for permission to use this chapter here.
After so many years had elapsed, I probably would not have decided
to write this book had it not been for encouragement from Michael
Herzfeld, Simon Holdaway, Danny Miller and, especially, Kathryn Earle.
They probably didn’t know until now just how important their
comments were. The interest of Michael, Danny and Kathryn made
Berg’s Materializing Culture series a natural home for the book; early
comments from Michael were crucial in shaping the way in which I
wrote it and Danny’s enthusiastic reading gave me the energy for the
final polishing. I also thank the other, still anonymous, reader for their
helpful suggestions. Roger Hall’s meticulous copy-editing helped to
domesticate the manuscript. To find one of my best former students,
Emma Farley, charged with the task of looking after my manuscript at
Berg and doing so with such care, cemented my sense that this was
the right publishing home.
My ‘real’ home has been vital to sustaining me during the original
research and the subsequent writing of this book. Mike, Tara, Thomas
and Harriet have not only put up with my interest in museums but
have also (sometimes at least) let themselves be coerced into visiting
them with me. Their often forthright views on different museums, their
comments on parts of this manuscript, and their support have been
sustaining sources of food for thought, and for life, for which I am
indebted.
This page intentionally left blank
 Taster

‘The nation’s museums and galleries are under the spotlight as never
before. Changes in funding and management are clearly inevitable and
an increasing number of directors now argue that these must be radical
and rapid. . . In the heartland of the traditional museum business the
vision of tomorrow is still obscure. The battlefield will be the marketplace
and the casualties will be those museums that fail to appreciate the public
no longer lives in the 19th century. . . the culture must change’ (Director
of the Science Museum, The Times, 1.5.1988).

‘The Science Museum is in the grip of a cultural revolution’ (Science

Museum curator, Science Museum Annual Review 1989).

‘I detect with appreciation [the Science Museum’s] first steps to becoming

not only the nation’s showplace for the best in contemporary science
and technology but its expanding role in promoting a broader public
understanding of these important issues. . . Industrial success depends
on national attitudes to science, engineering and manufacturing’ (the
then Prime Minister, letter to the Science Museum Trustees, published
in Science Museum Review, 1987).

‘Just because it’s the first exhibition to be really carried out since the
new Director, yes, that does mean that all eyes are upon us. We’re the
guinea pigs! . . .’ (Project Manager of Food exhibition, 1988).

‘So the assumption was that just because we were an all female team all
we would be doing was showing a bit of cookery’ (Member of the Food
team, 1990).

‘It’s not as lively as I’d expected’, ‘It doesn’t look so very different from
everywhere else’, ‘It’s a bit flat’ (Discussion, Food team, after opening of
gallery 1989).

1
2 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

‘This gallery has a supermarket logic’ (The Food Programme, Radio 4, 1989).

‘It’s so refreshing to see something where people can interact with the
exhibits, take part and actually touch things. It’s so different to, for
instance, the Science Museum of my childhood when everything was in
glass cases and you had to read a lot of very small print to know anything’,
‘I didn’t think food was very – was science. . . Well, it has to be – it’s in
the Science Museum’, ‘. . .being cynical, I was a bit suspicious of how
much McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s and so forth is pushed at you - but
then, there you are.’ ‘But, you know, I would imagine they would use
experts’ (Science Museum visitors, 1990).
 o n e

Admission: Going In

T he aim of carrying out ethnographic research in the Science Mus-

eum was to study the construction of science in museum exhibitions,
exploring the agendas and assumptions involved in creating science
for the public. On 3 October 1988, the day that I began fieldwork,
admission charges were introduced at the Science Museum. This was
one of the first national museums in Britain to initiate what was later
to become a much more widespread practice of charging for admission,
a practice which was, and continues to be, highly controversial.1 There
were pickets and media reporters at the main entrance to the Museum
and many (though not all) of the Museum staff were wearing ‘Stop
Charges at the Science Museum!’ stickers.2
Although I had read about debates over the possible ‘commodifica-
tion’ or ‘Disneyization’ of museums, and had read articles about
charging which had appeared in the press in the preceding months, I
had not fully appreciated the passion that the introduction of charging
would generate, the national and historical significance with which it
would be imbued, or the many other changes in museums – and
national culture more broadly – with which it would be associated.
Neither had I anticipated the degree of contention which it, and its
associated changes, would arouse within the Museum itself. This seemed
to be an important moment in the history of public culture, one which
was bound up with more widespread shifts in the relationships between
national institutions and their publics and the government. Debates,
many of which had been long simmering, were thrown into particularly
sharp relief: debates over public accountability, consumerism, the role
of national cultural institutions, knowledge, authority and authorship.
To be permitted to do fieldwork in an institution so much engaged
with these dilemmas, and whose actions were seen as so symbolically
significant, was a great privilege. It was exciting, absorbing, demanding
and, sometimes, a political nightmare.

3
4 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

At the time, although fascinating and ethnographically irresistible,

the debates over museums and their changes sometimes felt like a
distraction from the main stated aim of the ethnographic research – to
investigate the construction of science for the public. Like other
researchers working on ‘the public understanding of science’, I some-
times worried that ‘science’ was disappearing from the study.3 However,
as I was to find, these debates and changes in the Science Museum
were thoroughly enmeshed with (though not simply determinative of)
the ways in which ‘science’ was imagined into public display.

On day one of fieldwork, a delay on the Circle Line (something with

which I was to become all too familiar) had made me late for a meeting
with Mr Suthers, the head of the Museum’s newly created Division of
Public Services. So, instead of rushing to join the commotion at the
Museum’s main entrance, I followed the instructions that Mr Suthers
had given me by phone the previous week and slipped into the Post
Office next door where there was an entrance leading to some of the
Museum offices. The warder checked that the divisional head was still
available to see me and I was given directions – up what felt like ‘secret’
staircases behind the scenes of the Museum – to his office. Mr Suthers,
a bearded and very amiable Yorkshireman, was not wearing a ‘Stop
charges at the Science Museum!’ sticker. He was dressed smartly and
arose to shake my hand. As I apologised for my lateness and sat down,
my eyes fell upon the capacious glass bowl of fruit and bottles of Perrier
on his wide and tidy desk. ‘Very healthy,’ I remarked. He grinned: ‘Well,
we like to try to give the right impression.’
As Head of Public Services, Mr Suthers was responsible for those
aspects of the Museum which were defined as dealing with ‘the public’.
Its tasks, which ranged from educational services and mounting
exhibitions to managing the restaurants and toilets, could to some
extent be defined as ‘impression management’.4 Public Services was
concerned with managing and maintaining the Museum’s ‘front stage’.
The Museum’s other main division, ‘Collections Management’, dealt,
as its name implies, with the Museum’s collections of artefacts. It was
focused on work which for the public was mostly ‘back-stage’: the
acquisition, conservation, restoration, storage, researching and cata-
loguing of artefacts. To have named these sections of Museum organisa-
tion ‘divisions’ was highly appropriate, for, as I was to learn, the division
between ‘the objects’ and ‘the visitors’ was one which ran through
much of Museum discourse. Objects and visitors made different
demands – demands which could not always be easily reconciled.
 Admission: Going In 5

Mr Suthers explained the role of Public Services and outlined the

recent managerial restructuring in the Museum for me. At the time I
could not really grasp quite what had been collapsed into what, or
appreciate its significance. ‘Don’t worry’, he told me, ‘You’ll hear plenty
more about it and you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ He was right. The
restructuring was a recurrent topic of conversation in the Museum and
usually one of the first things, especially in my early days, that Museum
staff explained to me. It was regarded as crucial for understanding other
things going on in the Museum, and, indeed, what was happening in
‘the museum world’ more generally. In particular, it was regarded as
crucial for understanding exhibitions, the making of which was to be
the focus of my study.
On my first day in the Museum I also met several other curators,
most of whom seemed to walk and talk very fast, to joke a lot, to work
in offices piled high with books, papers, intriguing-looking objects and
coffee cups, and to be full of ideas and of a sense of ‘living in interesting
times’ (as one put it). There was lots of talk of ‘the Director’, of ‘before’
and ‘after’, of ‘the old guard’, of the ‘public understanding of science’.
One curator told me that I would ‘end up with a model of factional
warfare’, another that ‘curators are stubborn buggers – the most
opinionated people that you could ever meet – we are all convinced
that we are right’, and Mr Suthers described his job as ‘90 per cent
firefighting’. This was a world behind the scenes that I had not quite
expected. It seemed almost like the world of David Mamet’s play, The
Museum of Science and Industry Story (1988), in which Chicago’s Museum
of Science and Industry comes alive at night with skirmishing groups
– railroad workers living in the transport exhibits, miners in a display
of coal mining, ‘Potowatamies’ in an area devoted to ‘primitive tech-
nologies’ – seeking to stake out and protect their own territories and
interests while commenting ironically on the museum’s subject matter
and its role. My task was to enter the behind-the-scenes world of the
Science Museum, to find out how it works, what kinds of passions and
ideas motivate practice, and whether and how this percolates into the
science that is put on public display.

Framing and Following

This research was part of a broader programme of research on the ‘public
understanding of science’, research which sought to investigate under-
standings of science in diverse public settings.5 Studying the makers
and consumers of a science exhibition was a means of following the
6 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

processes involved in ‘translating’ expert scientific knowledge into

knowledge for a lay public. One of the particular interests of the research
was to consider how the specific demands of museum exhibition would
shape what was presented to the public and also what visitors would
make of it. In an earlier study of the making of a science television
programme, Roger Silverstone (who devised the Science Museum
research) had shown how televisual demands (such as, the need for a
good story and dramatic pictures) ‘framed’ and shaped the representa-
tion of science.6 What kinds of demands would a three-dimensional
exhibition, a representation which would remain in place for a decade
or more, make on the representation and understanding of science?
By observing the day-to-day activities and negotiations involved in
producing an exhibition, the hope was that such demands would
become evident – as indeed they did.
As I have already noted, and as will be described more fully in the
chapters which follow, the museum study also spread beyond these
concerns with the nature of the medium to consider the nature of the
broader cultural ‘moment’. Given that the changes under way within
the Science Museum were of such pervasive local concern, given that
the exhibition whose making I was following in detail was explicitly
framed in terms of such changes, and given the echoes that I heard at
so many museum conferences and other museums that I visited, this I
felt to be inevitable. What this means for the account which follows is
that this is a story about a particular time as well as a particular place.
This specificity is important. It is important not only because specificity
matters but also because it throws some of the more long-standing
features and ambivalences of museum ambition and practice into relief.
Like the ‘social dramas’ of which Victor Turner has written, this ‘time-
place’ seems to me to be worth speaking from, in order to speak of and
to broader political-cultural concerns.7
Edging beyond original research aims and reformulating some of the
models initially used is often a consequence of ethnographic research
as the ethnographer struggles to make sense of local priorities and ways
of seeing. As well as spreading wider, this ethnography also shows that
the ‘communication model’ with which the research began – a model
in which science was taken from the world of science and translated
by the museum into something to be ‘responded to’ by the public – is
far too neat in practice. By participant-observing messy actuality, it
becomes clear that scientists sometimes intervene later than this model
would imply and visitors earlier. Moreover, the process itself, while in
some respects a matter of translation, is more multi-faceted and did
 Admission: Going In 7

not straightforwardly ‘begin’ – or indeed ‘end’ – with ‘the science’.

Neither, indeed, are ‘science’, ‘scientists’, ‘the public’ or ‘museum staff’
necessarily homogeneous groups or categories. Carrying out ethno-
graphy highlights some of the important differences within each of
these – differences which have significant consequences for the kinds
of displays, and forms of knowledge, constructed.
Following the local players and trying to understand their concerns
and their ways of seeing and doing, was, then, a principal and in many
ways traditional aim of this ethnography. While ethnographic research
often has the useful capacity to redefine itself and move beyond its
original remit, it does nevertheless inevitably begin somewhere and
with particular players. Most often these are human players. An
important strand of social research on science and technology, which
has come to be called actor network theory, has, however, argued that
we should not accord agency only to humans.8 Instead, we should
recognise that non-humans (particular technologies or objects for
example) may also be actors and exercise agency. While this perspective
sometimes seems to me to pay too little attention to language and
classification, taking into account the actions of the non-human as
well as the human does more empirical justice to the case here than
would considering only human actions. Moreover, one of the problems
that an ethnographer working in a relatively ‘unexotic’ setting may
face is how to defamiliarise the familiar.9 Trying to overcome my own
original presuppositions about agency, and the discreteness of the social
and the technical, was a useful defamiliarising strategy which helped
me to see, or frame, things in new ways. In the story below, my own
beginning point was ‘the exhibition’ – an exhibition about food which
came to be called ‘Food for Thought. The Sainsbury Gallery’. In terms
of primary actors, this led me to pay particular day-to-day attention to
a group of Museum staff charged with the task of creating the exhibi-
tion; but beyond this I attempted to follow a myriad of different kinds
of actors who came to be involved as the exhibition was negotiated
into being.10

Writing in and Reading off

As Handler and Gable point out in their superb study of Colonial
Williamsburg, ‘most research on museums has proceeded by ignoring
much of what happens in them.’11 Instead, it is generally based on the
finished exhibition, with a tendency to assume that researcher interpre-
tations somehow map onto meanings ‘written in’ by the culture
8 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

producers. Moreover, just who (or what) is ‘the culture producer’ is

also rather unproblematically assigned. Sometimes it is the particular
individuals who have been directly involved who are so assigned, at
others it is institutions in general, ‘the state’, ‘dominant ideology’ or
‘corporate capitalism’ (with these sometimes being elided with one
another). What an ethnography, especially one coupled with historical
and political-economic analysis, can provide is a fuller account of the
nature and complexities of production: of the disjunctions, disagree-
ments and ‘surprise outcomes’ involved in cultural production. It can
highlight what did not survive into finished form as well as what did,
and also some of the reasons for particular angles or gaps. As the
ethnography here shows, agency and authorship – the social allocation
of agency – are contested and negotiated in ways which have conse-
quences for the nature of the cultural product and for some of the
ways in which it will be interpreted.
In chapter four I set out in more detail an ‘authorial puzzle’ which
constitutes a main plot of this book. In brief, this was the fact that the
food exhibition turned out differently in some significant respects from
the Museum exhibition team’s expectations. For the exhibition team,
it was an opportunity to create a democratising, empowering exhibition.
Yet, the final product also came to be interpreted as a representation
of a rather less than democratising free-market enterprise culture in
which the public is expected to make choices but denied some of the
means to make them. How an exhibition can end up different from
original intentions in politically significant respects is one of the stories
that this ethnography tells. It shows us that the process which is
sometimes called ‘encoding’ in cultural studies can be just as multi-
faceted and disjunctive with cultural texts as ‘decoding’ by audiences.12
As we shall see below, exhibition team members themselves give
accounts for the disparity between their original aims and the finished
exhibition. My account differs from these, however. This is not because
their accounts are dishonest (though given the importance of impres-
sion management in an institution like the Science Museum it is likely
that any account will be carefully constructed). Rather, it is because
events are understood, described and even perceived according to
particular conventions and circumstances. The ethnographer tries to
understand these and also to draw attention to assumptions and details
that participants may have taken for granted or not noticed.13
My account here has also benefited from being able to move back-
wards and forwards across time to use insights derived from visitors to
revisit the material on exhibitionary production and vice-versa. I should
 Admission: Going In 9

also note that, while I am critical of analyses of cultural products which

simply ‘read off’ production and intention (or, indeed, consumption)
from ‘texts’, I also think that theoretically-informed critical readings
of cultural products are a valid and often insightful contribution to
understanding. Such analyses seek to explore the possible significations
of specific representations through an understanding of broader cultural
practices of meaning construction.14 Sometimes, in discussion in the
Museum and at museum conferences, I have heard comments to the
effect that such analyses are redundant and that all that matters is ‘what
the visitors think’. While I agree that it is important to research visitors
(chapter eight discusses this in detail), this is ideally coupled with
consideration of more critically-informed accounts. The task of any
audience research is not simply to celebrate whatever visitors, viewers
or readers do or say but also to consider what they do not and the
reasons for both. Moreover, the move towards rather uncritical celebra-
tion of visitor or viewer ‘readings’, plus the dismissal of what might be
called ‘deep expertise’, chimes with a particular cultural constellation
(explored in this book) in which there is a privileging of the consumer
(‘the customer is always right’) and a distrust of certain forms of
expertise and complexity. This cultural perspective – which in various
areas of public life is becoming secured as a kind of moral principle –
is not without its problems, and one aim of this ethnography is to
highlight some of its easily unnoticed side effects.

Exoticism, Parallels and Overlaps

When I began this research, the Science Museum was already both
familiar and unfamiliar to me. Like many members of the British public,
especially the middle-classes, I had visited the Museum before. One
Museum wisdom has it that most visitors come three times – at the
age of nine, then with a child of nine, and finally with a grandchild of
nine. In fact, this was usually related with reference to masculine
gender: ‘He comes at nine, then as a father. . .’ Perhaps this is why I
had missed out on my own visit at nine (or at any other years during
my childhood), and had to wait until the next stage (though my
children were younger than nine at the time). Nevertheless, when I
began the research, the Museum was already in some senses familiar
to me as a place which I had visited, and more broadly as part of a
genre, of museums, which were part of my own cultural landscape. It
was also, however, deeply unfamiliar both in the sense that there was
much – especially about its workings – that I had never encountered
10 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

before, and also in that it remained an exotic and even magical place
for me. I loved the immensity of the Science Museum and its almost
surreal internal diversity, and the possibility of going behind the scenes
of this world felt like – and was – a great adventure.
I can still almost viscerally feel the excitement that I first felt on
being able to go from the front-stage of the Museum displays through
doors, often hidden at the back of galleries, into what initially seemed
to be a maze of footfall-echoey staircases and doors to mysterious offices.
I liked having my own key to be able to use these doors, and being
able to move, unchallenged by the security warders who manned the
boundary, from visitor space to curator space. However, although the
Museum retained its magic for me and although I continue to find the
workings of museums fascinating, much of the day-to-day activity in
that world behind the scenes was familiar and even mundane office
life: writing (mostly at computers), reading, ‘shuffling paper’ (as routine
administration is referred to), making telephone calls, photocopying,
picking up and sending faxes, having coffee, holding meetings, chat-
ting, and leaving and arriving for other meetings or conferences, or
perhaps for a spot of shopping. Much of this, and its everyday tribula-
tions and celebrations – someone going off sick, the photocopier
breaking down, misplacing an urgently needed file, a promotion, a
birthday, a piece accepted for publication – was very much like the
routine academic milieu.
The parallels with my own university world ran deeper, however.
National museums and universities are both public institutions in
receipt of state funding; both have an educational and public service
remit. Museum staff, like university staff, are concerned with issues of
knowledge, communication and research. At the time of my fieldwork,
museums and universities were pursuing sponsorship and their publics
(visitors or students) more actively than previously; and in both there
were claims that research was under threat. There was talk, and
evidence, of ‘cutbacks’, ‘efficiency savings’, ‘managerial restructurings’
and ‘down-sizing’. Moreover, new forms of audit, with an accompany-
ing tide of bureaucracy, were being introduced, and yet more – especially
performance indicators – were looming on the horizon.15 There was
also a level of concern, that we have now come to take for granted but
which then felt new in its intensity, with PR (the management and
creation of good public relations) and its accoutrements of corporate
images and logos, and careful use of the media.
The Museum was not, however, identical with the university. Museum
staff also had particular concerns – with objects and conservation, with
 Admission: Going In 11

gallery space, with the national status of the institution, with their
own specific promotion practices – which, while analogous in some
respects, were also important to understand in themselves. In the
account which follows my primary aim is to describe the museum
context and allow the reader to contemplate any analogies. Neverthe-
less, one of my motives for returning to this Science Museum material
is my own continued awareness of parallels between the dilemmas and
debates which I witnessed in the Museum and those in other areas of
public life, especially, though not exclusively, in universities. In trying
to make sense of how the best of intentions from very capable people
can end up by having ramifications which they do not expect, I have
returned again and again in my thoughts to the case described here.
What was going on in the Science Museum illustrates well some of the
issues raised by changes underway in many public institutions. I have
myself welcomed some of these changes – trying to find less arrogant
and more attractive and interactive ways of engaging with visitors,
students or audiences, for example – but I am also deeply concerned
about some of the consequences for our conceptions of knowledge and
for our cultural ambitions more generally. I will return to this in the
final chapter.
The Museum context also overlapped with the university world.
Museum staff sometimes attended the same conferences as myself; we
shared common academic acquaintances; some Museum staff worked
on similar topics to academics I knew and had work published in the
same edited volumes. In the Museum I was as likely to find people
willing to discuss with me, say, actor network theory, as I was in the
university. One senior member of the Museum staff was working on a
project that was funded under the same programme as mine, the
Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Public Understanding of
Science’ programme, which provided us with the opportunity for some
most illuminating conversations. He also held a visiting chair at a
neighbouring university. Another Museum employee, who had pub-
lished on matters of museological representation, helped to negotiate
access for the research. He sat on the interview board at which I was
appointed and acted to some extent as an unofficial local research
supervisor as well as being a tremendous source of insight and intellec-
tual discussion.
Some Museum staff knew a lot about anthropology. We sometimes
discussed it, Museum staff joking about being ‘my tribe’ and about my
observation of their ‘savage customs’. One curator wrote a wonderful
illuminating short spoof called ‘The Museum People: an interactive
12 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

ethnographic experience’ – heavily influenced by Colin Turnbull’s study

of the Ik – which she presented to me as a foretaste of my observations
of the ‘bizarre behaviours’ of museum staff to which she was looking
forward. Some others in the Museum configured my work through
the less exoticised frames of management consultancy and organisa-
tional expertise (on which others at my university were, at the time,
collaborating with the Museum). For them, I was there to ‘look at how
we make decisions’ (as several staff put it) and to come up with a plan
of action to improve this. As a recently completed management
consultancy exercise by a private company was widely believed to have
led to restructuring and redundancies in the Museum, there was also,
naturally enough, some initial suspicion about what I might be doing
there.
Many Museum staff were reflexive, and often ironic, droll and self-
critical, about their work and about museums more generally. Insightful
though this was, it sometimes led me to worry about whether I would
have any ‘extra’ layers of analysis to add to those already offered by
my ‘subjects’. Nevertheless, the bringing together of different strands
of Museum life, and attention to a fast-moving process on which it is
not always easy for the participants to reflect at the time, makes an
ethnographic portrayal by a participant-observer different from in situ
accounts. So too does the way in which an anthropologist might choose
to frame and explore the material. I hope, then, that what follows may
offer some new ways of seeing for those involved as well as restating
what they already know.
In producing this account I have over the years benefited enormously
from the opportunity to discuss my work with Museum staff and to
present it at a number of seminars and conferences in the Museum.
Such dialogue with those we seek to write about is not necessarily
unproblematic but, culturally shaped as it inevitably is, it undoubtedly
helps further understanding, especially in the context of highlighting
misunderstanding.16 In formal terms, the Science Museum did not have
any rights of censorship over what I produced. I have, however, sought
comments on draft material and have tried as far as possible, where
this did not infringe upon the integrity of my analysis, to take these
into account. What is described here was in many ways a learning
process for all involved. It is being published many years after the events
it describes and the participants’ lives have moved on. All members of
the exhibition team with whom I worked, for example, have had their
then temporary promotions confirmed. All have gone on to make
significant and impressive contributions to museums and exhibitions.
 Admission: Going In 13

Names and Identities

Carrying out research in a large public institution raises certain
particular problems. I could not, I believe, conceal the identity of the
place in which I worked. The Science Museum is important for being
Britain’s National Museum of Science and Industry. Its national (and
international) status is a key aspect of its particular public and institu-
tional dynamic. Neither could identities of some of those working in
it easily be disguised. For example, the Museum had one Director – Dr
(now Sir) Neil Cossons – a well-known public figure. While I do not
use pseudonyms, however, I do quote members of the Museum without
giving their names where this is not relevant; also, of course, when
they spoke to me on the understanding that I would not reveal their
identities.
There was a complex politics of naming in the Museum. Staff of
higher rank, especially those at the level of Keeper, were mostly referred
to by a title and surname (at least to their face) by those junior to
them, and by first names by those of equal or higher status, though
there were notable exceptions of individuals who preferred to be
addressed by their first name by all staff of whatever rank. The names
that I use here are those which I generally used at the time to address
Museum staff. Thus, I use first names for members of the exhibition
team with whom I worked, but use a title and surname for the Museum’s
Director. Only very senior staff (and only some of those) used the
Director’s first name when they spoke to him, and I was surprised to
find that many addressed him simply as ‘Director’. The Head of Public
Services, Mr Suthers, would, I am sure, have been happy to be ‘Terry’,
and this is how he was widely addressed. Younger staff, however, were
more likely to call him ‘Mr Suthers’ and as I perceived myself as rather
junior at the time, I do so too.

Following the Exhibition

In practical terms, much of my ethnographic following of the making
of an exhibition was carried out in the two neighbouring offices where
the exhibition team was located. The smaller office was the base of the
Project Leader and the Project Manager; the larger was occupied by
the four other members of the Team. I generally spent more time in
the latter, partly because it was less cramped, and also because, with
more occupants, there tended to be more discussion. The Leader and
Manager frequently popped in with the latest ‘developments’ and for
14 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

coffee and biscuits (to which there was an ‘ode’ on one of the cupboard
doors). In addition to office-based work, however, Team members would
frequently go on visits outside the Museum (to other museums for ideas
or to borrow artefacts, to food companies, to nutritional advisors, to
designers, to auctions) and inside it – on ‘recs’ or ‘reccies’ (requisitions
– chasing up things which they wished to use in the exhibition),17 to
collect faxes,18 or to the Museum workshops and other services to check
on how certain reconstructions or interactive exhibits were getting on.
They also crossed the boundary into the main Museum to carry out
visitor research, and, once the exhibition was actually being built, to
watch and participate in its construction and ‘shop-fitting’ (as the
furnishing stage of the gallery creation was called).
With six different members of staff often going off in different
directions I had to make decisions, often on the spur of the moment,
about whom to accompany. Sometimes this was limited by the fact
that they had not asked for prior permission from those they were
visiting for me to join them and felt it might be awkward (as to a food
company concerned about industrial espionage). Mostly, though, I
simply opted for whatever sounded the most interesting. Despite the
fact that it was impossible directly to observe everything involved in
exhibition-construction, Team members would report on their excur-
sions at regular Team meetings (as well as sometimes discussing them
informally in the office) which acted in some ways as an ‘obligatory
passage point’,19 in this case, in the movement of results of excursions
into the exhibition itself.
In addition to following the Team members, I also carried out semi-
structured interviews with many other Museum staff, especially those
involved in exhibition-making. There were also two other new exhibi-
tions being planned during the period of my fieldwork – Flight Pad
(an interactive exhibition linked to the Aeronautics Gallery) and
Information Age (a new computing gallery) – and I attended some of
the meetings for these exhibitions. I interviewed some of the staff
involved, partly to try to get a sense of similarities with, and differences
from, the Food exhibition. Another development which I tracked,
discussed in chapter three, was an ambitious attempt to ‘rewrite’ the
whole Museum, known as the Gallery Plan. I attended meetings for
this and also interviewed many of the staff involved. There was also
plenty of opportunity for more informal discussion with Museum staff
– over lunch (which was often at Imperial College next door), in
corridors, at social events such as the Christmas parties and in the
Design Studio up at the top of the Museum where I had been given a
 Admission: Going In 15

desk (well away from the Food team so that I could ‘escape’ if necessary).
The Museum’s ‘in-house’ designers, who occupied this large open-plan
office, were not working on the Food exhibition. In a new development,
there had been a decision to use outside designers. Not surprisingly,
this was regarded with some annoyance, and created a starting point
for much informal discussion of changes under way in the Museum.
My research was not, however, bound by the physical boundaries of
the Museum. In addition to following the Food team to meetings
outside (to a ‘Retreat’ in Lancashire, to visit designers in Chester, or to
film-editing studios in Soho, for example), I also sought to locate the
Science Museum experience within the broader museum world (a
phrase used by those with whom I worked) by visiting other museums
and heritage sites (especially those which were discussed in the Science
Museum) and interviewing staff there. These included the National
Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford and The
National Railway Museum at York, which, together with the Science
Museum, constitute the National Museum of Science and Industry
(sharing financial and managerial arrangements to a large extent). It
also included other science museums and science centres, such as the
Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, the Birmingham Museum
of Science and Industry, and Xperiment! in Liverpool. I also went to
influential new sites such as Jorvik, Ironbridge Gorge Museum, Green’s
Mill, the Design Museum and the Museum of the Moving Image, and
also other museums in London, especially in the South Kensington
area (the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert). I was
able to attend a number of conferences dedicated to discussing muse-
ums’ developments (including the large international ‘Museums 2000’
conference),20 and also a course which involved visiting innovative
museums in the north west of England with other museum personnel
and hearing about examples from other parts of the world, including
the United States, Canada and Finland. All of this gave me an under-
standing of some of the likely background knowledge of those with
whom I was dealing (many museum staff making visits to other
museums in order to develop their ideas about exhibition) as well as
both alternative ways of doing things, plus the web of institutions and
concerns within which the exhibition was likely to be interpreted.
Following the exhibition’s life after opening – its life with visitors –
was also an important aspect of the research design. This allowed
exploration of the extent to which the ‘actual’ visitors to the Food
exhibition corresponded to those imagined by the Team and designers,
and of the ways in which they appropriated the exhibition more
16 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

generally. The methodology as well as some of the results of this

research are discussed in more detail in chapter eight.

Book Structure
In this book I bring together an account of exhibitionary production
with analysis of the finished exhibition and visitor study of it. In doing
so, I have struggled over two particular presentational difficulties: (1)
Whether to keep these three dimensions – production, text, consump-
tion – separate (as to some extent they were in the real time of the
research) or to allow them to overlap (which helps to throw some of
the issues into relief and make the analytic point that they are inter-
related); (2) Whether to give a narrative rendering of exhibition-
production or to focus on themes. In the end, I have tried to do some-
thing of all of these. The book mainly keeps production, text and
consumption separate, partly because there is a narrative development
following the time-plotted process built into the structuring of my
account, but also because it allows the finished exhibition and visitors
to intrude into production where this helps throw questions into relief.
Similarly, while I focus mainly on particular themes – otherwise I feared
that the narrative would read too much like a set of details (complexity
can overwhelm) – I also try to convey a sense of the narrative. To some
extent here I have been stimulated by the textual freedoms of novels
such as Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) (which
also provided inspiration for my title), which use movement between
different time-frames in the unravelling of their plots. My account uses
changes of tense for similar reasons.21
Related to this presentational difficulty, I have also found myself
somewhat torn between producing a ‘messy text’ in the sense used by
George Marcus – a text which resists closure and the evocation of totality
– and the narrative compulsion to tell a story, which seems to invoke a
move towards closure as Janet Hoskins has noted.22 Messiness had
resonance for the complexity and ethical fuzziness of much that I
wanted to say about the Museum; but it also seemed to me that there
were certain stories that needed telling and that without some tidying
up (which is, of course, inevitable) these would be submerged. So, again,
rather than try to make an either or selection I have tried to work with
this tension and to produce a narrative account, with a sense of
direction which results from following a process, but which also tries
not to lose the sense of what was in many respects a messy business.
 Admission: Going In 17

Museum staff, during the time that I worked with them, were being
urged, in increasingly forceful terms, to consider and define their ‘target
audience’. In writing this book it occurred to me that I should do the
same and I struggled to try to decide which, of those various possible
audiences jostling in my head (Museum staff, anthropologists, aca-
demics, people working in museums more generally, myself. . . .), should
really be my ‘target’. As I did so, however, I came to the view that this
‘aim and fire’ model was rather impoverishing. If I kept only one
audience in mind my task would certainly have been simpler, but it
seems to me that the process of mentally negotiating between different
audiences and struggling to find ways that can talk across boundaries
is a key part of thinking and writing. Some of my hopes are that those
who work in museums and related cultural institutions will find that
my account of the Science Museum illuminates aspects of their own
practice, assumptions and dilemmas, as well as other ways of doing
things. I have thought about the issues which I discuss in relation to
debates in anthropology, sociology, cultural, media, museum, science
and organisational studies, and I hope that the book highlights the
relevance of the museum as a subject of study to these (and perhaps
other) disciplinary areas, at the same time showing the worth of these
debates and an ethnographic perspective to those already interested in
museums and science.

The Chapters
Chapter two, ‘Cultural Revolution in South Kensington’, is an account,
told primarily through a focus on the national museums in London
and on the Science Museum in particular, of the changes – sometimes
described in the press and in the Museum as ‘revolutionary’ – under
way in museums and related institutions at the time of my fieldwork.
As well as giving an account of what seems to me to be an important
period in public culture and in the development of public under-
standing of science initiatives, this chapter also provides a broader
context, taking us further behind the historical facades of London’s
museum quarter.

Chapter three explores some of the cultural changes under way and how
they were organisationally negotiated by telling the story of an attempt
to revise thematically the whole Science Museum and reorganise its
exhibition spaces. This is a chapter about the search for ‘vision’ and
the struggle with revision. The processes and debates involved highlight
18 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

the ways in which possibilities were culturally framed within the

Museum: what was sacrosanct, what was repugnant, what felt
compelling, what seemed dangerous, what looked irreconcilable. The
chapter also shows something of the workings of the Museum: who
and what mattered, who and what could make a difference, who and
what could make it happen – or not.

Chapters four to seven delve further into these matters. They ethno-
graphically follow the making of a particular exhibition, Food for
Thought, which was at the time regarded as something of a ‘flagship’.
These chapters tell the story of the multiple hopes and ambitions of
those involved in making the exhibition, their labours to ‘get science
across’ to the public, their assumptions about the nature of ‘science’,
of ‘the public’ and of how these might be brought together. These are
chapters about struggles with authorship and materialising dreams,
about conflicting demands and desires (between ‘object love’ and ‘clear
messages’, for example), about how a final exhibition may be subtly
and unexpectedly shaped along the way by matters which may have
seemed trivial or been taken for granted at the time.

Chapter eight moves to the exhibition’s reception by visitors. Here my

aim is to explore not only congruencies with and differences from the
virtual visitor imagined during the construction of the exhibition but
also the frameworks within which visitors ‘read’, and physically engage
with the exhibition, and to some extent, as I argue, with exhibitions
(especially those of science) more generally. As we will see in the
production of the exhibition, critical discussion of the politics of display
tends to be foreclosed, and as in previous chapters I am concerned to
understand why this is so.

Chapter nine moves beyond the ethnographic account to a broader

discussion of the cultural changes described, and of the politics of the
production and consumption of science for the public. The chapter,
and the book, ends with a consideration of some of the implications
of this for more recent – and possible future – developments in
museums and public culture.
 Admission: Going In 19

Notes
1. In 1997 the new Labour Secretary of State at the new Department of
Culture, Media and Sport announced, as one of his first ambitions, that he
would abolish admission charges at national museums. However, it was only
in the run-up to a general election in 2001 that measures to achieve this were
put in place and while some national museums welcomed the decision, others
were more reluctant, arguing that it failed to recognise the nature of the new
consumer. The Science Museum announced that it would abolish charges by
late 2001. For a useful review of arguments see Museums and Galleries Commis-
sion 1997; and for current government policy: http://www.culture.gov.uk. Also
see chapter nine below.
2. Where I use Museum with a capital M, I am referring to the Science
Museum.
3. Similar worries were shared by researchers on some of the other Public
Understanding of Science projects ongoing at the time. As we came to realise,
however, this apparent ‘disappearance’ of science was an important feature of
the ways in which it was locally contextualised. Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne,
in a volume bringing together some of the work on the Public Understanding
of Science programme, observe that: ‘the “disappearance” of science does not
mean that it serves an unimportant role in such situations – it is more that
“science” as a category blurs into other areas of social practice and contestation’
(Irwin and Wynne 1996a: 13).
4. This term is from Goffman 1969. The theatrical terms ‘front-stage’ and
‘back-stage’ which I use below are from Goffman’s dramaturgical model. See
also Law 1994.
5. The programme was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
I discuss some further aspects of this programme, and the wider emphasis on
The Public Understanding of Science, in chapter two. See Irwin and Wynne
1996 for some of the work of the programme.
6. See Silverstone 1985. The term ‘framing’, which indicates the concerns
within which science is located, is used in the title of this detailed narrative of
the creation of a BBC Horizon programme about the Green Revolution. In
chapter nine I discuss the concept further. Silverstone 1988, 1989, 1991 and
1992 contain discussion of museums as media and consideration of some of
their differences from other media, especially television.
7. See chapter one of Turner 1974 for a discussion of social dramas; and
also chapter nine below.
8. Some of the classic works making this argument are Callon 1986, Callon,
Law and Rip 1986 and Latour 1987. John Law’s ethnographic study (1994) of
a science organisation is a sustained example of the use of this perspective
20 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

which also contains reflective criticisms of it (as well as reflections on parallels

with management in universities); and Latour’s semi-ethnographic account of
the plans for a ‘guided-transportation’ scheme for Paris engagingly follows an
ultimately doomed process using actor network ideas (1996). For discussion of
some of the shortcomings as well as further potential of this perspective see
the contributions to Law and Hassard 1999.
9. Strathern’s discussion of what she calls ‘auto-anthropology’ (1987)
highlights some of the particular difficulties which may be involved where
the anthropologist shares cultural presuppositions with the people being
studied. I have discussed this and ‘parallel context ethnography’ further with
reference to my work in the Science Museum in Macdonald 1997.
10. The notion of ‘following’ the actors is used by Latour (1987) in his
account of how to study science and technology; and Marcus (1998: ch.3)
discusses different modes of ‘following’ (e.g. of persons, things or metaphors)
as a means of avoiding predefining the boundaries of what is being studied.
11. Handler and Gable 1997: 9. Their own study is one of the notable
exceptions; so too, though less extensively, are O’Hanlon 1993, Sabbagh 2000
and Schneider 1998. Others commenting on the paucity of research on what
goes on in museums, and calling for ethnographic study, include Karp 1991:
24, Clifford 1997: 166, González, Nader and Ou 1999: 111 and Shelton
(forthcoming). The same is much the case for cultural and media studies
generally: see, for example, Howell 1997, Silverstone 1994, Thomas 1999 and
Willis 1997.
12. The influential model of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ in relation to cultural
texts was devised by Stuart Hall (1980). David Morley notes that part of the
significance of this model was that it moved analytical emphasis from the
meaning of a text to ‘the conditions of a practice’ (Morley 1995: 302). See also
McGuigan 1992: ch.4; and Stevenson 1995: ch.1.
13. I have discussed strengths of an ethnographic perspective in relation to
the Science Museum in particular and organisations more generally in
Macdonald 2001. Other chapters in the collection by Gellner and Hirsch 2001
also highlight reasons for an anthropological perspective on organisations, as
do chapters in Wright 1994. Book-length ethnographic accounts of organisa-
tions which I have found illuminating include: on museums and museum-
like institutions – Davis 1997 and Handler and Gable 1997; on culture producers
– Becker 1982, Born 1995, Miller 1997, Wulff 1998; and on science and
technology – Downey 1998; Gusterson 1996, Kidder 1982, Latour and Woolgar
1979, Law 1994, Rabinow 1996, Traweek 1988, and Zabusky 1995.
14. For a useful discussion of different strands in such analyses as well as a
set of illustrative examples – including one on museums by Henrietta Lidchi
1997 – see Hall 1997. Some particularly illuminating examples in relation to
 Admission: Going In 21

museums include Bal 1996, Bennett 1995, Duncan 1995, Haraway 1992, and
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998.
15. See chapter two.
16. One misunderstanding concerned my use of inverted commas. It is worth
noting here as an example of a particular problem of fieldwork conducted in
the same language in which it is written about. In addition to using inverted
commas in ways common to many kinds of writing (to indicate a quote, a
term or a technical concept), I also use inverted commas to indicate (especially
on the first instance or where this is not necessarily clear from the context)
terms which were used in the local case. In other words, these are ‘indigenous
terms’, even though they may be very familiar to the reader. Were the study
of people whose native language was not English, the originals of these terms
would probably be given. This is a common ethnographic convention which
implies no value judgment about what is being described.
17. A requisition is the paperwork required to get things done, especially to
move objects from one part of the museum to another (or from one site to
another). Without this authorisation many tasks cannot be accomplished and
therefore ‘recs’ are a frequent subject of curatorial concern.
18. At this time fax machines were relatively novel and the Science Museum
had just one central fax machine. Exhibition team members had to collect
faxes from this, several floors and corridors – and sometimes a queue – away.
19. This term is from Latour (1987: 150) in his account of how to follow
scientists and study ‘science in action’.
20. Boylan 1992 is the proceedings of this conference (complete with
audience discussion) and gives a good sense of some of the debates under way
at the time. It includes a contribution by the Director of the Science Museum,
Neil Cossons, which provoked a good deal of debate (Cossons 1992).
21. I use changes of tense to remind of the fact that the action that I describe
is located in the past, to convey a sense of engagement and lived present, and
to unsettle. See Davis 1992 for insightful discussions of the complexities of
tense in ethnography.
22. See Marcus 1998, especially chapter eight; and Hoskins 1998, especially
pp.4–7.
This page intentionally left blank
 t w o

Cultural Revolution in
South Kensington

T he Science Museum is located in the affluent London area of South

Kensington. Here, in one of the world’s most famous museum
quarters, national achievement, history, culture and educational
excellence line the wide streets. The buildings exude authority, solidity
and the weight of history. Despite the bustle of tourists – more than
ten million visiting the area each year – the general impression is one
of permanence and imperturbability. Yet in the late 1980s the press
was widely reporting ‘culture clash’, ‘crisis’ and even ‘cultural revolu-
tion’ behind the monumental facades.
In this chapter, I provide some historical information about the
Science Museum as a means both of situating this ethnography and
also of highlighting some of the continuities and discontinuities in
the Museum’s conceptualisation of its role. I also outline changes which
were under way at the time of my fieldwork in the Science Museum.
In doing so, I pay attention both to the detail of innovations in the
Museum – including managerial structures and marketing strategies –
as well as to ongoing transformations in museums and public culture
more generally. In addition to providing a portrait of some of the
apparent cultural shifts, and of perceptions of what was going on, my
aim is to highlight influences coming to bear upon the Science Museum
(and other museums in South Kensington) and the very detailed (and
sometimes apparently trivial) forms in which these could be realised,
as well as the ways (also detailed and also sometimes apparently trivial)
in which it acted in relation to them.1

About South Kensington

Much of South Kensington was developed in the Victorian period, and
much of the funding (as well as some of the objects) for establishing
23
24 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

the museums came from profits raised by the Great Exhibition of 1851.2
Like the Great Exhibition, the development of the area was enthusi-
astically supported by Prince Albert and has for that reason sometimes
been referred to as ‘Albertopolis’. From its beginnings, when the
indefatigable Henry Cole (later Sir Henry, Director of the South
Kensington Museum from which both the Science and the Victoria
and Albert Museums evolved and the inventor of Christmas cards and
much else) petitioned for its name to be changed from Brompton to
South Kensington, the area has manifested concern with its public
image.
The Science Museum is situated on the west side of Exhibition Road
which runs on a north-south axis through the centre of South Ken (as
Londoners call it). It is flanked on its south side by the relatively incon-
spicuous Geological Museum and beyond that the splendid red-brick
gothic edifice of the Natural History Museum. Science lies on its
northern side too, in this case Imperial College, London University’s
distinguished college of science and technology, and the Science
Museum Library, which is shared with that of Imperial College; at one
time, the Royal College of Mines occupied the building next to this.
Across Exhibition Road, arts and sciences now divided, roosts the vast
Victoria and Albert Museum, the V&A. It is only a few minutes walk
up Exhibition Road to more Victorian majesty, the Royal Albert Hall,
to Hyde Park, with the rather ugly memorial that Victoria had built
for her Prince Consort, and beyond that to Kensington Gardens and
Kensington Palace. The Royal College of Music is sandwiched between
Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall, and one block to the west
lies the Royal College of Art.
There are plenty of expensive hotels and rather good, if pricey, sand-
wich shops in the area too, as well as some excellent restaurants, with
several ice-cream vans laying in wait for museum visitors. The coach-
loads of excited schoolchildren, and the families emerging from the
tube station exits, are probably making for the Science Museum or the
Natural History Museum; the women with hats and arty ear-rings are
on their way to the V&A, as are the art-students with their portfolios;
the men wearing tweed jackets, air-soled shoes and taking long strides
are probably curatorial staff from the Science or Natural History; and
those with dark suits and shiny shoes could well be the new breed of
marketing staff.
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 25

The Science Museum Building

The Science Museum building fronting onto Exhibition Road is of a
classical design, impressive and elegant in white stone with tall Ionic
columns, capturing the traditional and modern dimensions of the
Museum’s role [Figure 2.1]. As the Architects Journal described it at its
opening in 1928: ‘It is modern, but soberly British; post-war but not
fantastic; or “cranky” like certain science institutes on the Continent’.3
The set of collections, however, which formed the basis of what was
displayed, had officially been known as ‘the Science Museum’ since
1885. Many of these collections had their origins in the Great Exhibi-
tion of 1851 (the Crystal Palace exhibition), and were subsequently
housed, along with the arts and crafts collections that would subse-
quently make up the V&A, in the South Kensington Museum, estab-
lished in 1857. This Museum was located on the present site of the V&A,
on the east side of Exhibition Road, originally in temporary corrugated-
iron buildings nicknamed the ‘Brompton Boilers’. Then, in the 1860s,
the ‘non-art’ collections (as they were often known) were moved to a
set of long thin buildings on the west side of Exhibition Road, which
had served as refreshment rooms for the 1862 International Exhibition.

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 2.1 ‘Modern but soberly British’: the Science Museum. Courtesy of the
Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.
26 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

The opening of the more spacious East Block, as the new building
was called, was the result of many years of discussions and set-backs,
in which arguments about the need to do something to try to match
what the French and Germans were doing with their science and tech-
nology collections were often voiced.4 France’s Conservatoire des Arts et
Métiers, a national collection of technological artefacts, had been opened
as early as 1797; the Deutsches Museum, Germany’s national museum
of science and technology in Munich, was ready to open in 1913,
although it did not actually do so until 1925 due to the First World
War. That Britain, while claiming to be the birthplace of the Industrial
Revolution and a leading nation in technological development, had
no similar permanent national museum for exhibiting its achievements
was described as a ‘scandal’ in a document presented to the government
in 1911. Due to difficulties over securing a site and the interruption to
all plans on account of the First World War, it was to be more than a
decade before the East Hall was finally opened; even then, all of the
projected buildings had not been completed. With these, said Viscount
Peel at the opening in 1928, ‘the country will have a Science Museum
which need fear no comparison with any in the world’.5 It took until
1961, however, for the Central Block to be completed, and more than
thirty more years for a projected West Block to be even started. Inter-
national comparisons since have continued to be one impetus in the
Science Museum’s self-conception, as they are for all national museums.

‘Incalculable Benefit to Intellectual Progress’

In addition to national exhibitionism, demonstrating the achievements
and worth of Britain, the Science Museum has also been regarded as
having a public educational remit since its earliest days. Indeed, the
Great Exhibition (like other international exhibitions), of which the
Science Museum was partly an offspring, was also intended to have
this dual function. On the one hand, such world exhibitions were
acknowledged as international competitive arenas: nations were
awarded with medals as at the Olympic games.6 On the other, it was
also argued that they provided the public with the opportunity to see
the best in current international developments, and thus helped to
educate craftsmen and workers in particular. Such an argument was
also used with regard to the value of the Science Museum collections
and for the establishment of a national museum of science and industry.
A Catalogue of the Machinery and Inventions collection (c.1910), for
example, noted that one role of such a collection was ‘to offer to the
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 27

engineer suggestions or ideas from other branches of his profession

that may prove fruitful in the work upon which he may be engaged’.7
The Bell Report of 1911–12, which was influential in presenting
arguments for a permanent Science Museum, argued that such a
museum would not only ‘be a worthy and suitable house for the
preservation of appliances which hold an honoured place in the
progress of Science or in the history of invention’ but also that it could
‘promote an intelligent appreciation of the leading facts and principles
of Science and of the ways in which invention has applied these to the
furtherance of the industrial welfare of the World’.8 The first part of
the report concluded that such a museum would be ‘of incalculable
benefit alike to intellectual progress and to industrial developments,
and will be recognised as an institution of which the country may well
be proud’.9
Although those who came to work in the Science Museum were not
for the most part scientists researching particular collections and hoping
to make scientific advances by doing so, as was the case in the Natural
History Museum, they included individuals with practical experience
in engineering and industry who emphasised the importance of the
careful research of the collections and ‘scientific’ modes of display. This
principally meant typological and evolutionary modes of arranging
objects, locating them alongside similar objects with the same function
and putting them into a time-series from the most primitive to the
most advanced (these two principles not always being easy to combine,
and one was sometimes prioritised over the other). As Steven Conn
has observed, these modes of display were the physical manifestation
of ‘the assumption that objects could tell stories’; more specifically,
arranged properly, a museum exhibition could highlight underlying
‘general principles’ (as both the Catalogue of Machinery and Inventions
and the Bell Report put it).10
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, there was gener-
ally little conflict over the idea that such ‘general principles’ could be
both permanent and the latest discoveries. Museums were as important
as universities in engaging with ‘cutting edge’ science, and more
important in displaying it to a broad audience.11 By the 1920s, however,
this idea had been superseded in most scientific disciplines, as had the
centrality of both collections and museums to much of the more
prestigious scientific research. Science was now more likely to require
sophisticated laboratory equipment and deal with processes and pheno-
mena not so readily visible to the human eye.12 This was to present
difficulties for museums of science, and later – as technologies also
28 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

became more miniaturised and intricate – for museums of technology.

The strategy adopted in the Science Museum from the day that it
opened, of accompanying some machines by working models – using
handles outside cases or compressed gas – to demonstrate how they
worked was not so straightforward in the case of, say, computer chips
(to take a case that was under much discussion in the Information Age
project which I observed in the Museum). This growing invisibility of
science has been one of the problems with which all museums of
science and technology have had to contend.13 By the time that the
new impressive facades of the Science Museum on Exhibition Road
were completed, the role of the Museum as a research institution and
as one of the most epistemologically apt sites for representing con-
temporary science was already in question. The Museum still had,
however, an important role vis-à-vis the public, though this too was
not static.

Visions of Visitors
One consequence of the demise of the idea that museums were material
manifestations of the latest scientific principles, argues Conn, was a
shift in orientation towards less knowledgeable visitors – especially
children – which in many places was under way by the 1920s.14 We
see something of this in arguments about modes of display in the
Science Museum in its early years. Thus, where the Bell report (1910)
listed ‘the ordinary visitor’ last in its list of types of visitor, with ‘the
student’, ‘the technical visitor’ and ‘the specialist visitor’ coming first,
Henry Lyons (Director of the Museum) in 1922 put ‘the ordinary visitor’
first and ‘the specialist’ last. He also laid down new guidelines for the
writing of labels which were intended to make them more accessible
to non-specialists. In his suggestion that there should be a main part
of the text in bold type and a longer sub-text in a different type, what
he was pioneering was later to be called ‘multi-level’ text. This, with
further subtle but significant refinements, would be claimed as fairly
innovative when I carried out my fieldwork. However, even what seems
like an outrageously modest proposal now – that labels should not
contain more than 400 words – met with objections from those he
referred to as ‘the older ones’ on his curatorial staff.15 More generally,
as subsequent Science Museum director David Follett comments:

In placing “the ordinary visitor” first Lyons was much ahead of his time:
many years, decades in fact, were to elapse before the museum world
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 29

generally accepted that museums were as much for the “ordinary visitor”
as for those already knowledgeable in their fields, and began to apply
the modern arts of display with him in mind. Certainly in 1920 the staff
of the Museum thought only of the presentation of the Collections to
the technically minded – the ordinary visitor just had to make the best
he could of the exhibits.16

Nevertheless, Henry Lyons won one particularly notable battle, and

one which fits Conn’s argument perfectly: the establishment of a
‘Children’s Gallery’ in 1931. Not only did the Children’s Gallery contain
many working models, it was also ‘the first realisation of the principle
that the presentation of the Museum Collections should not stop at
the exposition of technical development’.17 Showing the role of the
technologies in everyday life, albeit within a very clear narrative of
technological improvement, was at the time considered a daring new
dimension to Science Museum display. Although the Children’s Gallery
contained some objects from the Museum collections, there were by
no means as many of them as in other galleries in the Museum. To
this extent it was a portent of what was to become much more wide-
spread – though never ubiquitous and never uncontested – in the
Museum as styles of presentation intended to convey more ‘context’,
such as dioramas, were increasingly introduced over the following years.
The demonstrative dimension also continued and could be said to have
culminated in the opening of Launch Pad, an area containing only
‘hands-on’ interactive exhibits and no objects from the collections, in
1986.
To say that museums were in part an expression of an ‘object-based
epistemology’, and that they reflected, and tried to cope with, changing
ideas in science, is not necessarily to deny their roles also as ‘instruments
of liberal government’. The latter perspective has been explored
especially by Tony Bennett in his work on the birth of the public
museum.18 Drawing on Foucault and Gramsci, Bennett is concerned
to highlight the ways in which the development of the public museum
was bound up with attempts to transform a populace ‘into a people, a
citizenry’.19 To this end he pays particular attention to features of
museum architecture and display techniques, as well as comments made
about visitors, which illustrate concern with the public. His argument
is not that this is a simple matter of control of visitors by the dominant
classes as a way of the latter maintaining their class position. Rather,
the public museum is a product of a liberal urge to ‘civilise’ or ‘educate’
the masses in order to produce ‘a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry’.
30 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

‘As such, the public museum is concerned not only to impress the visitor
with a message of power, but also to induct her or him into new forms
of programming the self-aimed at producing new types of conduct and
self-shaping’.20 Progress, a preoccupation of nineteenth and early
twentieth-century liberals, was to be effected not by keeping the masses
as they were, but by giving them ‘an opportunity to civilize them-
selves’.21 Museums, as part of the informal sector of education, were
important to this in that they embodied the spirit of voluntarism which
was central to the liberal idea.
Museums, then, can be explored as agencies for imagining and
attempting to construct particular kinds of public without being
necessarily conceived of as an attempt at class dominance (though there
might be such attempts and it might nevertheless result) or as unidi-
mensional.22 Rather, debates about visitors, and attempts to shape their
behaviour in the museum (to prevent them eating sandwiches in the
lobbies or to try to get them to read labels, for example), might reveal
ambivalent visions of visitors (as unruly hordes or as self-motivated
learners) and contradictory impulses (to keep them out or to pull them
in). In addition, changing scientific ideas and perceptions of the
scientific and research role of museums were inevitably inflected on
the workings of museums and their exhibitions. The attempt to cope
with multiple demands, and what must sometimes have felt like
irreconcilable dilemmas, has surely been a characteristic of the public
museum from its inception and museums like the Science Museum
have been shaped by multiple impulses rather than the unproblematic
‘writing in’ of any single narrative.
Moreover, as we shall see further below, museums may also have to
labour against their own physicality:23 the objects and architecture of
museums do not always lend themselves unproblematically to the
visions of either science or of the visitors that museum staff wish to
materialise. This was perhaps less the case in the nineteenth and early-
twentieth century when new museums, embodying the latest ideas,
were constructed, and especially when science and liberal ideals could
both be expressed in evolutionary narratives. Particularly for those
working in existing and long-standing museum buildings, however,
the architecture of earlier visions can prove an impediment to imple-
menting their own, and objects can behave obdurately, as we shall see
in some of the ethnography below.
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 31

Crisis and Accountability

Museums have, perhaps, always perceived themselves to be in crisis as
Conn suggests.24 Given the multifaceted and potentially conflictual
nature of their task this is not surprising. At the cusp of the 1980s and
1990s, however, this came very publicly to the fore and was repeatedly
voiced in the media, with headlines such as ‘Museums facing financial
disaster: Britain’s heritage in crisis’.25 This particular article in The
Observer focused on the financial problems facing national museums,
problems which arose from a combination of changed arrangements
for funding museums and declining money available to them. Other
articles described ‘culture clash’ and even ‘cultural revolution’ as being
under way not just in South Kensington but also in museums and public
culture more generally. Although there were in these accounts many
echoes of previous dilemmas – over relative orientation to research or
to the public – they took on new inflections in the late-twentieth
century.
The ‘cash crisis’ which national museums faced, in what was,
ironically, ‘Museums Year’ in 1989, was in part an outcome of a transfer
of responsibility for the maintenance of buildings from a central
government agency – the Property Services Agency (PSA) – to the
museums themselves. This was part of a much more extensive govern-
mental strategy at the time of ‘devolving financial responsibility’ as
part of a ‘rolling back of the state’ which was intended to tackle what
the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, described as a ‘dependency
culture’.26 Although national museums received state funding, and this
was meant to enable them to take over the functions of the PSA, they
all agreed that this was woefully inadequate, particularly in the face of
what they claimed were years of neglect and accumulating structural
problems left behind by the PSA. There were reports of leaking roofs at
almost all of the national museums, the Tate Gallery, for example,
catching the rainwater in buckets alongside some of its masterpieces.27
The financial squeeze was compounded by rising costs of conservation
and display, both of which – like salaries – were rising faster than the
funding received by the museums. A report on the national museums
by the Museums and Galleries Commission in 1988 described a
troubling state of affairs even before this latest financial ‘crisis’:

The funding gap is serious, and has had adverse consequences in all the
national museums, which have had to leave unfilled varying numbers
of posts in their complements (though these were determined after
32 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Government staff inspections). The effects are lamentably to be seen in

terms of closed galleries, reduced security, curtailed opening hours or
days. . ., backlogs of work (e.g. on conservation and the production of
catalogues and other scholarly publications), less ability to help schools
. . ., inefficient use of staff time (word-processors can hardly be afforded),
and less good service to the public. . . Most serious is the danger of a
cumulative, long-term decline in curatorial standards, as reduced staff
are increasingly stretched and often unable to maintain contact with
other international scholars, find time to attend international gatherings,
take necessary study leave or publish accumulated experience.28

At the same time, as in all other areas of the public sector, museums
were being called on by the government to demonstrate ‘public
accountability’: that is, to justify their entitlement to spend what was
referred to in government rhetoric as ‘taxpayers’ money’. The use of
this expression, in place of what had been more commonly termed
‘public’ or ‘state’ ‘funding’, was part of the ‘new-think’ which the
Conservative Government was attempting to promote: a way of
thinking in which previous state functions were all to be questioned
and individuals were to exhibit ‘self-sufficiency’.29
Quite how to assess ‘accountability’ – how to make it visible and
how to quantify it – was itself the subject of a fast-growing industry of
consultants and experts. ‘Performance indicators’ was the term used
for the characteristics used to ‘measure’ so-called ‘effectiveness’ or what
was termed ‘value for money’.30 The quest, in other words, was for
readily countable signs which could be used as currency equivalents
to decide on whether ‘value for money’ (greater output for reduced
input) was being rendered. There was extensive debate about what
would constitute suitable performance indicators for museums but,
within the ethos of the time, it was clear that ‘the public’ (alias, with
slightly differing connotations, ‘visitors’, ‘customers’, ‘consumers’, ‘the
tax-payer’) was considered by government to be one of the, or the, most
important judges of performance. As the number of visitors attending
was a neatly countable ‘output’ it was widely believed that this would
become one of the main indicators of museum performance in ‘spend-
ing taxpayers’ money’. This too created additional pressures, for if
museums were to be judged on the number of visitors they received
they had to create displays and other facilities which would attract
visitors; in the vicious circles of the time, this entailed spending money.
The problems were perceived as potentially still more viciously self-
perpetuating. Many working in the museum world believed that if they
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 33

were to follow the government’s encouragement to find other ways of

raising revenue (by charging for admission, for example) this would
mean only that the amount of state grant-in-aid (as public funding
was called) they received would be cut further. Not surprisingly, there
were disagreements about what to do, and while some museum
directors argued that the only way out of this predicament was to
become more independent of government by generating a greater
proportion of their own income, others saw this as a longer term road
to ruin.
In order to prompt national museums into taking greater charge of
their own finances, the government required for the first time that the
museums should draw up five-year corporate plans, setting out their
objectives in relation to ‘strategic plans, ideas, and finance’. These were
to be presented to government as part of museums’ bids for funding
(which was no longer to be assumed) and were to be revised each year.
There were also significant changes in the management of national
museums. Legislation in 1983 established so-called ‘independent Boards
of Trustees’ – appointed almost exclusively by government – at the
majority of them, transforming them into ‘independent public bod-
ies’.31 Previously, most nationals had been managed within government
departments: the Science Museum had been part of the Office of Arts
and Libraries. Trustees are persons drawn from those in Britain known
as ‘the great and the good’ – individuals who collectively would bring
to bear expertise deemed relevant to the running of a museum. In the
case of the Science Museum (or, more properly, the National Museum
of Science and Industry),32 there was in 1988 a thirteen-strong all-male
board consisting of a mix of industrialists, such as Sir Austin Pearce
CBE (who was the Chair of the board), Sir John Harvey-Jones (famous
for his success at ICI and for his management ideas) and public worthies
(including His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent). There were only two
professors on the board, an indication, perhaps, of the general anti-
academic stance of the government at that time and its endeavour to
make public institutions ‘think like industry’. Officially, the Trustees
‘own the collections and have the statutory duty of caring for them
and ensuring public access’ as well as responsibility for the buildings.33
As the Museums and Galleries Commission explains, ‘though the
Trustees have the final responsibility, they have no executive role (it
could hardly be otherwise, since they are unpaid and often have other
commitments which preclude their devoting even one day a month
to the museum). The Director is the Trustees’ executive arm’.34 In
practice, then, the establishing of independent Boards of Trustees did
34 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

not diminish the role and significance of the Director. However, despite
the small amount of time they were able to devote to their task, Trustees
were capable of having a significant effect, both of limiting the auton-
omy of directors (as we will see in the next chapter) and of opposing
the government. In 1989, Trustees of National Museums (including
the Science Museum) made an announcement that they would collect-
ively resign if the funding crisis of museums was not ameliorated by
the greater input of state funds, which contributed to an (albeit smaller
than requested) increase in the overall budget.
Introducing admission charges was one of the means by which
museums attempted to reduce the funding gap which they faced. The
V&A introduced a ‘voluntary charge’ in 1985 and the Natural History
Museum began compulsory charging in 1987. The latter led to a 40
per cent drop in attendance and it was widely believed that the loss
was particularly of poorer visitors. The voluntary charges at the V&A
led to a drop of about 30 per cent and also failed to raise much revenue,
partly, perhaps, due to a counter-charges campaign which produced
badges stating, ‘I didn’t pay at the V&A’. In 1987, prior to the introduc-
tion of charging, 3.4 million visitors were recorded at the Science
Museum, a figure superseded only by the British Museum and the
National Portrait Gallery. The National Museum of Science and Industry
(NMSI) as a whole, of which the Science Museum is a part, could claim
to be the most visited of all with nearly five million visitors in total.35
After the introduction of charges at the Science Museum, however, the
visitor figure for the NMSI – which the Science Museum delayed in
producing – was down by 60 per cent. Despite the bullish statements
in the press that this was only to be expected shortly after introducing
charges and that figures would soon return to their previous levels,
there was undoubtedly concern among the museum management. If
charging was partly a response to calls for greater public accountability,
the decision of the public to stay away was clearly not a desirable
message for the museums.

Marketing, Image Management and Contest

In response, museums went to new lengths to try to market themselves
and make themselves attractive to visitors. All of the South Kensington
museums employed consultancy agencies to help them with ‘identity
makeovers’ which resulted in new corporate logos and advertising
campaigns.36 Seventeen staff at the Natural History Museum were sent
to Disneyworld, Florida, to study customer care and corporate image
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 35

techniques; and the museum management angered some staff by trying

to distinguish between ‘curators’ and ‘scientists’, and handing the
creation of exhibitions over to a unit which pioneered visitor studies
(research on visitors) and mainly ‘objectless’ interactive exhibitions.37
At the V&A too there was conflict over the role of ‘research’ or
‘scholarship’ as Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who became director in 1987,
introduced a new institutional structure which ‘effectively separates
the scholars from direct contact with the exhibitions’.38 As at the
Natural History Museum, Mrs Esteve-Coll’s attempt was to create more
‘visitor-friendly’ exhibitions and she regarded this as only achievable
if the input of scholars was curbed. As she explained: ‘We must make
our collections more accessible to people who have not had a higher
education or and who do not have much knowledge of the classics or
the Bible. . . We know from research that most people can only take in
two or three ideas so rather than have a mass of objects we will
concentrate on a few major themes. . . and show objects related to these
activities’.39 The V&A also launched a controversial advertising cam-
paign (designed by Saatchi and Saatchi – the advertising company
employed by the Conservative Party during their successful 1983
General Election campaign) which for many people came to symbolise
the changes under way at the time. The advertisements featured the
caption: ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ [Figure 2.2].
For those V&A staff who publicly called for Mrs Esteve-Coll’s resigna-
tion, this advertisement was a blatant admission of the debasement of
scholarship and the proper functions of the museum, and their
subsumption to mere commercial and leisure interests.
For others, however, some of the changes in museums were rather
welcome. The V&A advertisement could be seen as a witty and honest
recognition of the fact that many people go to the V&A for its good
restaurant. The attempts by Mrs Esteve-Coll to deal with the ‘snobbery’
of the ‘arts mafia’ or ‘those reactionary museum people sitting in their
ivory towers’ was applauded by some as a championing of ‘the ordinary
visitor’.40 Likewise, the new emphasis at the V&A, the Natural History
Museum and the Science Museum on making museums more attractive
to visitors through improving general facilities such as restaurants and
shops, and trying to increase the ‘accessibility’ and ‘fun-content’ of
exhibitions (on topics such as designer tights at the V&A) were seen
by many as a rather welcome breath of fresh air.41 Even admission
charges were sometimes claimed as democratising: the director of a
metropolitan science and technology museum explained to me that
people liked to feel that they were deciding how to spend their own
36 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 2.2 ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’: V&A advertising
campaign. Courtesy of the V&A.

money and, not only was it perfectly valid that museums be one of
the possible leisure possibilities in which they could do this, but they
would also value the experience more if they had made that active
choice to spend money on it. Being a consumer – one of the key notions
of this period and one which felt new in its ubiquitous use – was clearly
being cast as an active and liberating subjectivity rather than as some
kind of dupe to market forces. Conceptualising visitors not as a public
but as consumers was seen as important for the museum by this director
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 37

at least. If the nineteenth century museum had sought to transform a

populace into a public, and had seen that as a major political advance,
it now seemed a time to transform that public into more active and
plural subjects: consumers.42
The V&A was far from alone in its experimenting with exhibitions
of popular culture: other museums did so too, or used techniques of
popular cultural representation in their displays. In London, for
example, the late 1980s saw the opening of the Museum of the Moving
Image, a museum of television and film which catered to popular
nostalgia in its inclusion of favourite children’s television characters,
and the Design Museum, which exhibited not only new design innova-
tions but also familiar everyday items referred to as ‘design classics’.
Many museums in the late 1980s and 1990s also staged what were
called ‘People’s Shows’. These involved ‘ordinary people’ throughout
the country exhibiting their own collections of mostly rather everyday
items – beer mats, teddy bears, egg cups, for example.43 This entailed
not only a representation of popular culture but also allowed exhibition
space to be used by those not normally able to do so (or who perhaps
did not even visit museums). As such, this too was part of a broader
and much discussed development: the attempt to open up museums
to previously absent or only passively represented groups. Involving
‘the community’ or ‘giving voice’ to, say, ethnic groups who had had
no say in the display of ‘their’ artefacts, was much discussed in both
Britain and elsewhere).44 Feminist, post-colonial and social history
perspectives were also increasingly in evidence at museum conferences
and in articles and reviews in professional museum literature such as
the Museums Journal. Other developments included exhibitions ques-
tioning and reflecting upon the authority of the museum itself or, as
in the much-discussed case of ‘Science in American Life’ at the National
Museum of American History, upon social dimensions of science.45
Alongside the intimations of ‘crisis’ and ‘disaster’, then, there was
also a lively sense of change, of ‘opening up’, of provocative challenge
to the status quo. At the same time, rather than smoothly superseding
earlier certainties and practices, many of the ‘new developments’ were
the focus of debate and sometimes resistance. The museum became,
very publicly, ‘a contested terrain’.46 It became not just a site, but one
of the most significant of sites, in which broader battles over the fraught
relationships between culture and truth were fought out. The great
expansion of interest in ‘museology’ since the mid-1980s from academ-
ics in diverse cultural and social disciplines is itself an indication of
this.47
38 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Challenge and the Museum Renaissance

In the 1980s there was also a massive increase in the overall number
of museums. This increase was paradoxical if what museums stood for
(history, stability, fixed identities) was really coming to an end, as
various social theorists suggested, unless explained as symptomatic of
an attempt to keep hold of such anchor points at a time of identity
turbulence.48 The precise extent of this ‘renaissance’ of the museum
or ‘heritage boom’ is difficult to determine due to a lack of data (and
discrepancies over what should count as a museum).49 Nevertheless, a
survey in 1988 estimated that 57 per cent of all museums had opened
since 1970.50 Everybody in the museum world at that time was aware
of, and many were fond of quoting, the finding that on average a new
museum was opening every fortnight in the UK.51 The Director of the
Science Museum suggested that it was only a matter of time before the
passenger arriving at Heathrow would find that the whole of Britain
had become one vast heritage park.52 This heritage boom was not
restricted to the UK, however, though undoubtedly it was felt there
particularly strongly and became bound up with debates about the
nature of Britain as an ‘old country’.53 Similar escalations in numbers
of museums were occurring across much of western Europe, in the
United States and Japan, and increasingly in much of the rest of the
globe. For the established museums, of which the Science Museum
was one, this rash of mostly independently run museums was both
encouraging in that it suggested that ‘the museum idea’ had not become
as passé and defunct as some had thought, and worrying in that the
new museums posed a challenge to the established museum idea
through their use of unfamiliar display strategies and in the capacity
of many of them to attract visitors who might otherwise have attended
the established museums.
There were two main types of these new independent museums, with
a variety of hybrids between the two including new local authority
museums (such as the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish,
County Durham). There were those set up and run by enthusiastic
volunteers, which were generally registered (if at all) as non profit-
making charities.54 Then there were attractions which involved paid
staff and which were more commercially-orientated and made an
admission charge. As both of these types of new museum had tourist
potential, they sometimes also became eligible for funding as part of
urban regeneration programmes. Interestingly, many of the new
heritage attractions involved the salvage and display of industrial sites
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 39

and technology – iron furnaces, textile mills, potteries and factories.55

While this covered some of the same subject matter as museums of
science and industry, the ‘new heritage’ tended to present a ‘total
environment’ which the visitor entered and ‘experienced’ (‘experience’
being a key word in the advertising leaflets, and one that we shall meet
again in the Science Museum). Such museums generally tried to convey
something of the lives of ‘ordinary folk’ connected with these industries,
perhaps employing actors to ‘bring the past to life’ as the promotional
leaflets so frequently claimed. The popularity of these sites also
challenged established museums such as the Science Museum to
consider adopting some of their display and marketing techniques.
Another challenge to museums of science and technology was the
development of science centres,56 the first of which is generally said
to be the Exploratorium which opened in San Francisco in 1969.57
Those which emerged in Britain in the 1980s (The Exploratory in Bristol,
1987, Eureka! in Halifax, 1987, Techniquest in Cardiff, 1988) followed
the same general pattern of collection-free interactive hands-on
galleries. In their aim to show general scientific principles, and in their
exclusion of any kind of context, these science centres (which did not
use the term ‘museum’) were in some respects an inversion of the
industrial heritage movement. They were nevertheless likewise very
popular and were an encouraging development for museums of science
and industry in that they seemed to indicate a popular interest in
science. Several museums of science and industry also incorporated
areas on the same principles, the Science Museum’s Launch Pad, 1986,
being the first; others included Xperiment! at the Manchester Museum
of Science and Industry (1988) and Technology Testbed in the National
Museums on Merseyside at Liverpool (1987).
Like other new developments, however, they were not unproblematic
for established museums. In the case of the Science Museum, the success
of Launch Pad in attracting visitors was regarded as counterbalanced
by the fact that it contained no objects from the collections and by
the disruption its visitors were sometimes described as bringing. (Many
staff said they wished Launch Pad could be moved to the car park, and
on my own numerous walks through the Museum I was often struck
by the contrast between the noise, bustle and sheer number of visitors
in Launch Pad and the quiet of much of the rest of the Museum.) As
such, the very success of Launch Pad in terms of its popularity with
visitors was in some respects deeply worrying for the Museum in that
it seemed to signal that what remained the key to the Museum – in
terms of the views of most of its staff, in terms of its expenditure, in
40 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

terms of its use of floor space, and in terms of its claims to singularity
– namely, the collections, appeared irrelevant to a large number of those
visiting it. This took on an even more worrying complexion in the
late 1980s as proposals were made for Battersea Power Station to become
an enormous interactive science centre, a development which would,
potentially, shrink the Science Museum audience still further.
In the late 1980s, in some ways surprisingly, ‘there were more
museums and more people going to them than ever before. . .; [and]
never before had they attracted so much attention from the press’.58
Museums had moved, noted the Director of the Science Museum, ‘from
the twilight to the spotlight’.59 The time was one of considerable change
and challenge for museums as such fundamental matters as museums’
roles, the task of their staff, the place of collections, their relationship
to research and to visitors were all thrown into question to an extent
which those working in museums at the time described as unprece-
dented. The politics of those changes were far from clear-cut. On the
one hand, there seemed to be a healthy challenging and democratisa-
tion of the museum with new levels of concern with a more plural
public plus a willingness to question and reflect upon entrenched
practices. On the other, the financial difficulties led to increasing
problems in meeting the needs of the collections and of the public
(as the Museums and Galleries Commission report quoted above
suggested). There were widespread fears of a ‘dumbing-down’ and
‘Disneyfication’, with a resultant loss of scholarship and expertise, and
that ‘market values’ would be all that would count.60

A New ‘High Priest’ and ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the

Science Museum
Directors of National Museums, appointed by the government and now
on fixed term five-year contracts, were vested with greater responsi-
bilities and potentially greater powers in the new managerial arrange-
ments. Dr Neil Cossons was appointed as Director of the Science
Museum in April 1986. In contrast to his predecessor, Dame Margaret
Weston, whom a former employee described as ‘stout and hearty but
seldom seen’,61 Dr Cossons was highly visible. A face and a name with
which everybody in the museum world was familiar, he was widely
regarded as an ‘innovator’. Newspaper reports (and he seemed to be in
the papers rather a lot in the late 1980s and early 1990s) used phrases
like ‘the High Priest of Museums’ and ‘museum guru’. He was featured
as ‘The Experts’ Expert’ of museum directors (selected by other museum
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 41

directors) in one Sunday paper in 1989, though it was a close battle

with Sir David Wilson of the British Museum, who had come to repre-
sent a rather different perspective.62 The features selected by admirers
of Dr Cossons were particularly his ‘popular touch’. He was described
as ‘a populiser in the best sense of the word’, having ‘pioneered the
path of museums as places of entertainment’. His ‘use of management
skills had enabled his museums to meet the challenges of the 1980s
whilst working with virtually standstill budgets’, so bringing, said the
director of the National Maritime museum, ‘a new spirit of enterprise
and confidence to museums in an era of government cuts’.
Those selecting Sir David Wilson, by contrast, made comments such
as the following: ‘Some directors have a clearer vision than others of
what is fundamentally important. Sir David Wilson. . . insists on first
principles – putting research and curatorial work before anything else.
He has strong views on public access and wants to retain free admission
to the BM’, ‘Sir David Wilson. . . has managed to keep the British
Museum an oasis of scholarly calm while the rest of us are rushing
around embracing versions of Thatcherism’. Lined up here, then, were
lines of opposition which were the subject of constant debate among
museum staff at the time: traditional curatorial, scholarly and research
functions of museums, coupled with free public admission on the one
side, and popularisation, reorganisation, enterprise and charges on the
other. Although Dr Cossons came from an academic and curatorial
background, with degrees and publications in economic geography and
industrial archaeology, and although he tried to challenge this polarisa-
tion, it was for initiating change and promoting popularization in the
museum world that he had largely come to stand.
Dr Cossons was particularly well-known for having established the
Blists Hill Open Air Museum, part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum
Trust, in Shropshire – a reconstructed village with actors ‘living history’
– which had become one of the most notable and popular developments
in the heritage boom experienced by Britain since the 1970s. An
independent museum, and therefore largely dependent upon money
levied by admission charges, Blists Hill had opened full-time in 1973.
After that, Dr Cossons moved to become director of the National
Maritime Museum, where he introduced admission charges in 1984,
making it the first national museum in Britain to do so.63 To many
this was a kind of heresy, which ran deeply against what they saw as the
spirit of the public museum. He argued, however, that it was part of
what he called a ‘plural funding policy’; this also included government
grant-in-aid, sponsorship, and income from other forms of marketing.
42 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Such a strategy was needed for museums to become less dependent

upon ‘the arbitrary cycle of public spending policy’.64 In other words,
charging could enable museums to become more autonomous.
When Dr Cossons was appointed as Director of the Science Museum,
then, there was considerable interest and some apprehension about
what he would do. Even in late-1988, when I began fieldwork, staff
seemed to talk endlessly about the Director, trying to second-guess his
plans. There was a constant attempt to look for signs of what he might
be contemplating. Thus, one day I found staff huddled over photo-
copiers passing round a draft copy of a right-wing policy group report
on the national museums which was said to have been leaked to the
trades union by one of the Trustees.65 The wording in some parts, I
was told, ‘looks terribly familiar’, the implication being that the Director
had been one of the sources of what was said in the report. One copy
which was passed to me, had scribbles on it in the margin by those
sections which might have implications for the future of the Science
Museum. As well as trying to detect future courses of action, there was
concern over the Director due, as one curator described it to me, to
the fact that he was the ‘only provider of scarce resources’. In this respect
the Museum was, he suggested, analogous to the court of Henry VIII
with a constant ‘positioning for power’ among its members.
All had expected some kind of change to be brought in by the new
Director; and change there was, enough to be referred to as a ‘cultural
revolution’ by some staff.66 Managerial restructuring, or ‘rationalisation’
as Dr Cossons sometimes called it, followed. He spelled out that what
was also needed was a ‘change of attitude’ among museum staff, some
of whom were ‘dinosaurs’, who were not facing up to the present.67
By the time that I began fieldwork ‘dinosaurs’ had become a matter of
everyday museum discourse, some staff choosing actively to refer to
themselves as such, and others, possibly picking up on an off-the-cuff
comment made by Dr Cossons, constructed an alternative museum-
type called a ‘bright young thing’. Where dinosaurs were stuck in the
past, bright young things were ready to grasp the changes that were
under way. While in more serious discussions museum staff would deny
that they could be categorised into these two types, these labels served
as abbreviations for the division between the stereotyped ‘research/no
change’ and ‘populist/entrepreneurial’ distinction that was frequently
invoked.
One curator colourfully described the change wrought in the Museum
as follows:
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 43

What had happened was that the Director had come in and basically
thought that the place was run by a load of wallies and dinosaurs. What
he thought was that he had to get rid of all of the Keeper Barons – he
had to smash the system. So he set up his own marines to break the old
hierarchical ranks. What we had was a new socially open system – for
the first time we were actually being consulted about things. It was a
real enfranchisement for all those guys in their thirties and early forties
who, though we didn’t realise it before, had been kept down, back in
Margaret Weston’s day. So the Director broke through all that. He was
having nothing to do with the wallies and dinosaurs, with all that
business about hierarchy and rank. He smashed all that. He smashed
what had been throttling the Museum.

While not all staff were so positive about the changes, the sense of
change conveyed here was widely shared.

Restructuring and Re-presenting

One of the changes which Dr Cossons introduced – after a management
consultancy had been carried out – was an institutional restructuring
of the Museum. It was this that Mr Suthers had outlined for me on my
first day at the Museum and which so many staff described and
discussed as one of the first topics when we were introduced. Figure
2.3 shows the institutional structure before and after this change. As
was pointed out to me, whereas in the old scheme collections-based
departments constituted the main organising principles and the bulk
of the institutional structure, in the new one these were all contracted
into a division of Collections Management. All those other services
which had perhaps been a little peripheral in the old scheme were
suddenly given equal weight by becoming a new division of Public
Services. Still more significantly, according to Museum staff, was the
fact that exhibitions were no longer to be organised within the
collections departments but in the new Public Services division. In the
old scheme, exhibitions had been seen as organically related to the
collections (that is, specially designated groups of artefacts), with an
exhibition generally having been devised by the curator of a particular
collection (such as Space, Land Transport, Electricity) within a particular
collections-based department (Transport, Physical Sciences, for example).
In the new scheme, however, the directional link in which the collec-
tions were the primary impetus in defining what was exhibited was
severed, a move which was also under way at the V&A and the Natural
44 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Before

Physical Sciences Wellcome (Medicine) Transport Engineering

Museum Services Administration Library

After

Collections Management

Public Services Resource Management Marketing

Research and Information Services

Figure 2.3 Managerial restructuring in the late 1980s.

History Museum. Instead, and as at the neighbouring national muse-

ums, the starting point and the main orientation of exhibitions was to
be to the public.
To some extent it was surprising that this should have been regarded
as such a significant change for the Science Museum as it had been
concerned with ‘the public’ and education since its inception. It would
be wrong equally to imply that visitors had been ignored in the previous
scheme, or that the collections would be ignored in the new. The shift
was more subtle; but from the point of view of those involved it was
no less significant and controversial for that. This attempted shift in
orientation of exhibitions was part of a whole raft of developments
aimed at giving ‘the public’ – or ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’ as they
were increasingly called – greater priority in the Museum’s activities.
Other innovations included the Museum’s newly adopted ‘Mission
Statement’. Mission statements were a relatively new concept in the
Museum in the late 1980s and the subject of a good deal of mirth among
some staff (who jokingly linked it to the television series Star Trek with
comments like ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ whenever the words were men-
tioned). This mission statement was: ‘To promote the public under-
standing of science. . . .’. The Museum had, of course, long had a public
remit and an acknowledged role in promoting public understanding.
What was different in this new scheme, however, was the conceptualisa-
tion of ‘the public’ as made up of ‘consumer-citizens’ – ‘choosing
selves’68 – and an attempt to provide not just what they ‘ought to have’
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 45

but what they might ‘want’. In the Museum, this meant new emphasis
on what were referred to as ‘front of house’ matters. These included
the external appearance of the Museum, its promotion, its exhibitions
and especially the entrance areas, its ‘customer relations’, and its
‘customer services’. The consultancy agency, Peter Leonard Associates,
was paid £425,000 to ‘create a new identity’ for the Museum. In doing
so, Peter Leonard stated that he ‘refused to look on it as a museum.
Our job was to get people through the doors’; and, as such, it was more
appropriate to create something which would draw ‘people in from
the street in the same way a high-street shop would do’.69 Thus, the
Museum came to sport banners, featuring the new modern logo (very
different from the coat of arms) on its exterior; a spacious new entrance
area (with cash tills) and large adjoining book and gift shop was con-
structed; the East Hall – the first area entered by visitors after entering
– was redesigned with a base-lit steel drum information desk at its centre
and enormous screens projecting scenes from different parts of the
Museum hovering above [Figure 2.4]70; Jean-Michel Jarre’s music was
piped into this area to help convey a sense of the dramatic mystery
of science, the modern being emphasised in contrast to the great

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 2.4 Industrial age meets space age: Information desk in the refurbished
East Hall. Courtesy of the Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.
46 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

nineteenth-century steam engines (which, because of their great weight

and bulk, could not be located anywhere else). Museum ‘warders’ were
officially renamed ‘stewards’ (though nobody outside the marketing
department referred to them as such) and were clad in blazers instead
of their previous rather militaristic uniforms. They were encouraged
to chat with visitors as part of a new ‘customer care’ approach. A trading
and mail order company was created, featuring products specially
selected by the Museum and some Science Museum own lines, such as
pencils and keyrings with the corporate logo; later this was expanded
to a mail-order catalogue. Galleries were hired out (though only to
companies deemed ‘suitable’) for parties and events. Actors were hired
to ‘interpret’ displays – so Mr Gillette demonstrated his newly designed
razor and Mr Hoover the remarkable invention of the vacuum cleaner.
New toilets and lifts were installed and plans were being drawn up for
improved restaurant facilities. The Museum set up a new marketing
department and strove to project its new corporate image and logo
further into the public arena through an advertising campaign which
included advertisements on the London tube and the Museum’s first
ever television advertisement.71
In 1989 the Museum also set up a Department of Interpretation. This
was part of a raft of policies concerned with ‘visitors’, this plural term
being most often used in the Museum in preference to the singular
‘the public’. Visitor research, while certainly not entirely absent, was a
relatively new venture for many museums, particularly the nationals,
and particularly in its more qualitative and investigative forms. The
Natural History Museum was especially active in promoting such
research, part of a world-wide boom in interest in museum visiting
whose origins lay in the increased recognition of the potentially diverse
nature of the audience.72 With this new field came a new technical
language and procedures such as ‘formative evaluation’, ‘summative
evaluation’, ‘meta-evaluation’, ‘customised random sample’, ‘stratified
sample’, ‘focus groups’. Visitor research and procedures of evaluation
and interpretation were increasingly professionalised. Staff went on
specialised courses, and conferences and seminars were held. In the
Science Museum it was at the end of the 1980s, during the period of
my fieldwork, that consultants on ‘visitor behaviour’ were employed
for the first time and training courses were run for members of staff to
help them to evaluate the Museum’s exhibits. These entailed looking
at numerous ‘bad examples’, culled all too easily from the Museum’s
exhibitions, of labels and information panels which the consultant
would denounce as ‘appallingly long-winded and confusing’, together
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 47

with our own usually still ham-fisted attempts to write improved ‘short,
simple and snappy, please’ ones.
Although Henry Lyons had tried in the 1920s to put ‘the ordinary
visitor’ first, this was done from a somewhat different perspective and
without all the paraphernalia of trying to find out what visitors might
want. The difference can be characterised with reference to the broader
new ethos in public service as neatly summed up in a catch-phrase of
the 1980s, ‘the customer is always right’. Museums, while not exactly
operating on the principle that customers were always wrong, had
tended to be run within a more paternalistic ethos. In many cases,
particularly in museums such as the Science Museum with a more
explicitly educative role (as opposed, say, to art museums where social
distinction is more central), the public was conceptualised as a child
which needed educating and bringing up properly. To take an analogy
from school: it was rather like a mode of teaching in which the teacher
stands at the front and imparts information compared to the so-called
‘child-centred’ pedagogical approaches in which children are encou-
raged to organise their own time and movement and follow up their
own lines of inquiry, approaches in which ‘education’ and ‘play’ are
regarded as inextricably linked.
To move from a model in which the museum sought to provide
knowledge which the public lacked to one in which museums should
begin from the point of view of what the public (the child) might want
and desire, was undoubtedly a significant, if subtle, shift of emphasis.
For some museum staff this felt rather like being told that they had to
give in to whatever ridiculous demands an unruly brat might make of
them. Others relished the idea that teachers should at long last come
down from their lofty positions in front of the blackboard and get their
hands into the sand-pit. The shift in task required of museum profes-
sionals was like that described by Zygmunt Bauman for intellectuals
and cultural mediators more generally, a shift from acting as legislators
to one as interpreters. 73 Rather than setting out knowledge which
museum staff had, on the basis of their own scholarly pursuits, defined
as that which the public should know, the emphasis was now on a
type of translation in which the nature of the audience was to be taken
much more fully into account. As part of what Macnaghten and Urry
have called a ‘polling culture’ – a culture which they suggest became
‘peculiarly powerful in late twentieth-century societies’ and in which
policy-making is justified through surveys of public opinion – the
museum was being turned into an agency of social research in its own
right.74
48 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Public Understanding of Science

We had been going along for years, not really sure of what we were about.
We vaguely thought it was something to do with collecting objects or
saving the nation’s heritage. But he Dr Cossons came in and said that it
was the public understanding of science [said dramatically]. Though what
that means, I don’t know. Here I am, supposed to be dealing with it –
and you are too.

This partly ironic comment by a member of the Museum’s Education

Department at lunch one day received a good deal of agreement from
others around the table. As one said: ‘Yes, it has become a buzz-word
but nobody really knows what it means’.
The prominence given to the notion of ‘public understanding of
science’ at this time, and its specific history, is worth exploring briefly
here, for it highlights the cultural constellations at play beyond the
Museum with which it was in interaction. In asking about the term, I
was sometimes directed towards a report produced in 1985 by the Royal
Society – the independent scientific academy which represents the
interests of science in Britain – entitled The Public Understanding of
Science.75 This published and widely distributed report made a strong
argument for recognition of the importance of science which, it
implied, was being underestimated by the general public and by a
government which was giving insufficient financial support to ‘British
science’.76 In effect, the report was a bid on behalf of the science
community in Britain for a greater slice of support from public finances
during a period when those finances were being squeezed and those
in receipt of them were being called upon to justify the worth of their
cases. Bruce Lewenstein has noted that the phrase ‘public understanding
of science’ in the United States in the period just after the Second World
War was generally used to mean ‘public appreciation of science’. In many
respects this was what the British science representatives in the mid-
1980s were calling for.77 ‘British scientists’ were represented as con-
cerned that ‘British science’ would cease to be a player on the inter-
national stage if their funding was cut still further.
Representing science as national, effected partly through comparisons
with other nations (especially the United States, West Germany and
Japan which were seen as faring much better), was a strategy which
could be repeatedly found in the arguments employed. This was not
surprising given that state-funding was at stake and given the Prime
Minister’s own penchant for nationalist rhetoric. In its report, the Royal
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 49

Society made two main justifications for the national importance of

science. One was economic: expressed in terms of ‘national prosperity’,
the argument here was that the nation as a whole would reap economic
benefits if ‘British science’ were more to the global forefront, but also
that individual companies could prosper if their workforce were more
positively inclined towards science and technology. (‘Hostility, or even
indifference, to science and technology, whether by shopfloor workers,
by middle and senior industrial management or by investors, weakens
the nation’s industry’.)78 The second was political: in order to make
informed decisions within a democracy, citizens need to be ‘scientific-
ally literate’. There was here an implicit casting of the public as deficient
and misguided in its present ‘lack of uptake’ of science – a ‘deficit model’
of the public, whose failing had to be repaired by getting more science
‘out’ or ‘across’ the boundary from a specialised and relatively bounded
world into that of the largely ignorant masses.79 Discovering better
ways to ‘package’ and ‘present’ science, and of overcoming ‘barriers to
learning’, were, in this way of thinking, the tasks of a ‘public under-
standing of science project’. Moreover, there was also an assumption
that better ‘understanding of science’ would surely bring a better
‘appreciation’ of, or public support for, science (though research within
the Public Understanding of Science programme itself, as indeed
elsewhere, has indicated that this is by no means necessarily the case
and can, indeed, even be to the contrary).80
Harnessing its own concerns to those expressed in the Royal Society
report was in part a recognition of the potential (and to some extent
long-existing) role of the Science Museum in what was often seen as
‘packaging’ and ‘presenting’ contemporary and potentially ‘useful’
science to the public and to generally improving ‘scientific literacy’.
The Royal Society had specifically drawn attention to the educational
potential of science museums and science centres, stating that ‘recent
initiatives in developing fully interactive exhibits and mounting
temporary exhibitions on the scientific aspects of current affairs are of
considerable value and deserve strong support’.81 Moreover, ‘public
understanding of science’ became a clear orienting idea for the Museum’s
tasks which would also, to an extent, demarcate it from the other kinds
of museums competing for a share of the public funding. Dr Cossons,
borrowing from marketing jargon, came to express this as ‘the brand
name of the public understanding of science’82: ‘public understanding
of science’ was thus a label – even a kind of guarantee of quality and
worthy intentions – under which a variety of ‘products’ could be ‘sold’
(to the public and to the government). The strategy, adopted in 1986,
50 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

was one which did indeed win a degree of approval – though no special
funding – from the Prime Minister who wrote to the Trustees in 1987
(quoted in full):

Britain was the first industrial nation and it must always remain a source
of great pride that it was from here that the new technologies which
were to transform man’s life spread throughout the world. We are very
fortunate that in the collections of the Science Museum – the nation’s
museum of science and industry – we have the best record available
anywhere of the vital steps to industrialisation.
But industry does not stand still and countries which once learned
their skills from Europe are themselves exemplars of high quality
manufacture, design and marketing. Industry in Britain is facing up to
this challenge and the current performance of our manufacturing sector,
particularly in the fields of innovation and productivity, gives cause for
optimism.
However, industrial success depends on national attitudes to science,
engineering and manufacturing. That is why I am delighted that the
Science Museum also displays the most modern technologies – for
example in the new galleries on the Chemical Industry, Plastics and Space
Technology.
Since 1983 the Science Museum has acquired the status of an inde-
pendent national body, run by its own Board of Trustees. This marks a
new era of self confidence and authority for the Museum and I detect
with appreciation its first steps to becoming not only the nation’s
showplace for the best in contemporary science and technology but its
expanding role in promoting a broader public understanding of these
important issues.83

In addition to the wider network of public understanding of science

interests within which the Science Museum could locate itself, there
was, perhaps, another internal reason why public understanding of
science was embraced by the Museum’s Director in the late 1980s. This
was the potential for public understanding of science research. This
facilitated a linking of the term ‘research’ not just to the collections
but to the public. It enabled the Director to steal some of the steam
from his opponents’ arguments by continuing to put emphasis on
research. By establishing a Professorship of the Public Understanding
of Science and launching a new journal and hosting and funding
research on the subject, it was intended to make the undervalued public
dimensions of the Museum’s tasks more professional and scientifically
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 51

respectable. This was also one reason why the research which I was
doing, financed under a public understanding of science programme,
was hosted by the Museum; though it was also a reason why some of
my own work caused some in the Museum a degree of consternation.84
More broadly, however, the emphasis on public understanding of
science was also a response to changes within science and its relation-
ship with society. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century museums
of science could confidently display scientific principles separate from
social factors, and it was generally believed that museum displays could
display those principles not just adequately but perhaps better than
anywhere else. This was no longer the case. Science in the late twentieth
century was widely conceived of as difficult and abstruse, a matter for
very specialised expertise. As the Director of the Science Museum put
it: ‘We are the first society which actually enjoys the fruits of science
and technology without having any understanding of it’.85 Not only
was understanding often ‘lacking’, so too was confidence: science was
increasingly seen not as an unmitigated ‘good’, but often as a ‘bad’, a
producer of environmental and other problems. What was needed, he
explained, was public understanding of science, in which museums
could play their most important role. A central plank of this confidence-
giving public understanding was to illustrate the utility or ‘use-value’
of science – its relevance not so much to ‘progress’ but to society and
the environment. This chimed also with ‘public accountability’, and
was witnessed in some of the topics which the Museum chose to
address, food being one of these. Perhaps one of the most striking
examples of this shift from arguing the worth of science in terms of
the generalised good and progress to more specific social and environ-
mental interests, was at the Natural History Museum where, in 1989,
it was announced that no longer would the museum continue its
previous aim to catalogue all known species. This task, the museum’s
director declared, was much more enormous than taxonomists had
ever imagined: there were simply too many insects in the world to
make this grand ambition ever likely to be fulfilled. Instead, the
museum would concentrate on ‘environmental, human wealth and
human health issues’.86

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, then, those working in museums
perceived themselves to be in the midst of widespread and sometimes
rather bewildering change. It was a period in which even the great
nationals in South Kensington found themselves undergoing ‘cultural
revolution’ and having to address such multifarious issues as ‘market
52 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

forces’, ‘consumers’, ‘context’, ‘feminism’, and ‘political correctness’.

For the then new Director of the Science Museum the question was
what to do, and how to translate some of his ideas into the practice of
the Museum’s workings and – especially importantly – into its exhibi-
tion space. Much of this book focuses on the first permanent exhibition
to be begun and completed under Dr Cosson’s directorship, an exhibi-
tion which was widely, though not unproblematically, seen as his
flagship. First, however, we turn to a much more extensive attempt at
rewriting the Museum which was intended to create a ‘new vision’ for
the 21st century.

Notes
1. In other words, I am concerned with museums not merely as ‘sites’ of
some of the ongoing changes but also as agencies actively engaged in coping
with, instigating, reformulating and ignoring those changes (see Fyfe 1996,
Macdonald 1996). Good illustrations of this include the historically sensitive
work of Tony Bennett 1995, Steve Conn 1998, Annie Coombes 1994, Gordon
Fyfe 2000, Donna Haraway 1989, Andrea Schneider 1998 and Daniel Sherman
1989.
2. For the history of South Kensington see Bennett 1995 passim; Butler 1992
(ch.2); Crook 1972 (on the British Museum), Greenhalgh 1988 (on the Great
Exhibition), Outram 1996 (on the Natural History Museum), Physik 1982 (on
the V&A), Stearn 1981 (on the Natural History Museum), Whitehead 1981
(on the Natural History Museum), Wilson 1989 (on the British Museum) and
Yanni 1999 (on the Natural History Museum). I have also drawn on entries in
the Encylopaedia Britannica CD 1999. Prior to 1989 the Natural History Museum
was officially ‘The British Museum (Natural History)’, but for simplicity I use
the name by which it was popularly and later officially known. The history of
the Science Museum is discussed in Butler 1992; Day 1987 and Follett 1978.
3. Quoted in Follett 1978: 86. Most of the following account draws on Follett
1978.
4. Follett 1978: 84. This kind of international competition through the
medium of museums is an important aspect of the global spread and develop-
ment of museums. For relevant discussion see Prösler 1996; and, in relation to
world exhibitions, Benedict 1983, Harvey 1996, Roche 2000 and Wallis 1994 .
For historical accounts of the development and spread of science museums
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 53

see Bedini 1965, Butler 1992, Danilov 1991, Mayr et al. 1990, Schroeder-
Gudehus 1993, Sheets-Pyenson 1989.
5. Quoted in Follett 1978: 85.
6. See Lindqvist 1993.
7. Quoted in Follett 1978: 12.
8. Quoted in Follett 1978: 21 and 23.
9. Quoted in Follett 1978: 27.
10. Conn 1998: 4.
11. See Conn 1998: 12ff; also Forgan 1994 and 1996; and Pickstone 1994.
12. See Pickstone 1994
13. For example, this is the subject of repeated consternation in a recent
symposium on museums of modern science (Lindqvist 2000).
14. Conn 1998: 19
15. Quoted in Follett 1978: 99. In the 1980s, by contrast, a Science Museum
curator was told that his labels should be about thirty-five words long (Bud
1988: 152).
16. Follett 1978: 98.
17. Follett 1978: 115.
18. See Bennett 1995, especially the essays in Part One.
19. Bennett 1995: 63.
20. Bennett 1995: 63, 46.
21. Bennett 1995: 47.
22. On the roles of museums in social distinction see Bourdieu 1984,
Bourdieu and Darbel 1991, Duncan 1995, and Merriman 1989, 1991.
23. See Silverstone 1992. Saumerez Smith 1989 and Bud 1995 give interesting
accounts of struggles over meanings of objects in museum display.
24. Conn 1998: 261.
25. The Observer 23 July 1989. Other headlines at the time included: ‘Museum
in crisis’ (on the Natural History Museum, The Observer 17 September 1989),
‘Museums’ cash crisis. . .’ (The Daily Telegraph 17 July 1989), ‘Culture clash in
Kensington’ (on ‘the row’ at the V&A, Financial Times 23 Feb 1989), ‘Museums
beg Thatcher to ward off ruin’ (The Observer 16 July 1989), ‘Museums send
SOS to Maggie’ (The Standard 17 July 1989).
26. For accounts of cultural, economic, political and social changes under
Thatcherism see Heelas and Morris 1992; and, in relation to heritage and
museums, Corner and Harvey 1991 and 1991a, Kawashima 1997, and McGuigan
1996. Young 1992 is a statement of some of the key ideas involved by one of
the ‘architects’ of the changes. For anthropological analyses of the ideas of the
free-market see Carrier 1997 and 1998. As part of the ‘drive for effectiveness’,
the Conservative Government appointed industrialist Derek Rayner to scrutin-
ise national museums in the early 1980s. The report dealing with the Science
54 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Museum, which was probably much more sympathetic than the government
would have liked, was produced in 1982 (Burrett, unpublished).
27. In The Observer 23 July 1989, article by Martin Bailey.
28. Museums and Galleries Commission 1988: 12. The report also gives
figures on the funding gap, other relevant statistics and commentary.
29. For anthropological accounts of the conceptualisation of personhood
involved in this thinking see Cohen 1992 and Strathern 1992, 1992a passim.
30. For general discussion of ‘audit culture’ see Miller 1998, Power 1994,
1997 and Strathern 2000. On ‘performance indicators’ for museums see, for
example, Ames 1991 and Office of Arts and Libraries 1991. Bud et.al. 1991 is a
sophisticated attempt to formulate a performance measurement model which
includes factors such as ‘enlightenment’ and ‘scholarship’ based specifically
on the Science Museum. An article published in this period by the Science
Museum’s Director gives an illuminating account of various impulses towards,
and possible ramifications of, the new accountability in museums (Cossons
1991).
31. This was the National Heritage Act of 1983. Overall about 80% of Trustees
were appointed by government ministers (Museums and Galleries Commission
1988: 17). In the case of the Science Museum all were appointed by the Prime
Minister. The Commission stated that the appointment of Trustees is ‘political
only in the sense that they are made by Ministers. The Trustees’ terms of
appointment (generally five or seven years) reflect the expectation that they
are not chosen for their support of any particular party’ (1988: 17). The
requirement for the national museums to produce five-year corporate plans
was introduced in 1988.
32. The Science Museum shares a Board of Trustees with the other museums
which together constitute the National Museum of Science and Industry: the
National Railway Museum (York, opened 1975), the National Museum of
Photography, Film and Television (Bradford, opened 1983) and the Concorde
Museum at Yeovilton (1980). These other museums have their own directors
but the Director of the Science Museum is the overall director and accounting
officer of the National Museum of Science and Industry.
33. Museums and Galleries Commission 1988: 17.
34. Museums and Galleries Commission 1988: 17. In the case of the Science
Museum the Trustees generally meet four times per year and this is supple-
mented with meetings of a number of Trustee Committees.
35. Report by the Policy Studies Institute (edited by Feist and Hutchinson)
1989: 6-7. The following figures are from their 1990 report, pp.46–7.
36. Macdonald and Silverstone 1990 also contains discussion of the changes
under way. Museums were not alone in putting a new emphasis on image
management and corporate identity at this time. Various social commentators
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 55

have seen this as a recognition of, or response to, the increasing emphasis on
culture and the circulation of signs or symbols in globalized late-capitalism.
Lash and Urry 1994, for example, make a general argument to this effect, giving
particular emphasis to what they call ‘aesthetic reflexivity’ – concern with ‘sign
value’, ‘image’ and ‘design’. For discussion in relation to the sociology of
organizations see du Gay 1997, Law 1994, Parker 2000 and Salaman 1997.
37. Originally, the ethnographic research which I undertook in the Science
Museum was planned for the Natural History Museum but the management
of the latter decided against it due to ‘sensitivities’ about the ongoing changes.
38. Article in Financial Times 23 February 1989, ‘Culture clash in Kensington’
by Anthony Thorncroft.
39. Quoted in Financial Times above.
40. See, for example, the vote for Mrs Esteve-Coll from Colin Ford, then
Director of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in The
Observer 23 July 1989.
41. For example, article by Janet Daley, ‘The Mr Crapper Approach to Art’,
The Independent 25 October 1989.
42. I discuss this further in chapter six. Other commentators have noted a
broader reconfiguration of the conception of citizenship at this time. Nikolas
Rose, for example, has written that: ‘The primary image offered to the modern
citizen is not that of the producer but of the consumer. Through consumption
we are urged to shape our lives by the use of our purchasing power’ (1990: 102).
43. See Pearce 1998.
44. In Britain, the forum for a good deal of discussion was the Museums
Journal published by the Museums Association, the organisation of museum
professionals. Edited collections discussing some of these approaches include
Hooper-Greenhill 1999, Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992, Moore 1997 and Stone
and Molyneaux 1994.
45. These developments, together with examples, are discussed in Macdonald
1998.
46. Lavine and Karp 1991: 1.
47. Commentary on this expansion can be found in Macdonald 1996 and
Sherman and Rogoff 1994.
48. For arguments see Huyssen 1995, Macdonald 1996, Samuel 1995, Urry
1996, Walsh 1992.
49. These terms are from Lumley 1988: 1 and Walsh 1992: 94.
50. See Hanna 1989.
51. E.g. Hewison 1987, Lumley 1988. See also Feist and Hutchinson 1990
and Audit Commission 1991.
52. Cf. his comment in Cossons 1989: 16 that ‘by the end of the century. . .
Europe will have become one vast open-air museum’.
56 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

53. See Wright 1985, McGuigan 1996. For the growth of museums and
heritage elsewhere see, for example, Hendry 2000, Huyssen 1995, Lowenthal
1998, Newhouse 1998, Walsh 1992.
54. Museum registration was a subject of considerable concern at the time
and the Museums and Galleries Commission was busy drawing up more
stringent procedures for registration.
55. See Alfrey and Putnam 1992, Butler 1992, Fowler 1992, Lowenthal 1998,
Lumley 1988, Macdonald 2002.
56. For discussion of this, see Barry 1998 and 2001, Butler 1992, Caulton
1998, Danilov 1982, Durant 1992, Pizzey 1987, Simmons 1996.
57. See Hein 1990.
58. Tait 1989: 174.
59. Cossons 1991: 15, 1991a: 186.
60. These fears were reflected, for example, in a conference held in 1990 by
the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and
Commerce, which sought to address the question of scholarship in museums
raised by the Museums and Galleries Commission report (1988). Some of the
participants, including the Director of the Science Museum, Neil Cossons,
argued forcefully against the opposition made between populism and scholar-
ship, as against the suggestion that scholarship was under threat or that there
was a ‘managerial take-over’ under way in museums. See Cossons 1991a.
61. Kohn 1989: 46.
62. The Observer 23 July 1989.
63. The British Museum had made a three month experiment with charging
in 1974 as part of an initiative by Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher. This
saw a serious fall in visitor numbers and the experiment was dropped, as were
hopes to introduce charging at all national museums. See Hewison 1991: 165,
Kirby 1988: 91, and Wilson 1989: 100.
64. Cossons 1988. See also Cossons 1989 and 1991. In 1989 he makes a
strong argument that: ‘Money from government and money from sponsors
inevitably carries strings. It is a peculiar paradox that money from the user is,
in effect, some of the cleanest money on which museums can lay their hands’
(1989: 21).
65. This report was usually referred to as the ‘Bow Report’ because it was
produced by the Conservative group known as the Bow Group. Authored by
Sir Philip Goodhardt M.P. the report is entitled The Nation’s Treasures. A
Programme for our National Museums and Galleries. As far as I am aware, the
Director was not a member of this group but directors of national museums
would probably have been consulted in the preparation of the report. The
report contains a number of specific ‘wishes’ of the Science Museum (e.g. to
expand the National Railway Museum and to establish a National Health
 Cultural Revolution in South Kensington 57

Museum). Overall it argues for the importance of the nationals, for the need
for them to have greater autonomy in their operation (including that the pay
and conditions of museum staff be no longer linked to the civil service) and
for them to have a higher input of funds, possibly from increased taxation.
The issue of pay and conditions was a sensitive one in the Museum and the
civil service union of which many staff were members was opposed to this
change.
66. Kohn 1989: 46, Swade 1989.
67. See, for example, Cossons 1987 and 1988.
68. Rose 1990: 103.
69. Quotes from article by Gaynor Williams ‘Leonard’s High Street Touch
in Science Museum’ in Design Week 10 January 1989. The shop as a model for
the museum was widespread at that time, perhaps most notoriously in Sir Roy
Strong’s comment that he wished the V&A to become the Laura Ashley of the
museum world. See Macdonald 1998a for a discussion of this metaphor.
70. See Cannon-Brooks 1989 for a discussion of the East Hall re-presentation.
71. Beginning ‘Discover man’s favourite achievements for yourself at the
Science Museum’, the advert showed a bespectacled boy in scenes featuring
weapons, surgery, aircraft and space. I first watched it on video with a group
of Museum staff, one woman among whom commented rhetorically, ‘How
more stereotypical can you get?’.
72. See Miles et al 1988 and Miles and Tout 1992 for accounts of some of
the pioneering work at the Natural History Museum. Bicknell and Farmelo
1993, Hooper-Greenhill 1994, 1999 and Lawrence 1991, 1993 give accounts
of the growth of visitor research and evaluation.
73. Bauman 1989. For Bauman this is symptomatic of postmodernity. See
also Barry 2001 for the associated shifts from ‘you must’ to ‘you may’, and
‘learn!’ to ‘discover!’.
74. Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 75. I am grateful to Jeanette Edwards for
bringing this to my attention and to Gordon Fyfe for the formulation of
museums as agencies of social research.
75. Royal Society 1985. The Royal Society was founded in 1645. Election to
a fellowship of the Royal Society is regarded as the highest accolade in British
science. The report was produced by an ad hoc committee of members of the
Royal Society, headed by the acclaimed geneticist, Sir Walter Bodmer.
76. The report also led to the establishment of the Committee on the Public
Understanding of Science, a body dedicated to the promotion of science in
the media, government and education. Indirectly it also played a part in the
Economic and Social Research Council funding a programme of research called
‘The Public Understanding of Science’, under which this Science Museum
ethnography was funded.
58 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

77. Lewenstein 1992: 45. See also Claeson et.al. 1996, Edwards 2002, Irwin
and Wynne 1996, Wynne 1995.
78. Royal Society 1985: 9.
79. See the following for some discussion of this model: Haraway 1997: 94–
6, Irwin and Wynne 1996, Wynne 1991, Ziman 1991.
80. See Irwin and Wynne 1996, Wynne 1995, 1996.
81. Royal Society 1985: 4.
82. Comment made during the opening address to a conference on ‘Museums
and the Public Understanding of Science’, April 1992, London, Science Museum.
83. Margaret Thatcher. Reproduced in Science Museum Review 1987.
84. I have discussed this in Macdonald 1997.
85. Cossons 1992: 132.
86. Natural History Museum Corporate Plan 1990: 2. I also heard the Director
of the Natural History Museum, Dr Neil Chalmers, speak on this topic in the
Science Museum in December 1989.
 t h r e e

A New V ision for the

Vision
21st Centur y: Rewriting
Century:
the Museum

‘Vision’ was a term much used in the Science Museum during the period
of my fieldwork and was, perhaps, common to many institutions in
the thick of the enterprising cultural changes described in the last
chapter.1 The search was on for new perspectives and for ‘visionaries’ –
individuals possessed of a kind of second sight which would enable
them to see ways out of current difficulties and dilemmas into better
times ahead. Managing vision into existence was, however, a difficult
matter. Managing (as adjective and verb) visionaries could be equally
problematic. In this chapter, I focus on an ambitious plan to ‘rewrite’
the whole Science Museum, to provide, as the briefing document put
it, ‘a new vision for the Science Museum as it moves into the 21st
century’.
In the end, the initial grand plans for wholesale thematised revision
were replaced by a rather different idea, to allow a more piecemeal
approach which was dubbed a ‘multi-museum’ or ‘museum of muse-
ums’. Nevertheless, the process of trying to revise the whole Museum
was an extremely illuminating one from my point of view as it
highlighted so many of the issues faced by a national museum of science
and industry. It also gave me the opportunity to witness a series of
highly intellectual debates, in which passions sometimes ran high and
in which there was a feeling of fundamentals being thrashed out. When
I have talked of the Science Museum to academic audiences, there has
sometimes been an expectation that Science Museum staff would hold
scientistic, perhaps naively positivist, narrowly technological or even
rather celebratory views about science. The Gallery Planning Group
discussions made it abundantly obvious that staff were aware of, and

59
60 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

deeply engaged in, cutting-edge debates about critical, social and cultural
perspectives on science, and held a variety of views on these. Although
some staff felt disgruntled about the outcome of the process, and despite
a pernicious rumbling that perhaps it had all been engineered just to
keep some of the more headstrong curators busy, many felt that the
opportunity to participate in these debates was worthwhile. The curator
who described his feeling of enfranchisement brought by the new
director (see chapter two), told me after the process was officially over:

The GPG [Gallery Planning Group] was the most valuable curatorial
exercise that I have ever been through. It was the most valuable forum
for curators that we have ever had. The sort of collaboration between
groups that went on had never happened before – you had people there
who never talked to each other usually. As a process it was invaluable.
As a forum for locating one’s own perceptions in the wider Museum it
was extremely valuable. . . . GPG was very valuable as a process – both
personally and professionally. It gave me my voice. We were enfranchised.
We had been in the Dark Ages – we didn’t know it then – but we could
see it once we were enfranchised.

The attempt to rewrite the Museum was not only about visions of
science and of the Museum’s role, it was also about professional
identities, about relations between staff and between staff and Trustees,
about the relationship between the collections and the public, and
between the past, the present and the future.
In this chapter, I begin by looking at the context in which the Plan
was requested and carried out and the various recursions through which
it went. In doing so, my aim is to focus especially on the sources of
struggle: why was it so problematic? And why, ultimately, did it not
happen in the same grand form as had been originally envisaged?
Alongside, I also seek to pay particular attention to the culturing of
science – the different and contested ways in which science was
conceptualised, mobilised and produced during the struggles which
constituted ‘The Gallery Plan’.

Conception
The Plan had been initiated by the Director in 1987, the year following
his appointment. It was an attempt by him to make his mark on the
Museum, as visionary directors at many of the nationals were trying
to do at that time. The intention was that the Plan would provide the
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 61

detailed basis for a major reordering and re-colonisation of the Museum

space, a total reorganisation and updating of the Museum galleries over
the following fifteen years. In particular, it was hoped that the Plan
would ‘somehow tie the place together’ (as one member of staff put it)
or ‘give it an overall logic’ (briefing document). To try to achieve this
the staff involved were exhorted to ‘think the unthinkable’ – ‘be bold!’
(as they sometimes reminded each other). The backdrop to this was
the then current layout of the Museum [Figure 3.1] which a ‘Science
Museum Management Plan’ (1987) had described as ‘confusing without
much logical relationship of themes to one another’. Moreover, the
document declared: ‘this great Museum. . . is increasingly out of line
with current views on presentation and interpretation’. This was to be
addressed and remedied.
Staff were first appointed to work on the Gallery Plan in 1987 and
by the time I began fieldwork some initial ideas had been formulated
and sub-groups appointed to work on different aspects of the emerging
Plan.2 Initially, eighteen members of staff, chaired by the Keeper of
the Department of Physical Sciences (as it was then), were selected to
work on it. The majority of these were curatorial, together with
representatives from the education department, the Science Museum
library and the design office. Staff selected were not, however, only
the most senior. Indeed, to the contrary – and to some extent surpris-
ingly given the importance of the task and the high degree of conscious-
ness among Museum staff about seniority and appropriate tasks – the
group contained a number of less senior staff. These were the younger
staff who ‘had been kept down’ previously according to the curator
quoted above. All of the Museum’s staff are ranked on a civil service
scheme, the highest being ‘A’ and the lowest being ‘G’. These grades
are a matter of a good deal of discussion among staff, who can always
assign a grade to a colleague immediately (‘he’s a C’, ‘she was an E
until she was promoted recently’). This was described to me as ‘grade
consciousness’. More than half of the members of the Gallery Planning
Group were Cs, Ds and Es (one might have expected all of them to be
Bs), and this spread was pointed out as noteworthy in the Museum’s
own documentation about the group. In addition, seven of the eighteen
were women, a proportion described by a group member as fairly high
(though in fact about 30 per cent of curatorial staff were women). As
we will see with the flagship exhibition on food, there seemed here to
be an attempt to think (if not the unthinkable) differently by involving
more younger and female staff – those who were likely to be ‘bright
young things’. Age, seniority and gender were here articulated to
 62
Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum
TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER
TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 3.1 ‘Confusing and without much logical relationship of themes to one another’: Science Museum layout in 1987. Courtesy
of the Science Museum.
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 63

notions of ‘flexibility’, ‘dynamism’ and ‘looking to the future’; youth,

‘juniorness’ and ‘femaleness’ being regarded as relatively ‘flexible’ and
‘open to change’.3 However, although those chosen to work on the
Gallery Plan generally agreed that there was a need for a major revamp
in order to create ‘a new, exciting and attractive Science Museum’ (brief-
ing document, 1987), there were also plenty of areas of disagreement
as I shall go on to discuss. First, however, I want to turn to the existing
Museum and its perceived shortcomings.

How Things Were

As with many older and especially public museums (though not so
much the newer themed attractions and science centres), the Science
Museum was not created in one fell swoop on the basis of a ‘vision’ or
‘blueprint’, but was largely pieced together from collections inherited
from elsewhere. These came not only from the Great Exhibition but
also from the former Patent Museum, the Museum of Practical Geology,
and from individual donors, as in the case of the Buckland Fish Collec-
tion (which was to prove something of burden for the Museum, the
popularity of the sale of fish from its hatchery notwithstanding).4 Over
the years the galleries had continued to evolve in what the Gallery
Planning Group regarded as a ‘piecemeal’ and ‘illogical’ fashion, leading
to the current ‘confusing’ and ‘dated’ layout (as documents and
discussions described). Discussions in the Group as to how to deal with
this and rewrite the Museum suggested that there were three main
interrelated problems in the then current organisation: (1) its taxon-
omic, collection-based form; (2) the lack of an overall organisation;
(3) its presentational style.

Form
The layout of the Museum which the Gallery Planning Group sought
to tackle was predominantly organised in terms of particular collections.
That is, the Museum floor space was mainly chopped up into discrete
areas on different subjects, relating to collections of artefacts that had
been accumulated, generally over many decades. Such subjects included,
for example, ‘Glass’, ‘Optics’, ‘Aeronautics’, ‘Electricity and Magnetism’.
Collections themselves were conceptually grouped into larger categories.
So, for example, ‘Transport’ included ‘Land Transport’ and ‘Aeronautics’,
the former having further subdivisions into ‘Rail’ and ‘Road’. This kind
of taxonomic subdividing is typical of a way of organising knowledge
64 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

that the historian of science, John Pickstone, has called ‘museological’

or ‘analytical’, a form which he regards as particularly characteristic of
science in the late nineteenth century.5 It entailed a division of
knowledge into specific ‘domains’ and an attempt to divide this into
‘elements’ which in theory would reveal a ‘deeper level’ of structure or
process.
In the Science Museum, the categories themselves, however, were
sometimes everyday classifications, such as ‘Transport’, and at other
times were more scientific disciplinary ones, such as ‘Earth Sciences’.
As was characteristic of this epistemology, the larger taxonomy was
not mapped onto the layout of the Museum: structuring was only to
be found within discrete, generally disciplinary, domains. The overall
layout did occasionally reveal some logically varied attempts to place
related subjects near to one another: for example, ‘Photography and
Cinematography’ next to ‘Optics’; various instruments of measurement
adjacent to one another on the first floor; and a selection of marine-
related subjects occupying related gallery space on the second floor.
This, however, was organisation by proximity without any incursion
into the discrete bounded differentiation of the specific collections,
where displays signal their individuality through different design styles
and colours.
If there was a partial scientific and epistemological rationale for the
organisation of the museum, there was also a strong local institutional
one. This was a correlation of collections and persons. Each collection
within the Museum was locally regarded as intimately linked to the
curatorial staff who worked on it, headed by a keeper and, in a continu-
ation of the taxonomic logic of specialism, each curator had their own
area of expertise. The organisational identity and expertise of these
staff, then, was concentrated around the collections, and despite the
changes under way at the time of my fieldwork, this model was still
firmly entrenched in everyday museum discourse. To talk of somebody
as ‘not really understanding the collections’, as ‘curatorially insensitive’
or ‘not having a good feel for objects’ were serious criticisms. ‘Object
feel’ was, perhaps, analogous to ‘the good eye’ of art historians, a
construct which, Irit Rogoff hints, may also help to shore up a particular
disciplinary approach and close off certain other perspectives.6
Many curators had worked on the same collections for the whole of
their careers and had built up an immense detailed knowledge of their
collections. The possessive pronoun is very appropriate here, it being
typical in the Science Museum to describe curatorial personnel by the
main collection on which they worked – ‘She’s Optics’, ‘He’s Land
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 65

Transport’. This was accompanied by an affective relationship to the

collections which I call ‘object love’ – a passion for the artefacts they
curated. During my fieldwork I listened to many informative and
impassioned accounts of the wonderful details of particular types of
plastics, medical instruments or surveying equipment. There was no
doubting the excitement of the curator whom I watched rummaging
through a carrier bag full of plugs and sockets that somebody had
donated to the Museum or of the curatorial thrill of seeing a 1920s
fitted kitchen uncovered in one of the Museum’s vast warehouses in
Hayes. More than one curator, unhappy with some of the changes under
way in the Museum, told me that they would have thought of moving
elsewhere were it not for their deep attachment to their collections.
‘Objects’ themselves were variously defined for me as ‘anything with
an inventory number’ – in other words, any artefact once it was part
of the Museum’s collections (and, therefore, ‘harder to get rid of
basically’) – and as ‘anything which you can put on a pedestal and
worship’.
One member of the Museum staff (described as ‘not really under-
standing the collections’ by some others) was in favour of ‘de-acquisition’,
a euphemism for ‘getting rid of’ museum objects. He tried to organise
a seminar on the subject of ‘objectness’; his intention was (as he
described it to me) ‘to get them [other curators] to see that we make
something a part of our collections’. For him, it logically followed that
‘we’ could make them cease to be part of the collections. His view here,
however, ran counter to the more widespread perception of objects as
sacrosanct once they had become part of the collections. This defini-
tional process was so powerful and so ‘one-way’ that even the contem-
plation of ‘de-acquisition’ was regarded as something of a sin.
Object love was also an important dimension of local notions shaping
both exhibitions and the Museum more generally. Part of the local
expectation was that curators would act as advocates for their collec-
tions. One dimension of this was attempting to have their collections
on public display. (The majority of the Museum’s holdings were not
on public display in the Science Museum and some entire collections
were in storage.) Having floor space for display, then, was part of a
local battle for ‘territory’ – a key notion which Mr Suthers told me
that I should list in a ‘Museum glossary’ along with ‘objects’, ‘visitors’
and ‘tradition’. Territory, itself implicated in ‘objects’, ‘visitors’ and
‘tradition’, was necessarily also enmeshed with issues of professional
status among Museum staff. Any attempt to do away with the assump-
tion that exhibitions would be presentations of collections would,
66 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

therefore, be a challenge to an important dimension of local profes-

sional identity. This was presumably another reason for the choice of
many less senior staff on the Gallery Planning Group: they would be
less likely to be thoroughly committed to particular collections and
the collection-exhibition model.

Layout
The presentation of collections in an atomised fashion was also one
reason for the lack of an overall plan to the Science Museum layout.
So too was professional territorialism. Which collection had come to
occupy which space was, in part at least, a consequence of the success
of particular curators in preserving or acquiring gallery space. In some
cases certain galleries had come to be regarded as the inalienable terri-
tories of certain collections and curators. Another factor was also
involved in the evolution of particular subjects into particular spaces
at particular times. This was the availability of sponsorship. In order
to refurbish any gallery and to mount any major exhibition, the Science
Museum had for many decades relied upon at least some (generally
fairly substantial) input from external sponsors. Unlike exhibitions and
performances in the arts, sponsorship of exhibitions of science, industry
and technology almost always comes from companies with a direct
interest in the subject matter.7 Thus, an exhibition on gas is likely to
receive sponsorship from a gas company, one on electricity from an
electricity company. As one member of the Museum staff pointed out
to me, an ‘archaeology’ of which exhibitions were produced when was,
to some extent, a reflection of which industries were doing well at
particular times. Thus, in the first example of the sponsorship of a
‘permanent’ gallery (as opposed to a temporary exhibition), the original
Gas Gallery (sponsored by the Gas Council) opened in 1954, Electricity
(sponsored by the Electricity Board) in 1975 and the Chemical Industry
(sponsored by Imperial Chemical Industries) in 1986. Food (sponsored
by the charitable trust of the supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s), was a
continuation of this trend. Moreover, perhaps partly because financial
success brought companies into the public eye, this kind of archaeology
also suggested that the timing of sponsorship could often be related to
particular public relations concerns at those times: the opening of
Nuclear Power (sponsored by the UK Atomic Energy Authority) and
the Chemical Industry in the 1980s, as well as an exhibition on food
at a time when food scares were becoming major public concerns, were
examples which supported this suggestion.8
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 67

Other considerations were also involved in the organisation of space

within the Museum. For example, large and heavy objects, such as beam
engines, generally have to be kept on the ground floor because of their
size and weight. There seemed to be – though this is not set out explic-
itly in any documents that I have seen – an idea of progress, of higher
and more sophisticated technologies going upwards in the Museum;
thus, land transport and steam power were on the ground floor and
aeronautics and optics at the top. The basement was the location of
the marginal: the children’s gallery, domestic technologies (seen as
especially the preserve of women) and ‘fire-making’ – one of the few
exhibitions dealing with cultural ‘others’.9
The contingency of available funding, allied with the fact that the
expensive business of refurbishment had been carried out on a gallery
by gallery basis over many years, meant that the Museum tended to
evolve in a piecemeal fashion, highly constrained by its existing layout.
The aim of the Gallery Plan, then, was to change this, and it was to do
so while also challenging the atomised collection-based format. This
was also to be coupled with an updating of the presentational style of
many of the existing galleries.

Style
In the documents and discussions related to the Gallery Plan, the mode
of presentation in much of the Museum was often commented upon
negatively as ‘unappealing to visitors’. The preliminary report stated
that, in contradistinction to much of the current display, the revamp
was to ‘provide a lively, stimulating and easily digested insight into all
aspects of science, technology, industry and medicine’; though, as we
shall see below, there was a good deal of disagreement over how this
should be done. In part, the perceived problems of the current Museum
were simply that some exhibitions had been in place many years and
had become ‘tatty and dog-eared’; in addition to this many displays
were condemned as too ‘static’, as ‘patronising’ or ‘confusing’. Lengthy
labels and ‘poorly interpreted’ object-based displays were singled out
for criticism. As Tony Bennett has described, many museum staff in
the nineteenth century were preoccupied with labelling as a means of
making science, rather literally, ‘legible’ or ‘visible’; objects, ‘properly
labelled’, were seen as a better means of educating the working classes
than the more abstract literary techniques.10 Moreover, labels were seen
as a further aspect of the ‘analytical’ scientific approach in which
individual elements (in this case objects) were to be clearly indicated,
68 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

the label providing an indication of an object’s place within a taxon-

omic scheme. This was an approach which gave pre-eminence to ‘sight’
above other senses and to an object’s relational place within its ‘domain’
(for example, the features of this particular engine in relation to others)
above matters such as its mode of operation, social context or use. For
the staff involved in the Gallery Plan, however, this kind of approach
and information was generally regarded as ‘outdated’ and, as a mode
of presentation defined by a curatorial/scientific logic, not sufficiently
‘visitor-oriented’. The business of rewriting the Museum, then, was also
a struggle to define new museological styles which would, among other
things, connect to changing conceptions of science and to a shift in
the relationship between scientific expertise and the public.

Re-visioning

What the Director would really like is if we could rip it all out and start
again, kind of beginning in the Stone Age and work through the Ages,
Industrial Revolution and on, through the whole Museum, so that the
visitor comes in the front door and follows a single route through the
whole history of technology, and out again the other side. A bit like
Jorvik on a grand scale – preferably with little cars to keep them moving
too!

This half-joking account was voiced by one of the members of the

Gallery Planning Group as I walked along to a meeting with him. Jorvik,
a Viking exhibition in York which had opened in 1984, was the subject
of a good deal of interest in museums in the late 1980s and early 1990s
both because of its popularity and the fact that it achieved a very high
throughput of paying customers (boasting over 500 paying-visitors per
day and a higher rate of income per square metre in its shop than the
local branch of Marks and Spencers), due partly to the fact that visitors
take a twelve-minute ride in a ‘time-car’ through a brief history of the
Viking settlement of ‘Jorvik’ (York’s Viking name). The makers of Jorvik
had visited Disneyland to learn about techniques of ‘customer manage-
ment’. As this was coupled with a potentially educational and scientific-
ally respectable subject matter, Jorvik was a widespread subject of
interest and discussion among staff in the Science Museum and other
museums.11 For some, Jorvik – with its recreated scenes and smells –
was seen as a successful attempt to ‘bring history alive’, as it advertised
itself; for others, however, it was regarded with disdain as a crudely
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 69

commercial enterprise in which ‘real, historical objects’ had been

replaced by ‘mock-ups’.
As such, it was a focus for widespread debates in many museums at
the time, about ‘making museums more relevant’ or ‘dumbing-down’,
about ‘democracy’ or ‘Disneyfication’. Jorvik was also often taken to
exemplify what in the Science Museum was referred to as ‘the historical’
or ‘the social’ approach, which was contrasted with ‘the technological’.
The latter entailed an emphasis on mechanism and ‘how it works’ (as
one member of the Gallery Planning Group who was an advocate of
this perspective put it). These alternatives were also part of the
negotiations involved in the Gallery Plan, reflected among other things
in discussions about the nature of ‘the visitor’ and what he or she
wanted or should be presented with.
The possibility of ‘rip[ping] it all out and start[ing] again’ was not,
however, available: that would have entailed too much expense both
in terms of lost revenue if the Museum were to close entirely during
refurbishing and in capital costs over a short time period.12 Instead,
the Gallery Planning Group had to come up with a plan for a gradual
programme of gallery replacement over 10–15 years which would
attempt to both create a kind of overall plan to the Museum layout
and at the same time might begin to break down the atomistic
presentational style, as suggested by the idea of arranging the Museum
into a narrative ‘story of progress’. The Plan was, therefore, to be created
in a struggle against what were dubbed ‘practical considerations’: the
existing Museum layout, matters such as which floors could cope with
heavy objects, which galleries were in need of most urgent refurbish-
ment, and available funding. With regard to the last consideration,
the Group was told that they had to create their Plan on the assumption
that a budget of no more than £1.6 million per year at 1986 prices
would be available (this being sufficient for no more than two major
gallery refits per year). They were also not allowed to suggest extra
building work (such as a new wing to the Museum). Their task was to
‘be bold!’ – one of the joking catch-phrases of the Group – but within
tightly defined limits. Clearly, this was a tall order but it produced a
good deal of creative thinking.
Before discussing the ideas that the Group came up with, I want
briefly to reiterate that ‘rewriting’ the Museum was not just about
reorganising the layout. Rewriting inevitably also entails inscribing
certain cultural visions of, in particular, science, material culture
(objects), professional expertise, and visitors. Of course, inscription is
a messy, negotiated process and the ‘visions’ that it produces are likely
70 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

to contain ambiguity and even contradiction. At the same time,

however, the repertoire from which positions voiced in discussion are
drawn, and the ways in which some of them are likely to become pre-
eminent at certain times, is culturally located and not infinite (some
suggestions could be, and sometimes were, defined out of existence as
‘coming from another planet’). Likewise, to argue that certain visions
were produced is not to assume that visitors would necessarily interpret
the exhibition as the producers had intended; though what was
produced would inform those interpretations. Below, I discuss first the
general outline of the plans that the Group came up with before turning
to some of the more specific areas of discussion and their implications
in more detail.

Precepts: Visitors and Science

After the first meeting of the Gallery Planning Group – prior to my
fieldwork – four ‘working parties’ were established to try to formulate
some ‘precepts’ or ‘ground rules’ which would guide the more detailed
discussions about the content of the exhibitions themselves. These
groups and their remits were as follows:

1. Function: To look at the declared objectives of the Museum, how

these are carried out in practice, the constraints which influence
the efficient fulfilment of our role, and finally to assess the need
for and, if necessary, suggest a redefinition of that role.
2. Medium: To try to reach a better understanding of the exhibition
as a medium, what it can (and cannot) do for visitors of all kinds.
How can we exploit our medium to its greatest advantage?
3. Visitors: Who are our visitors? Why do they come? What do they
expect from a visit to the Science Museum? How do they use their
time in the Museum and were they pleased they came? What
competition do we face from other leisure activities and how should
we respond to this competition?
4. Building: To look at this building, its shortcomings and potential
and to recommend improvements in visitor access and facilities.13

As the report summarising the workings of the Gallery Planning Group

notes, with the exception of the last group which reached its conclu-
sions fairly uncontentiously, the other groups all ‘enjoyed’ ‘philoso-
phical debate. . . [which] stimulated heated discussion’ and made
evident that ‘some firmly held and opposing views could not and
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 71

should not attempt to be reconciled’. These views continued to be the

subject of debate in subsequent meetings.
Nevertheless, out of this stage of meetings a governing ‘ideal’ and a
number of ‘objectives’ were agreed. In relation to the former, the report
states: ‘The over-riding ideal of creating a new, exciting and attractive
Science Museum with easily understood displays for our visitors to enjoy
dominated the groups’ thinking. Specific objectives to achieve this goal
were identified. . . some representing a marked change from the
entrenched attitudes we have inherited from the past.’ What is particu-
larly noticeable about this ‘over-riding ideal’, and the remit of the
groups above, is the centrality which ‘visitors’ are given. Only the first
group – ‘Function’ – does not explicitly mention ‘visitors’; this is not
so much because it is absent, but, on the contrary, as the more detailed
notes show, ‘visitors’ were regarded as central to the Museum’s ‘func-
tion’. Some Museum staff commented on the way in which ‘visitors’
seemed to be the subject of so much talk at this time: “Visitors” has
become such a buzz word’ commented one curator, and in one
discussion one participant pointed out that it was important that ‘we
are now talking of visitors – plural!’. No longer was ‘the public’ supposed
to be regarded as a citizen-mass to be instructed.
Box 3.1 provides a list of the objectives that emerged from the first
meetings and which provided the ‘ground rules’ for the more detailed
plans. In addition to the centring of visitors, the list of objectives
highlights some interesting shifts in the Museum’s construction of
science. The kinds of cultural work which museums do, and are
perceived to do, in shaping science are not universal. In the nineteenth
century, not only were museums regarded as exemplars of analytical
techniques and as useful for scientific research as we saw in the previous
chapter, they were also important sites for the legitimisation of scientific
results. Prior to the eighteenth century, scientific legitimisation was
principally effected by reference to the gentlemanly worthiness of the
authors of the results; in the nineteenth, however, visibility to (at least
some versions of) ‘the public’ came to be crucial as evidence of
‘transparency’ and ‘objectivity’.14 Museums of science became impor-
tant spaces for this public presentation and therefore validation of
objectivity and science.
During the twentieth century, however, alongside a growing bureau-
cratisation and professionalization of science, the validation of science
became a more specialised process carried out largely outside the public
domain.15 If museums no longer had the same role as validators of
scientific process, however, a new task came to be seen as more pressing
72 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Gallery Planning Objectives

1. That the Science Museum as the world’s pre-eminent museum
devoted to the history of science, technology, industry and
medicine has a duty to promote an understanding of the
history of science and technology up to the present time.
2. Displays should be object-based to ensure that our rich and
varied collections are made available to the public.
3. The traditional approach of a one-to-one relationship
between collections and galleries should be relaxed. Objects
from several collections would be employed together in a
more thematic way.
4. The Museum cannot (and should not) attempt to be encyclo-
paedic, but should aim to be synoptic and cover all aspects
of science, technology, industry and medicine as defined by
the Management Plan.
5. Treatment must be exciting, stimulating and easily under-
stood. The Museum should aim to create experiences beyond
the mere showing of an object and to challenge the visitor
to think about science and technology.
6. Major themes should be arranged logically in the building
to enable visitors to select an area of interest from informa-
tion points to follow it through.
7. The treatment should reflect historical, social, economic and
cultural aspects of science and technology, although the
extent of this broader treatment may vary according to the
subject matter and target audience.
8. Where appropriate the Museum should make use of a wide
range of supporting material, modern display techniques,
reconstructions and live demonstrations.
9. It is vital to make it easier for visitors to find their way around.
Improved signposting and the provision of multiple informa-
tion points must be incorporated into the gallery plan.
10. The programme for gallery renewal must be carefully planned
to ensure disruption and consequent inconvenience to
visitors and staff is kept to a minimum.
11. The completion of exciting new ventures should be spread
over the entire period of redevelopment so that there is a
continuing awareness that the Science Museum is changing
and that we hold our own against other leisure interests.

Box 3.1 Source: unpublished Science Museum Gallery document, 1987

 A New Vision for the 21st Century 73

in the face of increasingly ‘hidden’ scientific expertise. This was to

inform the public about science, a task that, as science came to be
regarded as increasingly complex and esoteric, was seen to require not
just ‘showing and telling’ but more extensive processes of ‘interpreta-
tion’. Number five of the Gallery Planning Objectives expresses this in
terms of going beyond ‘the mere showing of an object’ and emphasising
the harnessing of visitor agency by ‘challeng[ing] the visitor to think’.16
In many ways the Gallery Plan could be seen as a major attempt by
the Science Museum to face up to this problem, and to the dated
scientific legacy of its then current exhibitions and layout.
In the late 1980s, there were a number of other science-related
changes which also pressed in upon the Science Museum’s attempt to
‘create a vision for the twenty-first century’. Objective four notes that
the Museum should not attempt to be ‘encyclopaedic’. This had been
part of the collecting project of many types of nineteenth-century
museum but, by the late twentieth century had come to be regarded
as simply too ambitious and indeed impossible as we saw when the
Natural History Museum revoked its aim of cataloguing the whole of
the natural world.17 The kinds of objects which the Science Museum
dealt with were proving as prolific and troublesome as the insects with
which the Natural History Museum had had such a problem. One
member of the Gallery Planning Group calculated that the within the
time-scale of the completion of the revision of the Museum, as many
objects as were already possessed by the Museum would have been
collected if current collection rates continued to accelerate as they had
in the past. Already, the large proportion of objects in storage rather
than on display was regarded as politically problematic: how could
the Museum justify spending taxpayers’ money on collecting objects
which would never be on public display? The Science Museum was
seen as having a particular problem here compared to many other sorts
of museum, whose emphasis was on old or rare artefacts. (Comparison
with other museums and types of museums was common in the
discussions.) If the Museum was not to turn into a ‘testament to the
Industrial Revolution’ or ‘be fossilised in 1988’, then this increase in
the collections, together with a smaller proportion of older objects on
display, was seemingly an unavoidable consequence. Moreover, though
this was not much mentioned in the heady Group discussions, the
fact that the Museum also showed ‘the most modern technologies’ –
as the letter from the Prime Minister to the Trustees had put it (chapter
two) – was also of significance for the Museum’s claim to be important
in the public understanding of science.
74 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

In the case of the Science Museum, being selective about what was
collected had also to be done in the face of a dilemma which was the
subject of a good deal of discussion in the Gallery Planning Group
meetings as well as more broadly in the Museum. This was the dilemma
over whether to try to collect globally or to build up a collection focused
on national science, industry, technology and medicine. To some extent
this had been less of a difficulty in the past because Britain was regarded
as at the forefront of scientific, industrial, technological and medical
developments. By collecting national products, therefore, curators were
simultaneously covering globally important developments.18 In the
1980s, however, it was increasingly clear that this was no longer the
case and curators faced a problem over whether to try to collect globally
– which could be very expensive – or to collect ‘home-grown’ artefacts
which might be of little significance in the ‘big global story’ of scientific
progress. Many curators could relate difficult cases of specific purchases
of this type. In one of the Gallery Planning meetings one curator
suggested that ‘the nationality of objects is largely irrelevant’. This
brought a good deal of protest, some members of the Group suggesting
that it would not be irrelevant to museum visitors and others saying
that it was not irrelevant from the curatorial point of view if ‘you can’t
get hold of them!’. There was also much discussion of the prospect
that the Science Museum might end up conveying a message not of
progress, as the ‘Jorvik solution’ implied, but of national decline since
the Industrial Revolution. ‘If visitors can see the pre-eminence of Britain
in the nineteenth century, then they’ll get a different impression from
2000 or whatever’ noted one member of staff. At one point, in
discussion with the Director, the idea was mooted to reorganise the
Museum explicitly around this contrast. The Industrial Revolution –
in which Britain’s pre-eminence would be evident – would be one major
theme and the Information Revolution – which would be displayed as
necessarily more international – would be the other.
Another science-related development that surfaced in Gallery Plan-
ning discussions, which is reflected in Objective seven, is the growth
of social and cultural perspectives on science and technology. Many
Museum staff were well read in these and saw in them interesting
potential for challenging exhibitions which would ‘make visitors think’.
Others, however, were suspicious, regarding them as potentially too
esoteric and intellectual for visitors to understand and as risking
forgetting some of the Museum’s traditional roles in showing objects
and ‘how things work’. They were also aware of the criticisms which
could be made of some of the Museum’s exhibitions from such
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 75

perspectives, and this too fuelled the sense of need for revision. So
how was this to be achieved?

Themes and variations

After coming up with the above objectives, the Gallery Planning Group
split into three randomly mixed groups – X, Y and Z – to go away and
try to work out just how the Museum could be reorganised in a way
which would meet the challenges and objectives that they had formu-
lated. As they had observed, there was a need to move away from the
atomised and outdated collections-based model (Objective 5). Instead
there was to be ‘thematic’ presentation (Objectives 5 and 6), which
would not be necessarily based on themes drawn from ‘science’ itself
(Objective 7). The difficulty, however, was that this had to be done
while retaining an emphasis on objects from the Museum’s collections
(Objective 2), which were regarded as the Museum’s ‘unique selling
point’, and without ‘ripping it all out and starting from scratch’ in
one go (Objectives 10 and 11).
Groups X and Y came up with the rather similar idea of dividing the
Museum up into three main ‘themes’, though they varied in quite how
they saw these as mapped onto the layout of the Museum. The themes
were:

Group X Group Y
Science and Technology of Industry
Everyday Life Investigative Science
About Industry Science and Technology of
About Science Everyday Life

As the document reporting this observes, ‘Science and Technology of

Everyday Life’ ‘represents the most radical innovation in the group’s
proposals’. It is this ‘theme’ which most closely relates to the attempt
to focus the visitor in the Museum’s exhibitions. The report explains:
‘A large area of the Museum would be devoted to science and tech-
nology from the user’s point of view. It is particularly aimed at the
visitor with little or no prior understanding of the subject who will
find the subject-matter readily accessible because it is related to everyday
experiences.’ While the Science Museum has long included exhibits
which can be said to relate to ‘everyday life’, the idea of making
‘everyday life’ an orienting category is indeed ‘radical’ (as was locally
76 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

perceived) in that it suggests that the categories of display will be based

in ‘everyday experiences’ rather than on science or collections. Although
this theme attempts to break down the barrier between science and
the public it remains elsewhere with the retention of the categories
‘Science’ or ‘Investigative Science’. Moreover, the traffic seems to be
all one-way: from science to the public.
The ideas of Group Z, however, won the day. Their three thematic
categories were the following:

Group Z
Knowing – science as a process for understanding the natural world
Making – technology as a process for transforming the natural world
Using – the use of technology in industrial, commercial and domestic
settings

So why was this the most attractive option? To some extent it was
simply that this proposal had, as the report notes, the most ‘elegant
simplicity’ and its framework showed ‘clarity and comprehensibility’.
Expressed as verbs, these three categories nicely captured the attempt
to move the emphasis away from static collections; moreover, they are
fairly ‘everyday’, rather than specialised, words. Despite some similarity
with the X and Y schemes, this does not work from already institu-
tionalised domains and has what one participant described as ‘the
advantage of vagueness’. As such, it was more open to a more thorough-
going blurring of boundaries (‘Knowing’ could be about both institu-
tionalised science and also about ‘common sense’) and thus a more
flexible and even experimental approach.
In the meetings at which the three proposals were discussed, and
that of Group Z selected, it was decided that each theme should be
represented on a particular floor of the Museum, with Using on the
first floor, Making on floor two, and Knowing on the third. The
rationale given for this ordering was, again, visitor-justified, the
argument being that visitors would come first to floor one on which
they would encounter the uses of technology which would be the most
familiar of the three themes. Making would take them into the world
‘behind’ this, the creation of technologies; and Knowing would deal
with the most potentially esoteric business of processes involved in
the creation of scientific knowledge. Thus, built into the Museum would
be a kind of hierarchy of different dimensions of the late twentieth-
century techno-scientific complex on a continuum from the everyday
and accessible to the relatively inaccessible and more specialised.
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 77

Three new groups were then formed – Knowing, Making and Using
– each with the remit of ‘fleshing out’ the themes and deciding how
they would be transformed into exhibitions in the Museum over a
specified time period of ten to fifteen years. It was in trying to plan
this transformation – a struggle against the legacy of the existing
Museum, of timing, of space, of money, and of competing ideas – that
some major difficulties emerged.

Definitional struggles
Each group convened a series of meetings with many individuals writing
papers for discussion. Meetings were generally extremely lively and the
debates highlighted just how thoroughly engaged Museum staff were
with questions about museological display and about the nature of
science. The negotiations also revealed, however, some very different
perspectives on many of these matters, as well as different ideas about
how they could be mapped out in practice.

Space, Objects and Professional Identity

To some extent space constraints were a source of disgruntlement for
all of the groups. This was especially the case for the Knowing group
as a large portion of the third floor, almost a third of it, was already
occupied by a specially built gallery for the display of aircraft and it
was made clear by the Museum management that this, together with a
new exhibition of interactive flight-related exhibits, was to remain in
place. Moreover, another new medical exhibition, at that time provi-
sionally entitled ‘Cutting Edge’, was also scheduled to occupy the third
floor. With nobody arguing that the aeronautical exhibitions could
possibly be construed as part of the Knowing theme, and a very mixed
response to the suggestion that the medical exhibition could, this
severely threatened the integrity of the idea that the whole floor would
be devoted to this theme. One Group member put it that ‘the very
thesis of a Knowing floor is undermined’.
Added to problems of what was already present, all groups identified
a large number of collections which were (not uncontentiously) of
potential relevance to their themes – or at least more appropriate to
theirs than to the others. In the case of Knowing, for example, these
included: Astronomy, Geophysics, Geomagnetism, Heat and Tempera-
ture, Electricity and Magnetism, George III (a collection of scientific
instruments), Chemistry and Biochemistry, Meteorology, Surveying,
78 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Nuclear Physics, Optics – far too many to fit in the space available.
Many of these were ‘object-rich’ collections: that is, there were many
artefacts which could potentially be shown and many of these were
seen as historically important. Although there was general agreement
that the Museum should retain objects as central in its displays (cf.
Objective 2) and not go down what was described as the same road as
the Natural History Museum, where many of the newer exhibitions
consisted entirely of reconstructions and interactive exhibits, there was
debate about how to show them. How many would there be and would
they form the beginning point of the accounts or just fit into the
‘stories’ or ‘messages’ once these had been decided? In many ways, as
the discussions acknowledged, the rationale of the thematic approach
was the latter, which would almost certainly result in a relatively low
number of objects. For some curators, this went against the grain of
what they regarded as the important role of the Science Museum in
showing objects relevant to the history of science and technology; an
object-based approach was a significant strand of this discipline and
one for which some Science Museum staff were internationally recog-
nised.19 Moreover, reducing the number of objects on display was also
seen as politically dangerous both in terms of justifying the purchasing
and storing of collections, many of which would never be on show,
and in terms of attempts by curatorial staff to retain a major input
into the creation of public display rather than have this undertaken
primarily by non-curatorial education and design staff as was perceived
as being the case in the Natural History Museum. The distaste for this
model and the anxiety that it might be proposed in the Science Museum
was palpable. As one curator put it:

We have a deep fear of the way that they [the Natural History Museum]
do their galleries. . . We feel very strongly that we’re the ones with the
ideas, we’re the ones with the objects, we’re the ones that dictate what
happens and part of our great fear, which is also partly why we’re keen
to make sure the momentum of the planning for the themes goes on, is
that we might go the same way.

In creating their plans, then, Museum staff were also inevitably engaged
in a writing of their own professional identities. Yet, this did not mean
that they were attempting simply to hold on to the status quo. As
discussions in meetings showed, there were sometimes attempts by
particular curators to try to argue for the display of their own collections
(and occasionally the inclusion of certain other curators’ collections
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 79

as well because they might be piqued otherwise!) but on the whole the
general principle of the thematic approach, with its refusal to acknow-
ledge curatorial boundaries, was accepted. What these curators argued,
however, was that the concept and practice of ‘collection’ should be
retained through the idea of ‘collector’s collections’. These would be
specialised collections, housed either elsewhere or on the premises in
special ‘visual storage’, available as ‘study collections’ for those with a
specific interest in the topic. To the extent that these would require
conventional curatorial expertise and labour the curatorial role would
be retained. However, rather than ‘retreat’ to this alone, which had
previously been just one aspect of their job, they also argued for a
broader remit in relation to display. One Group member suggested that
what was needed was for curators to become ‘curatorial GPs’ (a GP
being a ‘General Practitioner’, a medical doctor in the UK): ‘generalist
specialists – integrating, balancing and interpreting the findings of a
broad spread of outside specialists – social historians, economic
historians, political historians and others’. A similar idea was increas-
ingly expressed and institutionalised in the then new concept of
‘curator-interpreters’, and the more widespread discourse in the
Museum of ‘interpretation’ to characterise the changing role of the
former ‘curator’.20
If objects were to be retained, however, there remained differences
about the role they should have and how they should be selected. One
member of the Knowing group caused some controversy by arguing
that many objects exhibited in the Museum were ‘small, visually dull
and virtually meaningless without a great deal of interpretation’. Given
this, she argued, a main selection strategy should be to give priority to
items with ‘visual appeal’, especially ‘large and striking artefacts’. Others,
however, felt that this was a renunciation of the role of interpretation:
the point was to make even apparently ‘dull’ artefacts meaningful and
interesting through museological techniques, such as placing them
within narratives.

Visitors, Revelation and the Nature of Science

This debate over artefacts and the degree to which they could ‘speak
for themselves’ was also linked to the nature of visitors – what could
they be expected to grasp? – and to what was considered a particularly
difficult problem for the Knowing theme, that of conveying ideas which
might in many cases be rather abstract. Any museum or exhibition –
and indeed any museum or exhibition plan – is inevitably a more or
80 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

less implicit statement about its imagined audience. Members of the

various groups differed sharply over the extent to which this potential
audience should be imagined as entirely lacking in scientific knowledge
or as reasonably well-educated. In some heated arguments about this
various statistics were mobilised: ‘One third of our visitors has a degree’,
‘Only one person per thousand in the population has a science degree’.
Those arguing for constructing the visitor as relatively ignorant were
accused of being ‘patronising’ and of ‘dumbing down’; those who
constructed the visitor as more educated faced charges of ‘elitism’ and
of being potentially ‘exclusionary’. One curator argued that to include
the term ‘ordinary people’ in the documentation was condescending
and a mistake because ‘people aren’t ordinary – they are all wonderful’,
and that trying to write for ‘ordinary people’ would create ‘ordinary
and mundane’ exhibitions. The extent to which visitors would be inter-
ested in science and in certain specific topics (history of science was
one source of contention) was also much debated and much disagreed
over: ‘Got to give them some romance’, ‘We need to grab them’, ‘They
need something to get their teeth into – not just little snippets’. Of
course, invocations of imaginary visitors were also a potentially effective
rhetorical strategy for supporting one’s own ideas or dismissing those
of others: ‘That’s just not going to be interesting to visitors’, ‘Visitors
will never get that’, ‘Visitors are not as stupid as you think: they’re
really going to like that’. The fact that little relevant visitor research
was available made this kind of ‘visitor hi-jacking’ relatively easy, and
many staff cast themselves as ‘audience substitutes’, staff without
scientific backgrounds generally resorting more frequently to this.21
This fed into a dynamic between an ‘intellectual’ and a ‘lay’ perspective
in some of the groups (which I also observed in other contexts in the
Museum), with some members employing a ‘bringing down to earth’
strategy of invoking the relatively ‘scientifically illiterate’ visitor when
certain others were mobilising academic arguments. One curator in
particular would often intervene in discussions with the opening
phrase: ‘I’d like to bring this discussion down to earth’ – which became
something of her hallmark.
This dynamic was particularly evident in debates about how to make
visible the esoteric dimensions of scientific knowing. Insofar as
Knowing was defined as about the ‘practice’ of science, some aspects
were relatively unproblematic in terms of display: suggestions here
included instruments of measurement and reconstructions of labora-
tories. Other matters were perceived as more difficult: in particular,
demonstrating the social and economic dimensions of scientific
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 81

practice, and providing a historical perspective without Whiggishly

assuming a linear progressive development. One curator, for example,
suggested that a section on physics might do this by incorporating
social and economic dimensions through scientists’ biographies. This,
however, was dismissed by others as too ‘conventional’ and too much
about ‘individual scientists’ or ‘great white males’. A suggestion for
conveying the amount of money involved in contemporary science
was to exhibit a big pile of (reproduction) banknotes by a laboratory
reconstruction; others argued that this ‘would not get at the scale of it
at all, or the international dimensions’. The problem, then, was that
although there was general agreement that science should be regarded
as social, just how to translate this into physical displays while keeping
text to a minimum and objects to a maximum was far from easy.
The museological medium here seemed to run against the grain of
the proposed ‘message’. The nature of much modern science also
contributed to this perceived ‘visibility problem’, with group members
worrying about how they would be able to deal with the fact that many
modern scientific processes are both so complex and on such a
microscopic scale that they might be very difficult to represent without
a very large amount of explanation. One Group member (a relatively
senior curator) lamented in a discussion document that the danger
was that matters would have to be expressed so simplistically as to tell
the visitor very little indeed.

[The curator’s] best efforts will be bowdlerised until the visitor has to
read, with dismay, that “super string theory is a sophisticated concept
which allows physicists to organise their ideas on the forces of nature”.
If we can only tease our visitors, and not enlighten them, then let us
not plunge blindfold into the quagmire. . . we must always ask ourselves
whether museum display is the best medium for what we are trying to
achieve.

This problem of displaying science and possibly abstract principles

was repeatedly, and in different guises, discussed in the groups. In one
discussion, a participant suggested that science could be regarded as
‘objective knowledge’ but this was roundly challenged by others; so
too was another suggestion that science could be regarded as an
accumulation of knowledge or progressively ‘better’ ways of knowing.
In the majority was a characterisation of science as ‘one type of know-
ing’ (as one draft document put it). But if it was ‘one type’ what was
specific about it? In a struggle over this, somebody suggested that it
82 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

was ‘one type of knowledge, based on objects’ but others disagreed.

‘Science is a kind of knowledge based on observations’ suggested
another, but mathematics was pointed out as an exception. Whether
‘non-Western science’ should be included was an especially difficult
matter. Some members of the group argued that while the Museum
had some artefacts in its collections which could relate to ‘non-Western’
traditions, these were rather few and so should not be included. There
were also arguments that as these were part of a ‘different tradition’ it
would be difficult to try to cover these as well as ‘the Western tradition’
– though whether the latter should also include Japan was a source of
debate. In the end, it was decided that other ‘ways of knowing’ could
be included as part of the overall theme of ‘Knowing’ but that ‘science’
should be restricted to the ‘Western practice that has come to be called
science’. Inclusive on the one hand, this strategy also risked creating a
tier of ‘ways of knowing’, as some members suggested. Throughout,
then, attempts to be more pluralist and to relativise science created
difficulties for an institution which was in many respects premised on
a conventional and progressivist viewpoint.

Fall-out
Despite the problems and continued worries about whether the
Knowing, Making, Using division (or MUK as it came to be called) was
such a helpful idea after all, the groups were pressed to work towards
preparation of a document to be presented to the Trustees which would
set out the case for approving the rewriting of the Museum – the Gallery
Plan. At a briefing meeting about this, the Director called for more
‘theology’. Each theme, he requested, should devise its own ‘theology’
– ‘an intellectual justification. . . that makes sense. . . within the
accepted canons of history and the aims of the Science Museum’ –
which would in turn fit into the ‘total theology’ (in ‘a Trinitarian
fashion’, as the author of one report noted). The task of ‘generating’
this was identified as ‘a creative work in its own right’ and, therefore,
one which ‘requires a single person to be appointed to act as synthe-
siser’. This strategy was itself also a reaction to the despair of many
staff at that time of getting anywhere given the differences of view
within the Gallery Planning Group.
A fairly senior member of staff who had not been previously involved
in the Gallery Planning Group was duly appointed as synthesiser and
he produced a document called ‘Planning for the Galleries’. Although
the Director had requested a ‘theological’ document, he was not entirely
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 83

satisfied with it, observing that ‘this seems a bit abstract to me’. A
member of the Gallery Planning Group also produced an alternative
report, entitled ‘Science Museum Gallery Plan’, which he characterised
as ‘an intellectual manifesto’ and in which he also sought to construct
a ‘theology’ and ‘synthesis’. On the basis of both of these, the Chair
and Secretary of the Gallery Planning Group produced a draft report
entitled ‘Gallery Development Plan 1989 – 2004’. This was likewise
not met with a good deal of enthusiasm by the Director, who com-
mented: ‘It lacks vision. There’s a turgidity to it. . . . I’m beginning to
wish I had never started this’. Nevertheless, the report was edited by
the group as a whole and by the Director and retitled ‘Gallery Develop-
ment Plan: Thematic Principles’. This report, as its opening summary
states, was ‘concerned to capture the vision behind the planned
transformation of the Museum’s public exhibitions along three major
themes – ‘Knowing’, ‘Making’ and ‘Using’. In the very first paragraph,
the report notes that ‘increased emphasis is placed on relating the social
and economic context of the collections’, suggesting that this had come
to be seen as the major failure of the Science Museum’s current
approach. The report goes on to provide a ‘background’ to the produc-
tion of the Gallery Development Plan; an account of ‘The Need for
Change’; a description of the themes and an outline of what they will
cover; and a proposed programme of the first years of implementing
the Plan. This last section acknowledges that the programme would
be extremely costly and notes that fund-raising efforts in recent years
had proved disappointing. In a somewhat cryptic comment, which was
to prove one of the stumbling blocks for the plan as it went to the
Trustees, the report states: ‘Realistically, if we are to be able to guarantee
to deliver the new gallery plan within a reasonable period of years a
fundamental new approach to the mechanisms by which the Trustees
are enabled to fund major capital developments of this nature and
magnitude may prove to be essential.’
This was then put to the Trustees in January 1989. I was not permitted
to attend this meeting, one curator explaining to me that ‘the Museum
in general applies treacle to things. . . but the Trustees have especially
sticky treacle’. Indeed, information about what went on at meetings
of Trustees was not routinely available to Museum staff, which no doubt
contributed to the ‘treacly’ impression. Even those who were present
at the meetings (the heads of each of the groups in this case) did not
always find it easy to interpret what was going on. In giving feed-back
from the meeting, one remarked, for example, ‘There was support for
the “human element” approach I think – at any rate the chairman
84 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

moved his body at that moment.’ Mr Suthers, who also attended the
meeting, provided a fuller memo on the objections raised by the
trustees:

(1) That they [the Trustees] did not fully understand the intellectual
framework . . . and still had no vision of what the Museum would look
like, (2) The plan is overwhelming, involving a complete redefinition of
the Museum. Is it too rigid, might we come to regret it as the plan is
implemented? (3) Is the plan deliverable anyway? Can the Museum
sustain the initiative to attract sponsorship and implement the plan?

They also expressed concern over the disruption that implementation

would cause, as well as over a number of more specific issues, such as
the ousting of Shipping by a proposed Information Age gallery (a
concern that was related to the presence of an admiral on the Board of
Trustees by one curator). One member of staff irritably described the
Trustees as ‘imposing themselves on our professional expertise’. That
they behaved as they did was perhaps a consequence of the new
importance with which they had been vested: as noted in chapter two,
they were now officially the owners of the collections and considerably
more accountable than previously. Some Museum staff suggested that
they were in part asserting their authority to make this felt and purpose-
fully putting a brake on the ambitions of the still newish Director.
Others, however, believed that because the Director himself had come
to dislike the plan – and especially the fact that it was going to take so
long before it could properly be put into effect – he had ‘not pushed
it’. Many of those who had been involved in drawing up the Plan were
disappointed about the outcome. The curator who had been so positive
about the experience of being part of the Gallery Planning process
described himself as feeling ‘suckered and exploited’ and he blamed
the failure of the Plan to be accepted on the fact that ‘it wasn’t sold
properly – it was not marketed’. Somebody else commented that ‘there
is only one person in this institution who can grant life or death’, so
also putting the agency for the non-acceptance of the Plan firmly at
the Director’s door.
In response to what came to be characterised as ‘the inflexible KMU
scheme’, more ‘flexible’ frameworks were suggested, in particular, what
was called ‘the multi-museum concept’ or ‘the museum within a
museum idea’. Where the grand narrative of Knowing, Making and
Using had sought to fit galleries into a pre-defined framework, the
multi-museum concept involved acknowledging and working with the
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 85

variety of galleries , topics and styles to try to create, as Mr Suthers’s

attempt to promote the idea put it, ‘a varied and interesting menu of
informational dietary fibre’. Instead of trying to weld everything
together into one museum – with one overall logic – this new idea
conceptualised the Museum more as a set of museums on one site, or,
to quote Mr Suthers again, ‘shops within a store’:

The “menu” we can then offer, and the manner and atmosphere in which
we present it, will (as in a large shopping mall, department store, or
hotel) vary in approach, enabling us to establish changes of pace, depth
of information, and richness of objects displayed according to topic and
perceived audience size and level of knowledge.

Throughout the documents discussing the multi-museum idea is the

word ‘flexible’ – a concept which, as Emily Martin has shown, has come
to be seen as ideal in many areas of late twentieth-century life, from
business to the immune system.22 ‘Flexibility’ has come to be the
indicator of responsiveness to a fast-changing world, of the ability to
adapt. This is, perhaps, the new form of progress. In the case of the
Museum, flexibility was also seen to allow response to opportunities
such as new sponsorship possibilities, or to incorporate a greater
number of temporary exhibitions, perhaps on controversial or topical
subjects. While for some Museum staff the multi-museum idea was an
exciting prospect in its potential openness, others suggested that it was,
perhaps, an outcome of a ‘lack of direction and vision’, and that it
might mean that the Museum would be much more vulnerable to
whatever ‘pressures of sponsorship or fads and fashions that come
along’. As such, perhaps, it would be an abnegation of the social role
of the museum. In expressing these views Science Museum staff were
locally articulating some of the more general arguments that could be
levelled at notions of flexibility: on the one hand it seemed to promise
openness, responsiveness and change; on the other, it potentially gave
way to what Anthony Giddens has described as the ‘juggernaut of
modernity’, a process careering away with little sense of any hand at
the steering wheel.23
In either case, the multi-museum idea seemed to fit the times well
in its celebration of multiplicity and fragmentation. Ironically, the lack
of an overall layout in the Museum, which had been seen as one of the
main problems at the beginning of the gallery planning process, came
by the end to be seen as a forté. Instead of a fragmentation produced
by a logic focused largely within disciplinary and collection-based
86 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

boundaries and boosted by curatorial territorialism, the new think

conceptualised the lack of an overall theme connecting the exhibitions
to be an advantage, a creative space for maximising opportunities. This
was, as theorists have argued for late-capitalism, a future-oriented
disorganisation or de-differentiation: maximised variety offering
maximum choice for operating in a tough market-place where, in the
case of museums, sponsorship and visitor numbers were likely to be at
a premium.24

The multi-museum idea, then, in many ways succeeded in doing what

the plan put to the Trustees said any revision of the Museum must:
‘resonate with the times’. It did so, however, not in the way initially
attempted by those working on the Gallery Plan. Resonating with the
present is a tall order for museums which inevitably – through their
collections, their architecture and their role – carry a weight of the
past. As the document presented to the Trustees elegantly explained:
‘Exhibitions are historical signatures of their times.’ As such, any large
museum is like an autograph book whose pages have been filled over
many years, perhaps containing signatures whose original significance
and meaning is now faded or lost. What is involved, as Mieke Bal has
observed, is a ‘clash’ of ‘the past. . . with the present of which it is also
part, from which it cannot be excised although it keeps nagging from
within the present as a misfit’. This creates an ‘unsettlement’ within
museums, themselves ‘monuments to settlement’.25 However, as the
fate of the Gallery Plan highlights, re-visioning such a past-loaded space
entails particular kinds of struggles and a redesign not just of space
but also of entities which tend to be taken as fixed or as ‘givens’ for
museum staff, such as science, objects, professional identities and
visitors. In charting the unsettling business of trying to rewrite a
national museum of science and industry, I have sought to highlight
something of the cultural work and struggle that goes on ‘behind the
scenes’, and to illuminate some of the locally important categories and
divisions which motivate it. Those that I have particularly focused upon
in this chapter are the contested and changing concepts of ‘science’,
‘objects’, ‘professional identity’ and ‘visitors’. These are all central to
the specificity of the Science Museum as a cultural agency, and indeed
relationally contribute to its discursive formation. They do not,
however, necessarily pull in the same direction: as the Gallery Plan
discussions highlight, it is often tensions between them that fuel debate
or drive ambitions to ground. A felt need to be ‘object-based’, for
example, may run counter to more currently-resonant conceptions of
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 87

science as social; or a ‘visitor-orientation’ may seem to threaten aspects

of curatorial professional identity. Such tensions, however, need to be
recognised; even ‘readings off’ from finished exhibitions need to be
ready to recognise the potential ambivalence of production rather than
reduce it to a set of predefined motivations.
In looking at staff and meetings in the Science Museum, and
attempting to identify some of the key locally-motivating categories,
my intention is not, however, to assume that all agency is local and
that we can unproblematically understand museum staff as ‘authors’
of the Science Museum. On the contrary, my aim has been to show
their struggle within a particular historical-cultural location, and thus
to show how wider developments, such as increased competition from
other leisure sites or the specialisation of science, are refracted within
the particular problem of redesigning the Museum. By setting their
ambitions against a cultural analysis of the then current museum
layout, my intention was to highlight some of the often rather subtle
transformations at work or attempted. At the same time, however, I
also hope that an anthropological-ethnographic perspective helps to
recover not just a degree of agency for museum staff but also local
conceptions of agency and some of their critical and informed reflex-
ivity. If exhibitions are ‘historical signatures of their times’, we should
be ready to recognise that there may be more than one hand holding
the pen – and, there may be more than one pen. Going ‘behind the
scenes’ recovers some of that complexity. In the following chapters we
continue this as we enter the world of exhibition making itself, joining
a team busy with the exciting and fraught business of trying to create
a new gallery in the Science Museum.

Notes
1. Cf. Law 1994.
2. Initially there was some reluctance to allow me to attend the Gallery
Planning Group. As one of the members explained to me: ‘This isn’t an
especially happy group at the moment and there are still some fairly strong
protagonists and we’re not sure that we’ve actually got sufficiently clear in
our minds what out objectives are, so we’re a bit floundering and only doing a
bit of stop gap at the moment and we meet occasionally to mop up a crisis
88 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

and then we go into limbo again’. However, after some discussion I was allowed
to attend, though (initially) not to tape-record. In allowing me to take notes
but not to tape, it was said that I should be interested in the arguments rather
than who made them. For this reason I do not attribute comments to particular
individuals. I am very grateful to all members of the groups that I attended,
and to the many staff who agreed to talk to me about it individually.
3. See Martin 1994 for an anthropological account of similar cultural
constructions.
4. Follett 1978: 14.
5. Pickstone 1994. See also Conn 1998. This ‘decompositional’ conception
of analysis also became widespread in areas other than science as Beaney
(forthcoming) shows.
6. See Rogoff 1998: 17. She writes that ‘teaching in art history departments,
whenever I would complain about some student’s lack of intellectual curiosity,
about their overly literal perception of the field of study or their narrow
understanding of culture as a series of radiant objects, someone else on the
faculty would always respond by saying “Oh, but they have a good eye”’.
7. See Kirby 1988 for discussion at that time.
8. See Levidow and Young 1984 for a discussion of issues of sponsorship
and bias in the production of the Science Museum’s Nuclear Power exhibition
which was subsidised by the UK Atomic Energy Authority. One curator at the
Science Museum was reprimanded under the Official Secrets Act for having
divulged information about the making of this gallery to the authors of this
article. The memory of this experience made some staff in the Museum very
aware of the problems of sponsorship – some were even campaigning for a
sponsorship code. It also made some cautious about my presence: the curator
who had been reprimanded pointed out at a meeting that staff members had
not all been consulted. Perhaps because he also welcomed the idea of an outside
observer, however, he also argued that I should be allowed to attend, which
was agreed.
9. See Porter 1988 for an observation of the gendered nature of Science
Museum space and a discussion of the representation of women in museums.
10. Bennett 1998. See also Dias 1998 on the privileging of the visual.
11. That Jorvik was ‘scientifically respectable’ and indeed ‘scientifically
authentic’ was very important to its makers. When I interviewed one of them
he was anxious to tell me about matters such as plans to make the heads on
the models still more ‘authentic’ by basing them on computerised measure-
ments taken from skulls that had been recovered in the Jorvik archaeological
dig.
12. The changed nature of Museum financing, and in particular the
introduction of admission charges, had made the possibility of shutting the
 A New Vision for the 21st Century 89

Museum for a year or two to undertake a major revision untenable. Thus, the
demand to revise was coming at a time when it had been made less feasible to
achieve it.
13. This is taken from an unpublished Science Museum Gallery Planning
document of 1987.
14. See Shapin 1994 and Dias 1998.
15. Pickstone 1994; Shapin 1994.
16. See Bal 1996 chapter one for a discussion of the museological practice
of ‘showing and telling’ and its representational ramifications.
17. On encyclopaedism in nineteenth-century museums see Prösler 1996
and Sheets-Pyenson 1989.
18. This is not to say that the Museum collected only national products in
the past: it did not. The issue is one of proportions and focus.
19. See, for example, Fox 1992. Robert Fox was Assistant Director at the
Science Museum until 1988 when he became Professor of History of Science
at Oxford. It is worth noting that scholars could generally gain access for
research purposes to stored collections. For an interesting discussion of the
struggle to deal with different kinds of historical approaches in the Science
Museum see Bud 1993.
20. This is broader museological phenomenon: see Gucht 1991. Mary
Bouquet (1995) has also discussed it interestingly in terms of ‘brokerage’; and
in the context of the Science Museum Robert Bud also uses the term ‘broker’
and an analysis which draws profitably on Michel Callon’s notions of transla-
tion and actor networks (Bud 1988; Callon 1986).
21. See Allison-Bunnell 1998 for a discussion of this process in the making
of a film for a natural history museum exhibition.
22. See Martin 1994.
23. See Giddens 1990.
24. See, for example, Barry 2001; Harvey, David 1989; Held, McGrew,
Goldblatt and Perraton 1999 (especially chapters 3, 4 and 5); Lash and Urry
1987, 1994.
25. Bal 1996: 15
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 f o u r

‘A Hot Potato’ for a

New Public: a ‘Flagship’
Exhibition on Food

M eet Jane, Jan, Sue, Heather, Cathy and Ann. They are the six
members of what is informally known in the Science Museum
as ‘the Food Team’ or the ‘Foodies’. Permanent members of the Museum
staff, they have been brought together into a ‘team’ to work specifically
on the project of creating a new exhibition on the subject of what is,
at first and only provisionally, called ‘Food and Nutrition’ (or, collo-
quially, ‘Fruit and Nut’ – this was a subject which invited lots of,
sometimes half-baked, puns). This chapter looks at some of the heady
early stages of exhibition-making, and at the nature of the context in
which those involved worked. Because the Food exhibition was concept-
ualised in many respects as a ‘departure’ from previous ways of doing
things, it is a good case through which to provide an account of an
instance of, and response to, the ongoing ‘cultural revolution’.
By 1988, when I began fieldwork in the Museum, some exhibitions
that had been under way before the new Director’s appointment had
been opened, but none had been begun and completed within the
new regime. ‘Food’, as the first exhibition to be carried out in the new
Division of Public Services, thus acquired a special symbolic status in
the Museum – and beyond it – as a ‘hot potato’, an indication of the
‘new directions’ that the Science Museum, and possibly other national
museums, might take. As the Food Team leader, Jane, ruefully remarked
one day: ‘It is the Director’s baby I suppose. But what does that make
us?’. This brought peals of laughter from the other Team members and
a cry of ‘Don’t ask!’, followed by reflection on the way the exhibition
had taken on this ‘added significance’. Although Team members argued
that they were the ones ‘coming up with the ideas and doing the work’

91
92 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

and generally shaping the exhibition, they acknowledged that Food

and Nutrition had been permitted to go ahead because ‘it fits the vision’
and that if they were to ‘do anything he really didn’t like, we’d know
about it’. A consequence of this ‘added significance’, however, was that
‘everybody is watching and there are certainly some hoping that we’ll
fail’.
Later, during the planning of the exhibition, the Team experienced
the Director not liking certain aspects of what they were doing; and
this had major consequences for their work and the finished exhibition.
They also lived with the sense of everybody watching to see how it
would turn out. My presence, of course, contributed to this; when I
first met Jane and discussed with her the possibility of participant-
observing this exhibition, she said, ‘Well, we’re guinea pigs in every-
thing else, so why not?’. Despite the sense of being the subjects of an
experiment, however, members of the Food Team certainly did not see
themselves as puppets. They had clear ideas about, and much enthusi-
asm for, what they were doing. In some ways they also enjoyed the
fact that there was so much intrigue about their activities. They
sometimes actively manipulated the intrigue, either by refusing to
divulge many details about the content of the exhibition, (which
contributed to another of their nicknames within the Museum: ‘the
coven’), or by promoting rumours about it. The latter included fabrica-
tions such as that they planned to install an enormous tea-cup and
saucer, hovering over the Museum’s central atrium, or that the exhibi-
tion would include a huge lump of cheese and animatronic mouse, or
a vast ‘Big Mac’ (McDonald’s burger). Amidst these fictitious exhibits
they also released mention of others that were really to be included – a
gigantic pot of chocolate mousse, an interactive exhibit in which the
visitor would be able to experience what it is like to be a frozen pea, or
a McDonald’s fast-food outlet – so cleverly making it difficult for others
in the Museum to know what was really going to be included and what
was not. Active management of the information about exhibitions,
whose making was generally fairly closed to those who were not directly
involved, was characteristic of other exhibitions that I looked at. Those
carried out in the ‘old style’, however, were much more liable to have
information about them divulged by junior staff disgruntled with the
approach or how things were being done. None, however, ‘leaked’
information in quite the same artful and playful way as the Food Team.
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 93

An Authorial Puzzle
In this chapter I also want to set the scene for a matter that I had not
anticipated and which was to puzzle me a good deal. This was that
when the exhibition finally opened, it did not ‘feel’ quite like the exhibi-
tion that those who had been making it had envisaged. I use the term
‘feel’ here because it was difficult, for the members of the Team as well
as myself, to identify just what it was that created the sense of disjunc-
tion between the imagined new gallery and the one that materialised.
As much as anything, the disjunction was a matter of ‘atmosphere’. As
members of the Food Team put it when we talked about the exhibition
afterwards: ‘It’s a bit flat’, ‘Not as lively as I’d expected’ (see chapter
seven). Of course, this may have been part of a general emotional defla-
tion – the ‘coming down to earth’ as one suggested – as an extra-
ordinarily hectic, compelling and exhausting daily preoccupation came
to an end.
Even so, the apparent ‘flatness’ and even ‘seriousness’ of the finished
exhibition contrasted with the heady enthusiasm and joking which
had characterised the early days. During the making of the exhibition
there had been a marked sense of doing something different and
perhaps even daring or subversive. The Foodies used adjectives like the
following to describe the exhibition: ‘exciting’, ‘busy’, ‘buzzy’, ‘lively’,
‘fun’, ‘interactive’, ‘hands-on and even body-in!’, ‘interesting’. They
emphasised that it would be ‘not boring’, ‘not your book-on-a-wall
exhibition’, ‘not preachy’, ‘not trains’. Rather, it would contain humour
and would tackle ‘difficult’ and politically sensitive subjects. Certainly,
it was not entirely without these qualities and subjects, but for many
reviewers and visitors, and to some extent for the Team themselves,
these dimensions were not the ones that predominated, as we shall
see later. Moreover, some of the ‘before and after’ contrasts were rather
specific, particularly in the way that the exhibition seemed to be full
of panels of writing (‘too much reading’ said some of the visitors; ‘book-
on-the-wall’ said a curator) and much less ‘busy’ with ‘interactives’ and
the ‘market-stall atmosphere’ that had been planned. Quite how there
came to be this disjunction between ‘encoding’ (the production of the
exhibition) and the ‘text’ (the finished exhibition) is one of the stories
that I try to tell through this ethnography. It continues (with sub- and
parallel-plots) in the following chapters, through the making of the
exhibition to its final opening and viewing, or ‘decoding’, by visitors,
critics and museum staff themselves.1
94 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

This puzzle is a theoretical as well as an ethnographic one. The great

majority of analyses of museums and exhibitions read back from the
finished product, the text, to assumed relations of production (generally
‘dominant cultural interests’, especially those of class, gender and race).
Reading back does not allow for the kind of disjunction observed here.
This is not to say that there is no relation between production and
product or that ‘readings back’ are necessarily incorrect. It does, how-
ever, challenge us to acknowledge the complexity of the processes
involved and to find ways of theorising the rather messy business of
shaping cultural products. As we will see, there are aspects of the
finished Food exhibition which can be seen as the product of dominant
cultural interests, in this case those of food companies and market-led
politics. Yet, as we shall also see, the plots and actors which lead to an
exhibition which is legible in these terms, are more complex than a
conscious ‘writing in’, and both more specific and more multifaceted
than a nebulous notion such as ‘false consciousness’, or ‘the institu-
tional subconscious’, would imply.
This puzzle, then, points to a more general question about the
‘authorship’ of cultural products and knowledge.2 This, although it is
often not thought of in these terms, includes science and the science
that is presented to the public. Where, and by whom, we can ask, is
that science constructed? By scientists? By ‘society’, ‘the state’ or by a
particular set of social interests? By institutions with a public education
remit? By particular individuals or even technologies and artefacts? Or
is it by the members of the public themselves? In beginning with a
team of museum staff involved in creating a science exhibition for the
public, my intention is not to accord them sole authorship. On the
contrary, by bringing a specific process (exhibition creation) and a
specific group of people charged with that process (the Team) under
my observational and analytical lens, my aim is not to presuppose a
clear-cut authorial role but to focus on a visible site of intersection
between science, state, materials, the public and other interest groups.
Precisely because the Team have to mediate between diverse potential
and actual players, we can try to track the negotiations (and sometimes,
importantly, the lack of negotiations) involved in ‘encoding’.
Thinking about authorship raises questions of actions and actors (as
in actor-network theory) and of agency, this being a category which
seems to have become rather naturalised in sociology and which surely
cries out for further specification. Also, it takes us into issues of the
attribution of ‘credit’ or authorship, of what Foucault calls ‘the author
function’ and what we may also call ‘the author effect’.3 As a proprie-
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 95

torial discourse which seeks to bind particular agents to a particular

text or product, ‘authorship’ concerns matters of authority, authenticity
and ‘the politics of signatures’ (to use Derrida’s phrase a little crea-
tively).4 As such, it also helps provide us with a conceptual link between
debates in science studies, literary and anthropological theory (includ-
ing anthropological writing debates). Here, however, as I introduce the
Team and the task they faced, I merely want to highlight the idea that
authorship is a more slippery and dispersed matter than might seem
at first glance.

The Task
Creating an exhibition was a much more enormous, demanding and
expensive task than I had ever imagined before I spent time behind
the scenes in the Science Museum. Readers who are not experienced
in museum work will, I think, share my initial surprise. Certainly, when
I gave a first presentation about my ethnographic work to a group of
other academics working on related public understanding of science
topics, I was asked several times to clarify just how much the exhibition
was expected to cost – ‘£1.22 million excluding staff costs,’ I parroted,
this being the way that its cost was always expressed in the Museum.5
While this seemed an extraordinary amount of money to my colleagues
(more than all of our research budgets put together), and while it was
the most expensive exhibition in the Science Museum at that time, it
was in no way out of line with the escalating exhibition costs in the
late 1980s. What needs to be remembered is that although I use the
term ‘exhibition’, as did those in the Museum, this was not just a
temporary edifice expected to last for a short period, but the construc-
tion (including some – albeit fairly minor – structural alterations to
the Museum building) of a large new gallery. It covered 810 square
metres and was intended to be in place for at least ten years. At the
time of writing it is still there, as are many considerably older galleries
whose ‘life’ should have terminated according to original projections.
Responsible for the escalating costs, which were causing consterna-
tion among many museum directors during the eighties, was the
increased use of new technologies of display, including audio-visual
and computing technologies and ‘hands-on’ interactive exhibits,
together with ever-more sophisticated forms of lighting, casing,
photographic and three-dimensional reproduction and display panels.
Although the Science Museum did not have to cope with the stagger-
ingly high sums that were often paid for art works by the end of the
96 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

1980s, as a result of the major financial escalation in the art market at

that time,6 it thoroughly recognised the importance of exhibitions as
‘style statements’. Having the latest technologies of display was a
significant dimension of this. As one member of the Museum staff told
me: ‘We’re a national museum and we can’t get away with doing, you
know, “on a shoe-string but inventive”. We’ve got to be good. And if
we’re displaying cutting-edge stuff, we can hardly do so in some old
cases or using yesterday’s avs [audio-visual technologies]. We don’t have
that much choice when it comes down to it.’ A glance through the
Museums Journal, a glossy monthly which many museum staff receive
as part of their membership of the Museums Association, shows the atten-
tion given to these matters in reviews of new exhibitions by museum
professionals and reviewers as well as numerous advertisements for
different types of lighting, cases and other technologies of display.
It was not only the scale of the costs of creating a new exhibition
which surprised me. So too did the amount of time involved. The
research project on which I was working had been designed and funded
to last for two years. It quickly became evident, however, that this was
nowhere near enough time to see an exhibition from its initial
inception through to completion, and then to conduct visitor research
on its reception. In Science Museum files that I read, for example, I
came across memos written in 1981 suggesting an exhibition to open
in 1988 but worrying that this was insufficient preparation time. As it
happened, I was fortunate that Food was completed in what was
regarded as an unusually – and to some people ‘unseemly’ or even
‘ridiculously’ – short period of time. This was twenty months from
when a feasibility study was begun, at which point there was no
commitment that the gallery would go ahead, and only fifteen months
of production with all six team members in place. ‘Inception’ was,
however, an extremely murky concept in practice. On the one hand,
suggestions had been mooted for an exhibition on such a topic many
years previously. On the other, the project had changed considerably
and many, though not all, aspects of the previous plan had been
discarded. Trying to identify ‘inception’ – that ‘Eureka!’ moment when
it all began – was, then, rather like trying to say when a constantly
and extensively repaired car actually became a ‘new’ car. By the time
that I began fieldwork in the Museum, the full team had been in place
for just over two months. This meant that I did not directly observe
the early phase but had to rely upon discussing it with the Team,
working through the available documents and each Team member
talking me through her diaries. I was also able to attend some initial
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 97

‘brainstorming’ sessions of another exhibition, provisionally entitled

‘The Information Age’, then at an early stage of production. This,
together with discussions with other Museum staff who had been
involved in exhibition creation gave me contrasts and parallels through
which to ask more of the Food case.
Below, I first briefly introduce to the members of the Food Team –
those charged with the task of making this exhibition happen. I then
discuss some of the ‘departures’ that Food was generally regarded as
making from the usual ways of doing things – the ‘traditional way’
(features which were widely conceptualised as part of the ‘cultural
revolution’ that was said to be under way in the Museum at the time).
That Mr Suthers had listed ‘tradition’ as one of the key concepts which
I would have to list in my Science Museum ‘glossary’ was not surprising
for he, as head of the new way of doing exhibitions in the Division of
Public Services, must have perceived himself to be in the front line of
conflict with ‘tradition’. The Foodies were, at that time, the main focus
of his hopes and ambitions – and fears – in that battle.

The Foodies
There are various possible routes, and we can contrast two in particular,
by which curatorial staff come to work in, and develop their careers
within the Science Museum. One is the relatively specialist route: an
individual with a particular topical expertise in which they have perhaps
a higher degree or are undertaking one, joins the Museum at a fairly
senior level (D or C, say), perhaps having worked previously at a more
specialist museum (such as of shipping or the history of science). He
or she then tends to concentrate upon a particular collection or set of
collections and area of subject expertise. The other is a more generalist
route characteristic of all members of the Food Team at that time (and
indeed the way in which the majority of Science Museum curators
begin). This entails joining a museum at a low grade and gradually
working up. Generalists will also develop subject expertise and may
choose to become specialists later but this is unlikely to be closely tied
to their own subject-based educational background. Over the course
of their careers they are likely to move from one subject area to another.
The Foodies were all generalists in this sense and they argued that this
helped them to be more flexible in their approach and better able to
tune in to non-specialist expectations.
Below I list the grades of all Team members as they began the project.
Although Mr Suthers was said to want Museum staff to be ‘less grade
98 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

conscious’, issues of grading were deeply institutionalised. For example,

as several staff pointed out to me, only curators of D and above were
invited to what was referred to as the ‘Science Museum Christmas Party’
by some, and ‘The Trustees Party’ by others.7 One member of staff
described how ‘Gs’ in particular were looked down on by some ‘higher’
members of staff: ‘It’s like you’ve got G stamped on your forehead’.
This could change rapidly with promotion and one curator told me
that once she moved from G to F ‘high ranks start talking to you where
they hadn’t before’. Promotions were managed as part of an annual
review process, with certain targets being set. One strategy for being
promoted was also to apply for a post within the Museum at a higher
grade, as had some members of the Food Team. This promotion would
be ‘temporary’ for the duration of the project, though staff obviously
hoped that such promotions would be made permanent.

Jane Bywaters – Project Leader. Jane is in her mid-thirties. She was

promoted to a D in the early stages of the exhibition-making; otherwise
she would not have been allowed to sit on the appointments board for
the other Team members. Jane has a degree in microbiology. In the
Museum she has worked in a number of areas, including the Agriculture
and Food Technology collections and the Wellcome medical collections,

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.1 Jane and the food pyramid on opening day.

 A Hot Potato for a New Public 99

where she had a particular responsibility for the ethnographic material.

Shortly before working on the Food project, Jane had been a member
of a ‘visitor working group’ and she attributes what she describes as
her ‘visitor-bias’ to this and to the fact that she has ‘worked my way
up from being a G over the last ten years’. She once accused me of
depicting her (in a draft of a paper) as a girl-guide, and I suppose it is
true that I can easily imagine her leading us all on a successful camping
expedition. But while the girl-guide image may capture her good-sense
and skills of organisation, it does insufficient credit to her vision and
sense of humour. All members of the Team agree – except during a few
particularly difficult times – that Jane is a ‘good leader’ who successfully
delegates and allows autonomy, while also providing support and a
clear sense of direction. In the Museum more widely Jane is known as
one of the ‘bright young things’ but also as somebody who is ‘compe-
tent’ and ‘down-to-earth’, rather than ‘pushy’ or ‘just on the career
ladder’ (comments from various Museum staff). On the day of the open-
ing of the gallery, after all the dignitaries have left, I ask each member
of the Team to select an object in the finished gallery by which to
have their photograph taken. Jane chooses an interactive exhibit – a
‘food pyramid’ – which she decides to refill with assistance as I take
her picture [Figure 4.1]. She is clad in the stylish outfit in which she
was introduced to the Duchess of York (patron of Museum’s Year) who
officially opened the exhibition.

Jan Metcalfe – Project Manager. An E when the project began, Jan is also
in her thirties. Jan’s degree was in Archaeology and she has a diploma
in Museum Studies. Like Jane, she has been at the Science Museum for
about ten years. Jan has been particularly developing her managerial
expertise (though she tells me that she does not want to be confined
to this as she enjoys curatorial work). Prior to joining the Food project
she had been working (until the project stalled due to lack of funds) as
a project coordinator on the Aeronautics project. One of Jan’s main
tasks is to liaise with the builders and workmen over the physical
construction of the gallery; her forthright manner, ability to let people
know clearly when things are not being done well, and readiness to
joke and laugh make her especially well-suited to this task. Jan chooses
to be photographed in the site office, from where the gallery construc-
tion was coordinated [Figure 4.2]. On the table in front of her is a
deflated ‘Mr Potato-Head’ which she was given by a man from the
Potato Marketing Board. Like various other more light-hearted aspects
of the exhibition and personal favourites, Mr Potato-Head did not make
it to the completed version.
100 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.2 Jan in the site office on opening day.

Heather Mayfield. Heather was temporarily promoted to an ‘E’ position

when she joined the Food project. She had worked previously at the
National Museum of Photography Film and Television, helping to get
this under way. Hers was a pattern of moving between different sites
of the National Museum of Science and Industry, which is fairly
common among Museum staff. She also previously worked on the
Wellcome collections. Heather often comes up with the most imagina-
tive ideas and is also one of the members of the Team who most strongly
voices the stance of representing lay people in the exhibition, some-
times teasing the others if she thinks their ideas are not sufficiently
straightforward. Heather has amusing nicknames and descriptions of
many other Museum staff, plus a rather wonderful subtle way of being
subversive (as when she self-consciously and emphatically insists on
only calling the food company ‘Nestlé’, ‘Nestles’ – pronounced ‘Nessells’).
She is the one who often promotes the false rumours about the
exhibition; and is responsible for including the chocolate mousse pot
and the McDonald’s. I have chosen a picture of Heather (with Sue)
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 101

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION
FOR POSITION ONLY

Figure 4.3 Heather (in foreground, with Sue in background) examines the
Lyons Corner House exhibit about three weeks before opening.

admiring the installation of the Lyons Tea House which is part of the
Eating Out section of the exhibition for which she is responsible [Figure
4.3].

Sue Mossman. Sue is also on a temporary promotion to E. Sue has worked

in Physical Sciences and has developed a particular expertise in plastics,
about which she later publishes a book; she has also worked as an
assistant on both the Space and Industrial Chemistry exhibitions since
she joined the Museum in 1983. Sue has a degree in Archaeology and
at the time of creating Food is completing a PhD. She is active in trades
union politics in the Museum and is generally the most vocal about
political matters, including those concerning Museum organisation
(such as sexism, redundancies and charging for admission) and those
to do with the exhibition. She includes material on famine and
originally wants to incorporate a section on the ‘psychology of shopp-
ing’ which would be, she says ‘basically about how supermarkets con
us into buying what we don’t really want’ – though this is one of those
sections that falls by the wayside. Shopping, the global distribution of
food, and processes of freezing and canning are areas that Sue covers
in the gallery. She generally talks quickly and is sometimes described
102 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.4 Sue in front of the 1920s Sainsbury’s reconstruction on opening day.

as ‘sparky’; she doesn’t suffer fools, criticism or what she views as

political wimpishness gladly. Sue chooses to be photographed next to
the 1920s Sainsbury’s reconstruction [Figure 4.4].

Cathy Needham. Cathy is in her early twenties and is on a temporary

promotion to an ‘F’, having worked at the Museum for about two years.
Cathy has a degree in Geology. A talented artist, she is very inclined
towards the aesthetic (and sports a great selection of hats). She often
seems to think about her parts of the exhibition in terms of the
attractiveness of particular artefacts (the others do this too, but it seems
to be given even more predominance by Cathy). The elimination of
some of her favourite sections during the process of exhibition-creation
is something that causes her some unhappiness. Cathy’s favourite
exhibit is a model of a Victorian chestnut seller in a section on Snacks
for which she has been responsible [Figure 4.5].

Ann Carter. The youngest member of the Team, Ann, has a History
degree and is also on a temporary promotion to an ‘F’, having worked
in the Museum for two years. Ann has worked on the Domestic
Appliances collection, some of which at that time was displayed in the
Museum’s basement and in Engineering. During the making of Food
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 103

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.5 Cathy by the chestnut seller (part of ‘Snacks’) on opening day.

Ann is also carrying out a Diploma in Museum Studies, funded by the

Division of Public Services. An open, no-nonsense and friendly person,
Ann is often self-critical but always gets on with what she is doing
very efficiently. She dislikes pretension and is often extremely to the
point about shortcomings of some staff and Museum procedures, and
has some very forthright language to describe people. Ann’s areas of
the exhibition are ‘Bread’ and ‘Food in the Home’, and she also assists
Jane with a section on food poisoning. Here she is pictured at her desk
in the Food offices [Figure 4.6].

Here I should, perhaps, also mention me. I have no areas of the

exhibition to work on and my participation is mostly limited to fairly
minor tasks such as helping to clean objects or cases, making tea and
coffee, or running to the shops. Figure 4.7 shows me at the opening.
This ‘in-store bakery’ is not my favourite exhibit but I somehow found
myself roped in to standing behind this counter making bread rolls –
partly because in the rush to get the gallery open, preparing rolls in
104 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.6 Ann at work in the Food offices about three weeks before opening.

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.7 Sharon in the in-store bakery on opening day. Photograph by Cathy
on Sharon’s camera.
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 105

advance had been forgotten (and nobody was sure that it would be
evident that this was a bakery without them) and partly in an attempt
to ‘add a bit of life’ to the exhibition which, as it finally came together,
was perceived to need it. At the time, I was twenty-eight years old –
somewhere in the middle of the ages of the Foodies – and had the
kind of background that could easily have made me one of them, with
a first degree in Human Sciences and a doctorate in Social Anthropology.
To some in the Museum, especially on the non-curatorial side, I was
regarded as a member of the Team, and the cheeky name used by some
of the warders to describe the Team – ‘the Magnificent Seven’ – included
me. I very much enjoyed the company of the Team and often found
myself wondering whether I might not like to work in the more com-
munal and practical world of the museum once my own fixed-term
research contract came to an end. Trying to negotiate my way between
empathetic support for the Team and critical distance is something
that I found – and have continued to find – difficult.
In addition to those who are designated members of ‘the Food Team’,
who are regarded as in front-line charge of the decisions involved in
creating the new exhibition, are others also involved in the exhibition’s
creation. Probably the most important of these are the designers;
indeed, at the royal opening of the new gallery, when the Director
comments on this being an all-women team, a curator next to me
mutters sardonically, ‘So what about the designers then?’.

The Designers and other Participants

The designers – the ‘Johns’ – are based in Yorkshire and Cheshire but
visit for meetings with different degrees of frequency depending on
the stage in the process. They are also in regular communication by
fax and, during the phases of drawing up the plans for the exhibition,
realms of paper churn out of fax machines. The Johns are in their forties
and present themselves as both ‘northern’ (with the friendly directness
that this stereotypically involves) and stylish, with fashionable well-
cut clothes. At the time, having mobile phones is fairly unusual and
in the media it is regarded as a sign of being a ‘yuppie’ – a young upwardly
mobile go-getter of the late 1980s and early 1990s, generally typified
as more concerned with style than substance, and heavily into con-
sumer goods. The Johns use their mobile phones to play along with
the teasing that this brings from the Food Team, sometimes conspicu-
ously walking around using them to each other when there is little
need. The Johns choose to be pictured together next to a Juke Box
106 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.8 The Johns with the juke box on opening day.

[Figure 4.8] which they are very keen to have included in the exhibition.
They say they love it as ‘a beautiful object’ and for its ‘retro-chic’. While
the Johns are the most visible face of their design company, and make
the largest ‘design input’ to the Food exhibition, there are also others
in their offices, such as graphic designers, who play more limited and
specific, though significant, roles.
In addition to these individuals who are accorded a particular
‘creative’ input into the exhibition, there are many others whose work
is also crucial to its completion. Many of these are not members of the
Museum’s staff: the Team consults numerous others such as academics
working on nutrition and the history of food, industrialists, staff at
specialist libraries, staff at other museums, organisations with particular
skills (such as film editing, panel production or the creation of fake
food), and representatives of diverse groups, such as the Friends of the
Earth and the Good Housekeeping Institute. Other Museum staff who
are involved include the ‘line managers’ of the Food Team – Mr Suthers
and Dr Cossons; staff in the education department (who discuss
educational aspects of the exhibition and prepare a teachers’ pack to
accompany it); the interactives team, who prepare hands-on exhibits;
staff in audio-visuals, who work on electronic exhibits such as videos
and computers; carpenters (‘the Chippies’) and others in the Museum
workshops who create replica exhibits and prepare objects for exhibition
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 107

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.9 Hands-on preparations: working on an exhibit for food (a spice

cabinet) in the wood workshops about ten weeks before opening.

[Figure 4.9]; photography; Construction and Building Works, which

carry out the physical construction work necessary; and ‘manatts’
(manual attendants) who help to get things into place. Even from this
truncated list, it is clear that an enormous number of people is involved
in the process of creating an exhibition. And this, of course, does not
include the multitude of non-human agents such as the sausage-machine
[Figure 5.3], which caused Heather no end of headaches in its unwilling-
ness, at first to be found, later to allow itself to be taken to the gallery,
and still later to perform demonstrations of sausage-making to visitors
quite as predictably as required; the oldest can in the world (which we
feared might explode); the exercise bikes; and the artificial fruits and
vegetables. Neither does it include those agents that caused unexpected
disruptions such as the numerous train and London Underground
strikes in 1989 which meant that many members of the Team could
not get into work as usual; or the chicken-pox virus which afflicted several
of us (including me), setting back the work on some areas unexpectedly.
Of course, we should remember the numerous items used in the produc-
tion of the exhibition such as the dratted fax-machine which always
chose to malfunction at crucial moments, the personal computers on
which exhibition text was revised and revised, and the kettle, without
which the whole experience would have been much less pleasant.
108 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

It would take an enormous and quite unreadable book to give an

account of all the players involved in the making of this exhibition.
Instead, I begin with those human players who were in the local
perspective accorded principal agency, and I outline the features that
were locally selected as noteworthy and the intentions with which they
began. I then follow this through, in the next chapter, to the ways in
which those involved tried to realise these dreams, some of those they
enlisted to help them, and some of the tribulations – and even night-
mares – they encountered.

Gender and Team Structure

There were a number of things which were unusual – a departure from
the then status quo – about the Food Team, as they, and other members
of the Museum staff, pointed out to me. The first thing that was nearly
always mentioned was the fact that they were all women. This, as the
Museum’s Director noted at the opening of the exhibition, was unprece-
dented in the history of the Museum. It was sufficiently distinctive for
him to refer to the Team as ‘the girls’. Women constituted about 30
per cent of the Museum’s curatorial staff, though they were over-
represented at ‘lower grades’ (of the civil service promotional ladder).
Exhibition-making, which the Food Team told me was a ‘jammy job’
(no pun intended at the time I think), had been done mainly by staff
on fairly high grades (generally a B or a C being responsible for content).
As such, members of the Food Team were also relatively low-graded
for the task they were doing. Other Museum staff also told me that
creating exhibitions is ‘what gives the buzz’, building up and main-
taining collections being seen as relatively routine by many, though
not all, staff. The Team members themselves were somewhat ambivalent
on why there were only women in the Team and of its possible
consequences. Sometimes they wanted to dismiss it – ‘it was just the
way it turned out: best people for the job’, ‘it doesn’t really make any
difference I don’t think’. They explained the circumstances in which
members were appointed to the Team in terms which did not include
gender: ‘It was good to have somebody who had worked on domestic
appliances, so Ann was a good choice’. At other times, however, they
saw the all-woman team as a crucial – and encouraging – departure
from previous Museum arrangements: ‘It was an opportunity for a
different way of doing things, and I think women are better at working
in a team’, ‘We’re more in touch with, like, ordinary people and women,
who don’t like the Science Museum and all the toys for boys stuff’. As
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 109

such, although Team members were not selected because they were
women, it was assumed that women would be most likely to agree
with the perspective that was already defined by the time most of them
were appointed. What we see here is the articulation of gender to a
particular way of working and museological perspective as well as to a
particular kind of positioning of these museum staff in relation to
‘ordinary people’ or ‘the public’ or ‘visitors’. This self-designation by
museum staff, which I have called ‘visitor-hijacking’ and have already
noted in the Gallery Planning process, is probably fairly common in
the everyday working of museums. It was certainly deployed in other
exhibition groups which I observed in the Science Museum, though
perhaps to a lesser extent and with different aspects of identity or
experience being highlighted.
Another ‘new’ feature was the ‘team structure’. As van Maanen has
noted, team working became something of a ‘buzz-word’ in organisa-
tions in the 1990s. The Science Museum was utilising contemporary
managerial ideas by moving towards this kind of structure, which was
supposed to draw, in more egalitarian and collaborative fashion than
in the more hierarchical working arrangements, on the diverse skills
of its members.8 Previously in the Museum, most of the content of an
exhibition would be officially decided upon by one senior curator,
generally a Keeper (that is, the head of a particular collection). In the
course of a working lifetime a curator would expect to officiate over
the creation of only two galleries on average, though there were some
notable exceptions in the Science Museum who had been in charge of
as many as six. He (or more occasionally she) would be responsible for
writing what is called ‘the story-line’ of the exhibition – the outline
account of what will be shown and of the main accompanying text,
and, as part of that, selecting artefacts from the collections. In this, he
would not work entirely alone but would be assisted by other members
of staff (generally junior curators in his own department), whose tasks
would probably include finding relevant pictures for the exhibition or
arranging to borrow items from elsewhere. He would also work, with
varying degrees of success, with the Museum’s designers and might
consult the Museum’s education department for advice. The model,
however, was very much one of a principal author – and, indeed, within
the Museum, not only were curators often defined by their collections
(‘Sue is Plastics’, as we have noted), but it was also typical to refer to
galleries by the name of this ‘author’ – ‘Tom’s’, or ‘Robert’s Chemicals’.
This too was part of what Mr Suthers had meant by ‘territory’. It existed,
however, in interesting contrast with the absence of the curator’s name
110 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

on exhibitions themselves. There, names of sponsors and any external

design companies would be listed but not those of Museum staff. This
‘politics of signatures’, as we will later see, had implications for the
reading of the Museum. In it, the work of individual museum staff
was subsumed to a signature which was both absent and present
simultaneously – a ‘floating signature’ perhaps – the Science Museum
itself.
Despite the model of senior curator as principal author, I heard
numerous accounts from the designers with whom I shared an office
and from staff who had taken a junior role in exhibition-making of
the involvement of others in shaping the exhibition. In more than
one case, junior staff suggested that certain senior curators ‘just stepped
in at the end to take the credit’, suggesting that here authorship was
merely assumed. In other cases, however, they talked of how difficult
it was for anybody to change substantially the plans of the chief curator,
though they sometimes succeeded in doing so. Designers and junior
staff would talk of the ‘lack of vision’ and ‘intransigence’ of more senior
staff, and would sometimes tell of subversive strategies which they had
had to use to try to change the course of an exhibition. ‘In the end we
just cut it [the text] and didn’t tell him, so by then it was too late
unless he wanted it all redoing,’ ‘We had to put it in place and show
him that it literally wouldn’t work, so he had to agree in the end.’
Moreover many, including the members of the Food Team, suggested
that the passion of some senior curators for their own subject matter
sometimes made them oblivious to how visitors might regard the
exhibitions. ‘A PhD thesis pasted onto panels, accessible only to the
other three experts in the universe who are interested in the subject’,
‘Only woolly hats are going to be able to wade through that’ were
examples of comments made about such exhibitions – ‘woolly hats’
being a term used for ‘buffs’, lay individuals with a well-developed
interest in, or even obsession with, particular kinds of objects (‘the
sort who will spend every weekend dissecting an engine’ as it was once
explained to me).9 To be sure, this was to select particularly ‘bad’ exam-
ples, but it was this kind of single-author model that the new team
model was meant to supersede. Altering the managerial structure was
intended to alter the product.
Although Jane was the Team leader, and although she was on a higher
grade than other Team members, she was not the sole author. Instead,
the Team worked relatively collectively, with each Team member being
assigned a particular part of the exhibition to work on (researching
and writing its story-line, selecting its objects and conducting the
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 111

organisation necessary to turn this into a finished exhibition). They

referred to this as each ‘owning’ a particular area of the gallery, and
used personal names or possessive pronouns to refer to these in
everyday talk (‘I’m worried about my bits of the gallery’, ‘Is that bit
there Ann’s?’), possession in this case being partly bound up with giving
all members of the Team a sense of authorship. Clearly, much had to
be done to make sure that the different parts of the exhibition ‘fitted
together’ but this was a joint task, carried out in regular Team meetings
and in meetings with the outside specialist exhibition design team.
Sometimes, especially in the most fraught and pressured periods of
exhibition-making, tensions arose which were expressed as hierarchical
differences between the ‘two offices’ (the small office with Jane and
Jan, Project Leader and Project Manager, and the large office with the
rest of the Team – that is those on lower grades. Those in the larger
office sometimes felt that they were being insufficiently consulted, but
this was rare and mostly Team members proudly (and accurately)
boasted that they worked very well together and even by the end had
not ‘fallen out being bitchy to each other’ or ‘ended up scratching each
others’ eyes out’ as some other staff had predicted an all woman team
surely would. The collective sense which the Team managed to create
and maintain was also a function of their self-positioning contra the
rest of the Museum (fed by their sense of doing something different,
which might well be criticised by other curators). Of course, it was
only to certain dimensions and members of ‘the rest of the Museum’
that the Team thought of themselves in opposition, but the drawing
of this contrast helped to foster their own group coherence.
They were not alone, however, in doing this. The Information Age
project did so in some respects even more strongly – insisting on being
physically based in a building in a car-park outside the museum. The
Project Leader described what going on in much of the rest of the
Museum as ‘the dough’ or ‘the syrup’ (food metaphors seemed rather
widespread at the time!). (‘Get it past the plonkers’ was one of the
unofficial mottoes of this project.) The Food Team too, though still
inside the Museum building, were spatially located at some distance
from most other curators, and they too drew frequent contrasts between
themselves and what was going on elsewhere (including in The
Information Age project). In the case of Food, the gender of the
members of the Team also became part of this self-marking of difference,
as evident, for example, in their reference to some other Museum staff
as ‘boys’. There is no doubt that the gender and group solidarity of the
Food Team could be disconcerting to some male members of staff. As
112 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Sue put it: ‘We have been referred to as the female mafia and those
powerful women. I think that some men in the Museum do feel
threatened by us.’ This sense of threat could be seen on occasion. For
example, one afternoon the Team was having a small party – eating
cake and drinking coffee – in the large office when a male Museum
worker came in. Faced by this group of relaxed women, leaning on
radiators and sitting on desks, he was clearly taken-aback and blushingly
asked where one group member (who was then absent) was, then
hurriedly left. As he did so, we all burst spontaneously into laughter
and Jan then said, with mock gravitas, ‘They just can’t cope with the
fact that we’re such strong women!’.

Designers and Interpretation

The use of an outside design service was not unprecedented in the
Museum but it was unusual at the time for a major ‘permanent’ gallery
such as Food. Hall-Redman Associates – with offices in Yorkshire and
Cheshire, and known for previous work at the Bradford Colour Museum,
Lancaster Maritime Museum and Manchester United Museum – had
won the contract after a competitive tender. Again, this insertion of
competition and the external was part of the conscious attempt to
‘break with the past’ that characterised this exhibition and the particular
time of which it was part in the Science Museum. Like many other
such changes, it was received somewhat ambivalently. For those
involved, it was a chance to ‘get something fresh, a bit different – you
can get stuck in a bit of a rut if you always have the same designers on
everything’ or an opportunity to ‘counter a strain of in-breeding in
our exhibition development’ (internal memo). But for those such as
the Museum’s own team of designers it was part of a more widespread
demotion of expertise in the Museum (‘Outside designers aren’t going
to understand the nature of the Science Museum and our visitors.
They’re probably going to think of it just like any heritage presentation’)
and of moves towards contracting out rather than maintaining expertise
‘in-house’. (‘There seems to be an idea that outside designers are some-
how better,’ said one of Science Museum designers ruefully.) As such,
it was also part of a ‘downsizing’ of Museum staff: the number of staff
in the design office had been shrunk by so-called ‘natural wastage’ (staff
not being replaced when they left) from seventeen to ‘only five and a
half and one of those is on indefinite sick leave and most of the rest
are thinking about leaving’ (Science Museum designer). While overall
staff numbers in the Science Museum had not shrunk significantly –
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 113

there were still some 440 employees in 1988 – this overall figure masked
a decline in the number of jobs requiring traditional expertise and
employed on semi-permanent contracts and an increase in lower grade
(in civil service terms) and fixed-term contract jobs, especially in the
new marketing functions of the museum. In this respect, the Science
Museum was part of a more general reconfiguration of patterns of work
prevailing in the UK (and many other countries) at the time.
Another unusual feature of the organisation of Food was that it was
not based on, or concerned with exhibiting, a single existing collection
as were the majority of the Museum’s exhibitions. This had caused
some concern in the Museum when the subject-matter was first
announced, with one senior member of the Museum staff rhetorically
asking at a seminar: ‘What will it show then? A few ovens and a load
of old cookery books?’ The exhibition could, and did, draw on existing
Museum collections, including Domestic Appliances (from where some
‘old ovens’ were indeed culled), the Wellcome collection of medical-
related objects, and from Transport, Agriculture, Food technology, and
Photography. However, the selection of a topic – food – which did not
neatly map onto a specific collection, was part of a managerial strategy
to try to sever what had come to be thought of as a ‘natural’ link
between collections and exhibitions. Again, this was an attempt to alter
the product by changing the structures of its production, an attempt
which could be regarded as the according of at least some authorial
agency to institutional structures themselves.
Linked to this was the fact that members of the Food Team were not
appointed to work on this project because of their specialist curatorial
expertise. Indeed, in another departure, one in keeping with changes
discussed in chapter two, they were given the title ‘interpreters’ while
they worked on the exhibition, the term ‘interpretation’ being used to
highlight the orientation to visitors rather than the ‘care’ (‘curation’)
of objects. Nevertheless, they virtually always referred to themselves
as curators rather than interpreters or ‘curator-interpreters’. In fact,
before they began work on the project, all members of the Team had
worked as curators and all had particular subject expertise. Some of
this was relevant, though not strongly so (Ann’s work on the Domestic
Appliances collections, for example). Neither, with the exception of
Jane (who had a degree in Microbiology) did members of the Team
have any other special expertise in food-related subjects. All were happy
to state that while they found food an interesting subject, and enjoyed
eating it, they were definitely not experts in it. However, far from being
perceived as a disadvantage, this was positively construed; for, in the
114 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

process of ‘visitor-substitution’, lack of expertise was equated with a

greater capacity for being able to identify and communicate with lay
people. Members of the Food Team saw themselves as lacking the
barriers which would cause them to be ‘out of touch with ordinary
people’ – barriers created by too much specialist expertise. That they
vaunted a lack of expertise at a time when, as various cultural commen-
tators have observed, there was a widespread proliferation of expert
systems and professionalisation, is not to be explained simply as an
exception.10 It was precisely in relation to a perception of science as
highly and increasingly inaccessible to those who lacked the necessary
specialised expertise that the Team members emphasised their shared
sense of exclusion with ‘ordinary visitors’. Moreover, lack of traditional
kinds of specialisation and expertise was also equated with flexibility
and adaptiveness. Nevertheless, as the ‘flexible specialisation’ couplet
highlights, flexibility could, and indeed was, bound up with new forms
of specialisation as increasingly specialist niches – and distinctive
corporate identities – were sought out and promoted by organisations.
In the Science Museum, this can be seen in the way that the task of
understanding visitors, and more widely the business of the public
understanding of science, became increasingly expert matters, with
their own fast professionalising techniques, during the time-frame of
this ethnography, as witnessed in a number of other ‘departures’ by
the Team, such as carrying out visitor surveys and trialling prospective
exhibits on visitors.
Also part of the attempt to reorient this exhibition towards visitors,
rather than the expert and even esoteric worlds of science or of
collections and objects, was the managerial location of the Team within
the new Division of Public Services, of which Mr Suthers was Head,
and, as such, the ‘line manager’ of the Team. Again, this was not
uncontroversial in the Museum. While some staff found it a welcome
disruption of the power of senior curators and a sensible bringing
together of the Museum’s ‘public face’ tasks, others remained suspicious.
One curator involved in creating another exhibition was particularly
critical, lamenting the ‘dumbing-down’ that he perceived in the move
which now ‘puts exhibiting in the same division as managing the toilet
cleaning’. To him, this was evidence that the Museum was becoming
what he called ‘Bozoland’, ‘Lululand, Cuckooland, Nincompoopland’,
‘Wallysville’, a crazy irrational place in which values had become topsy-
turvy.
These, then, were the main differences in the way in which the
exhibition which came to be called ‘Food for Thought’ was organised,
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 115

relative to previous exhibitions. They were not the only ones, though;
others related more to the way in which the process was carried out
and the content and aims of the exhibition. No doubt in the making
of any exhibition there is something of a rhetoric of newness and
difference; after all, it is primarily through such claims that creativity
and even worth is assigned in modernity.11 This certainly was a feature,
to some extent, of the other exhibitions which I observed or discussed
with their creators, though in most cases ‘newness’ was restricted to
matters of content and approach rather than ramified throughout the
whole managerial process. The rhetoric of change and ‘restructuring’ –
of ‘sweeping away the old’ – was about more than Food alone: it was
also part of the more widespread changes outlined in the previous
chapters – in and beyond the Museum – which came to bear particularly
acutely upon this exhibition.

Why Food?
That the flagship exhibition of the new regime in the Science Museum
should have been on the subject of food, that this subject should have
been presented largely from the perspective of consumption, and that
it should have received the bulk of its funding from supermarket
sponsorship seemed like a perfect expression of the wider emphasis on
consumers and consumption of the time. As I noted, many museums
(and other public institutions) were embracing a vision of the public
as consumers, and conceptualising citizenship as a matter of making
informed choices. In museums of science the popularity of the concept
‘public understanding of science’ was partly an expression of this
(though also of the waning of museums’ former relationship to
scientific knowledge). The theme of health and nutrition was as
exemplary an extension of this idea – use-value and information to
support individual responsibility in the domain of one’s own body –
as could have been dreamed up. It was, however, in many ways an odd
or surprising choice for the Science Museum as comments by museum
staff and some internal memos noted (‘Surely this is a subject for the
NHM, not us’), and as was confirmed in a questionnaire commissioned
by Mr Suthers during the Food project, many visitors (50 per cent)
would not have expected such an exhibition in the Science Museum.12
So how did it come about?
An idea to mount an exhibition on a food-related topic had been
around for some time in the Science Museum, the Royal Agricultural
Society of England having proposed in 1979 that a new agriculture
116 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

gallery be planned for 1988, the 150th anniversary of the Society and
the ‘Year of British Agriculture’. Letters and meetings followed, but did
not ‘progress. . . as smoothly as might be hoped’, as an internal memo
from the then Director, Margaret Weston, noted. A sticking point was
that the Society, which proposed to support the exhibition financially,
did not quite see eye-to-eye with the Museum about the nature of it,
not an unusual problem when an idea was being instigated by an
external organisation which was to foot much of the bill. In particular,
the promotion of ‘agriculture’, which was a central aspect of the
Society’s remit (‘to show agriculture as a developing professional exercise
as well as a social necessity’, as one rather dull ‘scenario’ produced by
the Society put it), did not entirely tally with the Museum’s idea of
what might make an interesting exhibition. Matters continued to potter
along but were partly put on ice in the mid-1980s by the fact that
Dame Margaret was due to retire and it was easier to leave matters to
her successor.
Jane was one of those involved in some of the earlier ‘food and
farming’ ideas and she took the opportunity to suggest the idea of an
exhibition on a food-related topic to the new Director. In doing so,
however, she also reshaped the ideas, arguing that the agricultural
dimensions should not be included in the Science Museum but dis-
played instead in a proposed new national museum of agriculture. As
she explained it to me:

I was keen on the social bits and the new Director was the sort who
would go for that. The old one would have preferred ninety-one tractors
in a line – she liked the technology, not the social. The new Director. . .
wanted a radical change of approach to exhibitions, so the time was
right to stick in more of a social impact. There’s no point presenting
something if the Director is not sympathetic.

Jane, who herself had an interest in nutrition as well as a commitment

to the idea of communicating with a lay public, also emphasised the
suitability of food as a topic to the public understanding of science.
A number of other things also conspired to make the topic of food
one which would be given the go-ahead. First, it was something which
lent itself to some of the ‘departures’ which we have already mentioned,
especially that of not being based on a single collection. Second, food
was a subject that was a matter of considerable public and media interest
at the time – a real ‘hot potato’. This was a period of mounting concern
about factory production methods in particular, and health scares such
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 117

as salmonella in eggs. During the making of the project, every week

brought new articles – new findings (often seeming to overturn those
of the previous week) and new risks – about food which caused some
difficulty for the Team as we shall see later. Third, as a memo from a
member of the Education department put it:

The Museum is often castigated (particularly by teachers) for producing

exhibitions which appear to ignore developments such as the rise of a
multi-racial society, and the changing role of women in society. It is hard
to see how most of our galleries could show an awareness of these issues,
but F&N [Food and Nutrition] is different. It provides us with the
opportunity to show that we are aware of them without, I think, being
accused of tokenism or hypocrisy. Topic areas on “herbs and spices” or
“staple foods” would take care of the “ethnic” issue.

Fourth, the topic seemed to be one with good sponsorship potential,

with supermarkets and food companies being among the most profit-
able industries in Britain in the 1980s. (A list in the Food files lists
food companies together with their ‘profit after tax’ and the response
given to approaches from the Museum.) It was, in other words, a topic
which undoubtedly ‘resonated with the times’, though individual
initiative and much gathering of statistics and mobilising of arguments
(including ones to overcome objections that the topic was inappropriate
to the Science Museum) were required to translate this resonance into
the local context of the Museum.

The Feasibility of Food: the Feasibility Study

In February 1988, after Jane had sent her proposals to the Museum’s
Economic Management Committee (made up of the Director and
Assistant Directors), she was asked to prepare a feasibility study on the
topic. She did so with Jan and Sue, whom she personally requested to
work with her on this. The document which they produced in March
was entitled ‘Food and Nutrition: a Proposal for a Permanent Exhibition
in the Science Museum. Food Project Feasibility Study’. To highlight
their professionalism and difference from other exhibitions, this
document was ‘a glossy’, with a ‘Food and Nutrition’ logo (a stylised
shopping trolley containing this name alongside the NMSI coat-of-
arms). It was based on extensive ‘brainstorming’ – the rather wonderful
large sheets produced during this stage, full of many more joky ideas
than are represented in the Feasibility Study, were still available for me
118 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

to consult – and secondary research into matters such as costing and

the possible audience. It drew too on the work that Jane had already
done in her own earlier proposals. The study should, of course, be
understood not simply as a statement of intention but also as a strategic
and rhetorical document, designed to persuade the Director and the
Trustees to give it the go-ahead (which they did soon after the Feasibility
Study was submitted). I describe some of its content below.

Introduction and Audience

The Introduction to the study is as follows:

People are interested in food. Recent surveys have shown that, increas-
ingly, their interest focuses on health-related aspects. There is rising public
concern about ‘unhealthy’ foods but little understanding about what is
healthy or unhealthy, or how daily diet may be improved. At present
there is no major exhibition in Britain which explains nutrition and food.
The Science Museum proposes to mount a lively, entertaining and
interesting permanent exhibition on food. The Science Museum’s national
collections illustrate the history and current state of agriculture and food
technology, and hence it is uniquely placed to help people understand
today’s diet and answer some of their questions.
1989 sees the celebrations for British Food and Farming Year. This
exhibition will be timed to open in September of that year providing a
long term focus for the understanding of food and nutrition in the UK.

The claim of potential visitor interest in the first line is both a tactic to
highlight the fact that this is a subject which might well attract a wide
audience and also part of the placing of people, or visitors, to the
forefront as is evident in other aspects of the document and in ideas
developed later. The ‘health’ dimension is justified by its claimed
widespread and growing public and topical interest (as witnessed by
‘surveys’, frequently invoked in the report). The mention of relevant
collections is partly to counterbalance the opinion that a health and
nutrition angle would not be entirely appropriate to the Science
Museum as well as to contributing to the more general task of showing
why the Museum should be the venue for such an exhibition (‘it is
uniquely placed. . . .’). We should note here too that the proposal is
credited not to the authors of the report but to The Science Museum
(‘The Science Museum proposes. . .’). This is, perhaps, a somewhat
premature, though no doubt rhetorically effective, subsumption of
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 119

persons to the institution that we have already noted and that we shall
see later in the making and reception of this exhibition. Timing is also
justified: the British Food and Farming Year (Museums Year was later
to be added too).
The adjectives first chosen to describe the exhibition are worth
noting: ‘lively, entertaining and interesting’. In everyday discussion these
were oppositional adjectives, contrasting this exhibition with others
in the Museum, described as ‘boring’, ‘dull’, ‘book-on-the-wall’. Yet in
the document as a whole a more earnest educational dimension predomi-
nates – the exhibition will ‘explain’ and ‘help people understand’. As
the Education staff member noted, this was to some extent a departure
for the Museum too (he was contrasting it with the Natural History
Museum next door) and one on which ‘we have. . . a poor track record’.
One other theme should also be noted here: that of nation. ‘Britain’,
‘British’, ‘national’ and ‘UK’ are included in these few paragraphs in a
rather low-key and taken-for-granted manner: the Museum is ‘national’
and the Food and Farming year is ‘British’. National boundaries are
taken as rather natural parameters, the incontestable fact of the
Museum’s national status. How this and its auto-production of cate-
gories such as ‘the British diet’ were negotiated in relation to what the
Education officer referred to as ‘the “ethnic” issue’ is a theme to which
we shall return in the chapter six.
Although the Museum receives many international visitors, a British
audience is implicitly invoked in the proposal documents. As was a
new imperative of the late 1980s, a ‘target audience’ was also explicitly
defined: ‘The exhibition will be aimed primarily at family parties,
including parents who manage the family diet’. This is in some ways
surprisingly specific given that in verbal accounts the Team tended to
emphasise that the exhibition was for ‘everybody’ or ‘ordinary people’.
The statement, however, should not, I think, be interpreted to mean
that they considered all ‘ordinary people’ to be members of families.
Still more surprising is the fact that the Feasibility Study also identifies
‘higher socio-economic groups’ as its target. It notes that it is adults
with children, especially in ‘higher socio-economic groups’, who exhibit
most concern over matters of diet, that 47 per cent of Science Museum
visitors attend with children, and 97 per cent are from ‘higher socio-
economic groups’.13 These figures, we should note, derive from before
the introduction of charging. At the time of the Feasibility Study
admission charges had been mooted, though not yet confirmed, and
this may explain the strategic mention of the fact that those likely to
have ‘disposable income’ have a particular interest in this topic.
120 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Exhibition Content
The discussion of the possible content of the exhibition begins with a
list of ‘basic principles’. While this is a somewhat heterogeneous list,
it is worth quoting in full because it contains both the guiding principles
which were to shape the exhibition and what I call the exhibition’s
political legibility – the politically significant readings which the
exhibition seemed to invite or inhibit. As some of these principles were
later lost (sometimes with significant consequences for political
legibility), the list provides a useful starting point for the stories to
follow. Here I provide a very brief note after each principle (or two) on
the significance of each; I have numbered the list for ease of discussion
though the emphases are original.

(1) Successful exhibitions start with the familiar and move on to new
areas. Most Science Museum visitors are from south-east England and
few have direct experience of farming. Their experience of the food they
eat begins, as children, at the dinner table and extends, as adults, to the
supermarket shelves. Few know how their food reached there, or how it
is packaged, processed, or stored.

This idea of starting with the familiar was a central dimension of the
exhibition design and shaped various key features of it which would,
in turn lead to its being read in certain ways. In particular, it privileged
consumption and everyday knowledge in the exhibition.

(2) Modern agriculture would be difficult to present adequately in an

entertaining and interesting way in a gallery in the middle of London,
with no room for livestock or arable land. In addition there are plans for
a National Museum of Food and Farming on a greenfield site where these
could be better displayed.

(3) The exhibition will concentrate on food itself, and its ‘processing’
both in the home and in the factory. Basic production of food, i.e. at the
farm, need not be covered in detail, although it must be mentioned.
Accordingly the proportion of the exhibition devoted to agriculture itself
will be reduced.

The loss of virtually all mention of agriculture and primary food pro-
duction was to be a consequence of later so-called ‘pragmatic’ decisions.
It was, however, also to have an important impact on the political legi-
bility of the finished exhibition as these areas had been defined out of
the exhibition’s remit.
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 121

(4) The Science Museum is the ideal place to show the large 3D objects
used in parts of the food processing industry. Visitors expect to find such
objects here, and expect to see them working.

Large 3D objects were indeed included, though they sometimes behaved

rather obstreperously. Given the changes in the exhibition as it
progressed into reality, they also came to shape the exhibitionary
politics, partly because of their refusal to be thrown off their original
physical and semantic trajectory.

(5) The exhibition will be fun. Finding out about food should be as
pleasurable as eating it. Current beliefs about the benefits of a mixed
balanced diet will be explored.

‘Fun’ was a much used word in verbal accounts of the exhibition; and
we will return later to a discussion of the politics of fun. The rather
different point here about diet shows a clear awareness in the use of
the term ‘belief’, that nutritional ideas are not static. How the Team
attempted to deal with this is another theme that will be explored later,
where we shall see it in interaction both with scientists (nutritionists)
and visitors to the exhibition.

(6) We will start by explaining what we need to eat and, on a simple

level, why. Nutrition will act as the linking theme throughout the gallery,
setting each area of the gallery into an overall context. Nutritional theories
are constantly changing, so the gallery should be designed to allow for
easy updating. However, this gallery need not deal with digestion (in
the Natural History Museum) or the molecular details of nutrients (in
future biochemistry exhibitions).

Here we see the principle of presenting easy ideas first, as well as the
changing nature of (at least nutritional) science. The editing process
of siphoning off certain areas to other museums or exhibitions as a
justifying tactic is also used here.

(7) Somewhere in the exhibition we should consider the foods people

actually eat and drink, including coffee, even if these have no intrinsic
nutritional value.

Later, this was to be cast as part of the broader principle of familiarity

– a principle which, as we shall see, had exhibitionary (and political)
122 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

disadvantages as well as advantages. It is also part of the popular and

consumption emphasis of the exhibition.

(8) The gallery should not be afraid to tackle controversial matters of

public concern such as world food problems – shortages, food mount-
ains (witness Band Aid), and additives. Indeed, MAFF’s [the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food] survey found that ingredients in food
ranked third (after smoking and environmental pollution) in people’s
minds as damaging to health. They reported that public awareness of
additives was ‘media led’ with a general belief that additives had adverse
affects. Few people had any specific knowledge of their use.

Intentions to include controversial issues are clear here. All of these

topics came to be included in the exhibition, though this was not always
noted by visitors or critics for reasons that, as I suggest later, are rather
interesting. A recognition of the Museum’s possibly distinctive role as
part of, or in contradistinction to, the media is made here.

(9) The subject of food is very large. The exhibition should be designed
to allow visitors to choose what they wish to see and provide more
detailed information in the resource area.

The theme of choice in the exhibition was to become a central one

and it came to ramify through many more matters than the provision
of further information (which was done through computer pro-
grammes, themselves allowing ‘choice’ about ‘routes’ to take). This too
was a crucial dimension of the exhibition’s political legibility.

Figure 4.10 shows the topics which the study suggested should be
covered in the exhibition. At the top we see the two main consumption-
focused topics which were to orient part of the exhibition: Shopping
and Eating Habits. Leading down from the latter is what was described
in the document as a ‘nutritonal spine’. Here, nutritional ideas were to
be presented, oriented in relation to specific foods. Those listed were
each supposed to represent particular nutritional contributions to the
diet: Meat and fish (protein, fats, minerals, fish); Tea and coffee (dietary
water). In addition, each of the foods exemplified certain production
processes: Meat and fish (salting, drying); Vegetables (canning, freezing
. . .) (here was where the big 3D machines were to fit in) there were
various other (mainly historical) items of information such as ‘the 1960s
growth of coffee bars’. To this end, the Feasibility Study contains a
number of case studies outlining the possible content of each area.
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 123

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.10 Possible exhibit topics from the Feasibility Study.

‘Industrial Collaboration’ and Budget

The study also covers the potential for what is called ‘collaboration
with the food industry’, specified as the following possibilities:

l Expert advice on the range and content of topics covered in the

exhibition.
l Access to technical expertise on the key processes of food manufacture.
l Financial support for the exhibition, either as a sole or joint sponsor.
l Support for the planned programme of educational literature and
materials.
l Financial support for the continuing update of the exhibition over
its lifetime.
l Access to archive and film material.
124 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

l Assistance with identifying and supplying three-dimensional material

for the exhibition and for the national collections.

The report notes that ‘to date, approaches have been made to a number
of large companies and organisations within the food industry’. Looking
for industrial sponsorship for both financial assistance as well as for
what was often called ‘assistance in kind’ (such as provision of artefacts)
was necessary for most exhibitions and in this Food was far from
unusual, though the identification of particular aspects – the accomp-
anying educational literature and its updating – as separate sponsorship
‘opportunities’ was relatively innovative.
As the next section of the study – the budget – made clear, such
‘investment’ (the word used) by the food industry was going to be
essential to help to fund the set-up costs, which were estimated at nearly
£1.5 million, and maintenance costs of £79,000 over the projected ten
year lifetime of the gallery. The Science Museum (as author again)
‘expects to fund most of the staff costs’ (not included in the £1.5 million
figure), the study states, and in an appendix calculates these as nearly
£300,000. At the time, this was the most expensive exhibition that
the Science Museum had undertaken.

Go-ahead and Sponsorship

As the Director and the Trustees had now approved the idea of the
project, the following months were dedicated to trying to acquire some
substantial sponsorship – ‘patrons’ as the main sponsors were to be
called – for the exhibition to cover the large costs of the new gallery.
As the study itself had noted, a number of potential ‘industrial collabor-
ators’ had been tentatively approached. These meetings might have
been over ‘technical matters’ – as when Jane visited Nestlé’s head-
quarters and ‘Alimentarium’ exhibition in Switzerland – with sponsor-
ship being ‘slipped into’ the discussions. Personal contacts, such as
that of the Director with David Sainsbury (a member of the Sainsbury
family which owned a large UK supermarket chain), were also mobil-
ised, with representatives of possible sponsors invited to dinner at ‘the
Director’s club’ (London’s Athenaeum). The decision was to approach
two possible main sponsors (‘patrons’) in the first instance (Sainsbury’s
and Nestlé) and a number of other ‘smaller’ ones to fund specific aspects
(such as the education pack).
By the end of April, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation – one of the
Sainsbury Family trusts, and one which then was particularly interested
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 125

in funding interactive exhibitions – had confirmed that it would

contribute £500,000 and it was looking likely that Nestlé would
contribute £250,000. So appointing further members of the Food Team
went ahead in May: Jan was transferred to the project, and Sue and
Heather were appointed to the two E posts after interviews. All began
to work on developing the ideas – ‘reading frenetically, we were starting
from scratch, remember’ – and making contacts for potential objects,
all towards creating what were called ‘outline scripts’. Ann and Cathy,
also after interviews, took up the F posts in the summer, by which
time, the designers had also been appointed. Hall-Redman Associates
(HRA) had won the contract, not only because the interview committee
(the Director, Mr Suthers, Jane and Jan, with Sue in attendance) liked
their proposals but also that they were seen as ‘people we could get on
with’. Jan noted at the time:

I liked their northern bluntness. I am keen that this project is ‘curator

led’ and think that we are more likely to get this with HRA. This is not
to say that they do not have their own ideas to contribute – from what I
have seen of their work I think they do – but I have confidence in their
listening abilities.

Here she expresses a fear common to curators that designers might

‘try to take over’. ‘Want to lead on CONTENT!’ was the hand-written
note by one of the unsuccessful competing companies.
Although Nestlé confirmed in May that they would contribute
£250,000, they made this ‘subject to achievement of a satisfactory form
of contract between us which defines the commercial opportunities
and range of activities in which our brands may feature’. The Museum
was, however, reluctant to agree this, particularly as Sainsbury’s had
not made such demands. However, what had been agreed with Sains-
bury’s (by the Director in personal conversation with David Sainsbury)
was that the name Sainsbury should feature in the name of the gallery.
This was unprecedented in the history of the Museum and the subject
of a mostly negative comment by curators. In June, the Sainsbury family
offered an additional £250,000 sponsorship, but making it quite clear
that ‘the family name should be permanently and exclusively associated
with the exhibition so that it is known as the Sainsbury gallery or
exhibition’. They also specified that no other food retailer be involved
as sponsor (or in terms of foods represented) but that food manu-
facturers could be. A suggestion by the Museum that Nestlé’s name
should also appear on the gallery was rejected by Sainsbury’s, and
126 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

although negotiations continued for many months, no agreement

could be found satisfactory to all parties and eventually, after additional
arguments over some dimensions of the content of the exhibition,
Nestlé pulled out. Such negotiations, while here specific to this gallery,
highlight some of the problems about sponsorship for museums of
science in particular. Sponsors are clearly expecting something for their
money, and the problem for museums of science is that sponsors are
likely to support only exhibitions in which they have a subject-based
interest. In some ways, naming a gallery after a sponsor (as was the
practice at many other museums, in the case of the Sainsbury wing at
the National Gallery), rather than allowing a direct influence in the
content or more specific ‘commercial opportunities’, might seem a more
suitable option. However, because of the subject link, the semantics
are different from, say, art museums affecting the way the exhibition
is read as we shall see in chapter eight.
All of those who eventually contributed financially to the Food gallery
had an interest in the subject matter: the National Dairy Council –
£50,000, Tate and Lyle and British Sugar – £10,000 each a year for
updating the gallery for the next five years. The Meat and Livestock
Commission, Mars, and Good Housekeeping donated smaller amounts.
Given the widespread media coverage of dietary matters at the time
which was mostly critical of dairy produce, sugar and meat, these
organisations were likely to want to influence the representation of
their products. The Team members generally emphasised that they
themselves held what they termed ‘curatorial control’, that they alone
were ultimately responsible for the content of the exhibition. However,
they also conceded that it was sometimes difficult to be sure what had
been informally agreed, given the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ nature of
the way in which sponsorship tended to be established. Furthermore,
even if those individuals in a company with whom the deals had
originally been done had not requested any input into the content of
the exhibition, this had not necessarily been conveyed to those lower
down with whom the Team dealt directly, and such staff (who were
often PR staff because these were responsible for company trade
exhibitions) might well take it for granted that their aim should be to
ensure that their company interest be represented as favourably as
possible.

The Feasibility Study had already set out a timetable (Figure 4.11) and
this lists the activities which were to be undertaken and when. Despite
the constant sense of over-running and being extremely pressed for
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 127

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.11 Timetable.

time during the exhibition’s making, this timetable proved reasonably

accurate with very little of what in the Museum was euphemistically
called ‘irrecoverable slippage’ occurring. By the end of the summer of
1988, then, Food was steaming ahead. Not only had the main ideas
been mapped out, the Team and designers appointed, the name partly
decided and substantial sponsorship assured, it was also agreed that
the exhibition should be on the Using floor in the former Astronomy
gallery. This last decision was also a matter of some controversy for,
although Astronomy was generally agreed to be in need of refurbishing,
it was a particularly ‘object-rich’ gallery, both in terms of the quantity
128 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

and importance of its displayed collection (which was to be put in

storage). The list of objects (prepared for their removal) in the Astron-
omy gallery reads like a poem:

Oxford Heliometer, Dondi clock, Wright Orrery, Original Orrery, Nasmyths

Telescope, Groombridge Transit Circle, Kew Photo-Heliograph, Sissons
Mural Quadrant, Bird’s Mural Quadrant, Shuckburgh Equatorial, Rosse
Mirror, Smyth Equatorial, Newtonian Reflecting Telescope, Short Reflecting
Telescope, Butterfield Quadrant, Statue of Galileo, Jarvis Clock, Coronelli
Globe, Jaipur Zodiac, Festival Orrery. . .

‘They are ripping out Astronomy to put in a hamburger joint. . . Is the

public expected to pay £2 for that? People come to see historic objects’
said one curator caustically. As what was destined to be the first
permanent gallery to open after the introduction of charging, the Food
exhibition was in part going to be a test-case of what visitors did want.
First, however, under what often felt like the rather hostile gaze of many
Museum staff, the Team faced the task of turning their ideas into
physical reality: the exhibition itself.

Notes
1. See Hall 1980; and chapters one, eight and nine for further comment.
2. For further discussion of authorship in relation to cultural production
see, for example, Becker 1982; Born 1995; Burke 1995; Foucault 1995.
3. See Foucault 1995.
4. Derrida 1995.
5. The cost of the exhibition (and indeed any exhibition), which I so
unreflectively repeated, is itself an interesting cultural construct, as Hilary Rose
pointed out to me at that meeting. Why were staff costs excluded, for example?
Museum staff explained to me that as they were already employed, this was
not an ‘extra’ cost to the Museum. Nevertheless, the obligatory adding of
‘excluding staff costs’ was to alert hearers, especially imagined sponsors, to
the fact that the Museum was in fact making a further contribution. Part of
the background to this was that in negotiations with sponsors the Museum
often suggested that it would contribute a certain proportion – for example
that it would ‘match’ external sponsorship – but with the caveat that its
contribution would be made at least partially ‘in kind’, particularly through
the provision of staff expertise and time. As the latter were computational
 A Hot Potato for a New Public 129

matters in which the Museum could exercise considerable discretion, this

produced a useful flexibility into negotiations. Even within the computed costs
– amounting to £1.6 million in this case – there was room for discretion, though
this could rarely be exercised by the Team themselves. Thus ‘the budget’ and
‘expenditure’ felt extremely intransigent, especially when the former was being
exceeded by the latter.
6. See Feist and Hutchinson 1989a.
7. Other members of staff might be invited in special circumstances. So in
December 1988, all members of the Food team were invited as they were
working on ‘the flagship project’ as one wryly put it. Some staff expressed
their resentment at the way that the Science Museum/Trustees party was paid
for out of Museum funds, whereas other parties – such as Departmental ones
(to which all staff would be invited) – were not. One member of staff who had
never been invited told me that those below D were not allowed ‘because
they think we don’t know how to behave ourselves. They’re scared we might
moan in front of the Trustees’.
8. Van Maanen 2001. In management studies, this kind of work structure is
sometimes known as ‘business process re-engineering’ or just ‘re-engineering’.
Keith Grint explains that this is characterised by the use of process teams,
multi-dimensional work (perhaps requiring ‘multi-skilling’) and a shift of
‘employee focus’ – ‘from concern for the boss to concern for the customer’
(1995: 94) – in theory at least.
9. I never heard curatorial object love compared to or contrasted with woolly-
hat obsession though they clearly share similarities in their relationships with
objects. Perhaps ‘woolly hats’ – as the derogatory names for and comments
about them suggest – were a disturbing category for museum staff precisely
because of this similarity and extension of object love. There are interesting
discussions of collecting and its classification as either legitimate or perverse
in Elsner and Cardinal (eds) 1994, Pearce 1995, and Pearce (ed.) 1997.
10. On the proliferation of ‘expertise’ and ‘expert systems’ see, for example,
Giddens 1990.
11. The ‘cult of the new’ is part of a broader cultural focus on ‘originality’
which is deeply intertwined with notions of ‘individuality’ (see Taylor 1985),
and is also part of the ‘imaginative hedonism’ which Campbell (1987) has
argued is a distinctive and crucial feature of modern consumerism.
12. See McManus 1989: 4.
13. The source given for this is an English Tourist Board survey of 1982
which the report says provides the ‘most recent figures available’. ‘Higher socio-
economic groups’ is used to refer here to all groups except Ds and Es. Twenty
nine per cent are As and Bs according to the report, indicating that the
Feasibility Study could have interpreted the results differently if its authors
had wished.
This page intentionally left blank
 f i v e

‘Reality Sets In’: Managing and

Materialising Dreams (and
Negotiating Nightmares)

W hen I talked with the Team after the exhibition had opened, all
of them described the process of making it as one of moving, as
Sue put it, ‘from very creative to hard slog.’ ‘Well, you start off with all
of these wonderful ideas’, explained Jan, ‘and, then, well, reality sets
in. Each one of the areas we’d defined could have been a whole gallery
really, so in the end we just had to be brutal.’ Their accounts told of
cuts, of loss, of the unexpected intervention of ‘practicalities’, of con-
straints of time and of money. In this chapter, I look at some of that
process of ‘reality setting in’ as the exhibition materialised into exhibits
and gallery space. I do so not simply to tell an allegory of thwarted
dreams but to try to highlight some of the particularly important
players, processes and assumptions which shaped the outcome (some-
times in unexpected ways) of the exhibition.
This chapter continues to work through the authorial puzzle set out
in the previous chapter, and the more general concern with the produc-
tion of culture and science in the making that threads through the
book as a whole. During what often felt like a roller-coaster ride of
exhibition production the daily issues which crowded in were ones of
what to put in and where, how to deal with lack of space or a wrongly
shaped location, where to get hold of the right item to exhibit a
particular idea, how to express a concept simply, how to find enough
money and keep to budget, how to get all of those involved working
to a time-table and simply how to manage the whole enormous
multiplicitous business of creating the exhibition. Although it did not
always feel like it, all of these, one way or another, had implications
for the ways in which visitors were imagined, for the ways in which

131
132 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

science was represented and for the later political legibility of the
exhibition.
While numerous events and decisions throughout the exhibition-
making process shaped the final outcome, there were three moments
which seemed particularly consequential: (1) a relatively early interven-
tion by the scientific advisory panel of the exhibition which was critical
of one of the organising principles of the gallery and led to this being
changed – an intervention that I call ‘the Reorganisation’; (2) a first
major editing phase, referred to as ‘the Retreat’, as the Team’s ideas
were mapped into the physical space of the exhibition and much had
to be jettisoned; and (3) a later, and to the Team unexpected and at
the time frustrating, editing of the exhibition, which they called ‘the
Rethink’, initiated by criticisms from the Museum Director. I deal with
each in turn and try to trace some examples of what came to be
politically consequential inflections, showing how they became pro-
gressively solidified into the exhibition space. In each case I also use
the particular intervention and moment in the exhibition’s develop-
ment as the basis for a discussion of broader issues in relation to: (1)
the role of scientists in the making of science exhibitions; (2) the role
of physical space, objects, media and designers; and (3) the role of some
of the underlying ideas about knowledge, exhibition and ‘the public’.
In each section I am also concerned to highlight presuppositions and
sometimes apparently trivial decisions or events which – like bugs in a
computer programme – only make themselves fully evident as reality
sets in.

Science and ‘the Reorganisation’

In the making of most Science Museum exhibitions there is a good
deal of contact with those working in relevant industries and it is not
unusual to have somebody from a company joining planning meetings
to give what is usually termed ‘technical assistance’. So, for example,
in the making of the Chemical Industry gallery, a [retired] member of
ICI participated in regular meetings;1 the Information Age project also
intended to include somebody from a computer company on their Team
to help to give them detailed technical information. In the case of Food
this was deemed inappropriate: firstly, because the exhibition covered
a wide range of topics and there was not a clear specific industry to go
to, and secondly, because, as Jane explained to me, ‘It was very difficult
to get them to say anything against anything, even if it was not their
company’s product, because they worry about the impact it might have
 Reality Sets In 133

on the food industry as a whole.’ Because the exhibition was to deal

with potentially controversial matters such as food poisoning, additives
and health, this was also problematic. Although Jane had originally
assumed they probably would liaise closely with those whom she
termed ‘commercial scientists’, she chose in the end not to do so.
Sponsoring companies were a particularly difficult category, as the
Team learned early on when a representative of a sponsoring sugar
company seemed very keen that sugar be presented in terms of ‘energy’
– deemed a more positive category than either one of ‘carbohydrates’
or ‘calories’. This was resisted by the Team, who emphasised the
importance of their ‘objectivity’ on the matter and Sue decided to
include a representation of a slave ship in the section on sugar partly
to make the point, to herself as much as anybody else, that the exhibi-
tion was not shaped by its sponsors. This example was taken by the
Team as a warning of the ‘wrangles’ which could have ensued had
sponsor scientists (Sainsbury’s chief scientist, for example) been allowed
much input into the formation of the project. This is not to say that
sponsors were allowed no input at all: Sainsbury’s were given regular
presentations of how the project was going, and all sponsors were sent
the draft text of sections of the exhibition which related to their
products. This, however, was only after these had been discussed with
the main official scientific input to the exhibition, a five-strong advisory
panel consisting of those who held the title of Professor of Nutrition
or Food Science and Technology. This panel met twice to review the
early plans of the exhibition and its members were then available to
discuss particular points and to check over the text produced. In
addition to their explicit function of providing information and
checking ‘the factual accuracy’ (a favourite phrase in this regard) of
the exhibition, the professors also had an informal task (of which they
may not have been aware) of helping to ward off ‘commercial scientist’
input by allowing the Team to say that their advisory panel had
approved of particular things. These university professors were, then,
a means by which the Team harnessed what was, especially in dealings
with sponsors, termed ‘objectivity’.
Although the professors provided the Foodies with a good alibi for
employing terms like ‘factual accuracy’ and ‘objectivity’ in warding
off attempts to change their own ideas and text, in many ways they
highlighted the slipperiness of these terms. The professors also disagreed
among themselves on various matters, such as the nutritional worth
of particular nutrients and foods – a reflection of wider dissent, often
noted in the mass media, within ‘scientific opinion’ where food and
134 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

health were concerned. (For example, one of the professors argued

strongly for a massive decrease in the amount of fat consumed whereas
another attacked this as creating ‘muesli-belt malnutrition’.) This led
Jane to decide to highlight this lack of agreement within the exhibition.
However, in another unexpected twist, when the professors were asked
to come up with quotes illustrating their positions, they all chose rather
uncontroversial ones, perhaps because they were aware that these were
likely to be on public display for ten years or so. Thus Jane’s intention
was frustrated and the exhibition panel entitled ‘Controversy or
Consensus?’; showing the mug shots of the five professors and choice
snippets of their wisdom, illustrates the latter far more than the
intended former.
One aspect on which the advisory panel agreed was that the original
idea of the Team to present ideas about nutrients via particular foods –
bread to illustrate carbohydrates (as we saw in the feasibility document)
for example – was inappropriate and ‘old-fashioned’. They preferred
that people should think of all foods as a combination of nutrients.
This was the early editorial intervention which I call the ‘Reorganisation’
because it led to the Team making what felt at the time as annoying
but relatively innocuous changes to the organisation of the proposed
exhibition. In response to this criticism they decided to separate
‘nutrition’ (later to be renamed ‘Food and the Body’) to an area of its
own (rather than use it as a ‘linking spine’) thus severing its connection
with the food areas which dealt with food production. Nutrition and,
more broadly, the health dimensions of food, thus became physically
separated in the exhibition from the representation of food production.
This separation later revealed itself as problematic in the light of the
major issues of food poisoning and food contamination which began
to hit the headlines with increasing frequency in late 1988 and which
have continued intermittently ever since. In the next chapter we shall
return to consider how the exhibition tried to deal with these within
its fast ‘concretizing’ (as the stage of turning ideas into physical exhibits
was called) framework.
It is clear from the Food experience that the representation of science
to the public is not simply about taking ideas from ‘science’ and repack-
aging them for public consumption. Firstly, ‘science’ itself is far from
homogeneous: there are different kinds of scientists, not only with
different specialisms but also with different agendas, and those involved
in exhibition-making do not simply ‘pick up’ scientific ideas and re-
present them, they also negotiate between different kinds of scientific
input. Secondly, the process is far from being a neat linear one. Interven-
 Reality Sets In 135

tions from the scientists come at various points during exhibition-

making and some are only really evident as they interact with other
decisions and in the finished exhibition itself. Moreover, in making
their interventions the scientists are not doing so simply from the point
of view of ‘science’. They are also concerned with the reception of their
contributions, how these will be understood by visitors within the
context of the Science Museum, and with the possible public conse-
quences of what they say. This is evident in the commercial scientists’
reluctance to be critical of any aspects of food production as well as
the professors’ reluctance to have their more controversial ideas on
public display for the next decade.

The Pleasure before the Pain – Proliferation

The advisory panel’s intervention came relatively early on in the
exhibition’s production, after the Feasibility Study had been produced
and initial ideas set out but before these had begun to be translated
into the physical space of the exhibition. This interim stage was one
in which Team members dived into researching the areas of the
exhibition to which they had been allocated. They began reading
‘basically whatever we could lay our hands on’, beginning with library
searches and recommendations from the advisory panel and others
that they met, including children’s books and newspaper articles as
well as more scholarly books and journal articles. As Heather said, a
little ruefully: ‘What comes out may be like a Ladybird book but you’ve
still got to do all the research to get to that point.’ They also began to
make visits to relevant factories and archives, investigating simultane-
ously the possibility of pictures and objects which might be included,
especially large scale machines which might be able to be demonstrated
in action in the gallery. In addition, they visited other exhibitions on
the subject of food in Ontario, Chicago and Switzerland in order to
refine their own ideas through comparison.2
While these trips helped to show some things that the Team did not
want to do (‘some of the interactives which had sounded a good idea
did not really work that well’) they also provided positive inspiration.
Overall, this was a proliferation stage in which much got added,
especially things that individual Team members liked. These were
sometimes additional themes or ideas (like having something on ‘why
the British don’t like ring-pull cans’ or ‘squirty cream and the ozone
layer’) though more often they were particular objects that Team
members came across in their travels [Figure 5.1]. Heather, for example,
136 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 5.1 Object-feel (and smell): Cathy and Heather examine possible objects
for the gallery.

found a ‘rather gorgeous’ Greek wine jug with a picture of fish on it in

the Museum’s own collections and reckoned that she could ‘squeeze it
in’ to her section on fish. When Sue saw a tiny plastic gherkin in the
Heinz archive, she was desperate to include it (‘Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve
just got to have it!’). Less was abandoned than added, however, in these
heady and expansive months.
At the same time, some of the ‘basic principles’ of the exhibition
came to be reiterated and reshaped, both in the regular Team meetings
and also in the daily interactions in the offices. One dimension of this
was reacting against some of the criticisms of the exhibition that had
been voiced in the Museum, including the Education officer’s memo.
The suggestion that the exhibition might be ‘didactic’ irked the Team
and in response to this they re-emphasised their ‘fun’ approach, that
they did not intend to ‘be preachy’, that the exhibition would not be
‘boring’. One way in which they hoped to avoid ‘the yawn factor’ was
by not using panels of text in the exhibition. Quite what to use instead
had not been resolved, members often referring to panels, as did Jane
on one occasion before correcting herself, ‘or whatever we are going
to have instead of panels, because we’re not going to have panels,
because panels are boring’. (In the end, however, there were 160 panels
 Reality Sets In 137

in the exhibition.) They were also keen to emphasise the experiential

aspects of the exhibition – another key aspect of ‘fun’ – and that it
would cater not just to sight but also to senses of smell (a cabinet of
various spices and a food aroma unit), sound (an exhibit reproducing
different sounds associated with food, such as a popping champagne
cork, sizzling chips or crisps being crunched) and taste (at that point,
there was to be a tasting exhibit as well as an eating area included in
the exhibition). Joky and fun exhibits were to be included; the giant
chocolate mousse pot and some fairground-style mirrors which showed
visitors a little fatter or a little thinner were some of these, and there
were plans to use cartoons. The Foodies were keen to include as many
‘social bits’ as possible, several Team members saying that they person-
ally found these most interesting. This included what they listed as
‘superstitions and fads in each area’. These sections were supposed to
look at matters such as ‘carrots and seeing in the dark, garlic and
Dracula, salt and the Devil, Shrove Tuesday, gingerbread men’, plus
individual snippets of interesting historical and cultural information.3
All in all, at this stage, the proposed content of the exhibition was
undoubtedly ‘busy’, to use an adjective which the Team frequently and
approvingly used to describe it.
Another characteristic of this phase, which we need to understand
to see why later editing felt ‘very, very painful’ to the Foodies, was
reacting against some of the criticisms of the proposed exhibition
circulating in the Museum. The idea that the exhibition would not
contain historic objects (as in the Astronomy versus hamburger joint
comment) particularly rankled. Whereas the criticism of being ‘didactic’
irked by casting the Foodies as chalk-waving schoolmistresses, the
‘object-thin’ criticism seemed to impugn their identity as curators. In
response to the Education officer’s observation that this exhibition
would be unlikely to contain many objects, they angrily listed inven-
toried artefacts that were to be included, such as ‘the oldest can in the
world’, the original Birds-Eye pea-freezer, and a tea-packaging machine.
On several occasions Team members would report on conversations
they had had with other curators in which they had ‘had to point out,
that we do have objects actually’. Heather later described herself as
having been ‘paranoid about not having any objects’ at this stage of
exhibition-making and that this was why she had been ‘desperate to
get some in’. All, especially Jane (who was a member of the Gallery
Planning Group), were aware of the concern among curators that
displaying fewer objects could play into the hands of those arguing
that curators should not be involved in creating exhibitions, and more
138 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

generally for a ‘downsizing’ of curatorial numbers. Jane constantly

argued vehemently against this. For example, she resisted a suggestion
that an outside script-writer should be brought in on Food: ‘as curators
it is our job to interpret objects for visitors’. As curators too, all members
of the Team often exhibited object-love and, despite the fact that this
exhibition was to be ‘message-led rather than object-led’ (as the Director
described it), they often felt themselves compelled (‘gotta have it!’) to
incorporate objects on aesthetic (‘I thought they were so freaky’),
affective (‘I really love it’), historical (‘it’s one of the first produced’) or
other grounds (‘nobody will have seen anything like it’, for example).
This passion for objects, the desire to counter within-museum criticism
and awareness of the political consequences of a dearth of objects
contributed to their proliferation. This was expansive in terms of space
for, while some of the artefacts were relatively small, such as ‘the oldest
can’, others, like the tea-packer and the freezer, were space-greedy.
Other things multiplied too. There had from the beginning been an
intention to use a mixture of media, including working demonstrations,
audio-visuals and computers, with a particular emphasis on interactive
exhibits. While many post-1960 Science Museum exhibitions also
contained a combination of some of these, Food was regarded as
unusual in the high proportion of interactives it intended to have. It
was more a ‘science centre approach with added objects’ rather than
‘object-based with added demos’ to use some of the language in which
these matters were talked about in the museum world. Moreover, as
the Team liked to emphasise, the interactive exhibits were not to be
‘just push-buttons’ but ‘properly interactive’, which was defined to me
as ‘not just push-button, not so passive. . . we want something which
involves the visitor more’. Thus, some of the exhibits were to be not
just ‘hands-on’ but ‘body-in’. Among other things they included at
that time, was a tunnel which the visitor would be able to enter in
order to ‘experience what it is like to be a frozen pea’, a ‘smellerama’
(in which visitors try to identify different food smells), a ‘fun egg and
spoon’ exhibit, large ‘egg-timers’ for trying to shake oil and water
together, a sugar centrifuge, exercise bicycles with panels showing how
much energy was being used, and a supermarket checkout through
which visitors could scan basket loads of fake food. Many of these
exhibits, especially the ‘body-in’, were ones which would occupy a good
deal of space. But the space in the gallery was finite – too finite to
accommodate all these dreams.
 Reality Sets In 139

Design and ‘Retreat’

The first major curbs on the Team’s proliferation phase came in October
1988 when they rented two adjoining cottages in Lancashire and spent
two days with the designers trying to work out how the outline scripts
– the basic ideas and artefacts the Foodies wanted to include – could
be mapped onto the actual gallery space. This was not the first meeting
with the designers; they had had meetings earlier, but the Lancashire
Retreat was regarded by all concerned as a major ‘moment of truth’, of
‘brutal cuts’ and of ‘reality setting in’. Unironically referred to as ‘the
Retreat’ because the meeting was held at such a distance from the
Museum (in order to prevent interruptions and enable a really concen-
trated effort on the task), the meeting could also be seen as a ‘retreat’
both in that it involved a re-treating of ideas, and in the sense that the
Foodies had to step back from some of the many ideas that had already
blossomed.
A general idea of which parts of the proposed exhibition would go
where had been established at the earlier meeting. What the Retreat
was about was a more detailed and specific designation of space –
working out which particular artefacts and exhibits would go where
and just how much space each section of the exhibition would be
accorded. Given that the organisation of each part of the exhibition
had been the task of a different individual, the Retreat also involved
managing relations between different Team members over whether
space should be taken from, say, X to give to Y (‘trading’ as one of the
Johns called it).
The designers had been sent the outline scripts in advance and had
brought their drawings of the possible layout of the exhibition with
them. These were on large tissue sheets which could be laid over the a
base drawing of the gallery and its structures (which showed various
crucial structural matters including at which points it would be possible
to place heavier objects). In some cases they had prepared alternatives
and they had rubbers, pencils and rulers at the ready for redrawing as
plans changed. The days proceeded with each Team member, in the
presence of Jane and usually of Jan, going through the plans for their
particular areas with one or other of the Johns. Far from being a matter
of the designers just ‘packaging’ the Team’s plans, this process was a
much more constructive one in which some of the planned material
was cut, condensed or reconceptualised. The designers also held
opinions on what was likely to be ‘interesting’ or ‘boring’ as well as
what would look good.
140 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

The designers were particularly concerned that the space would be

‘confusing’ and ‘bitty’, with too many small distinct areas, a conse-
quence of the Team’s desire for something ‘busy’ with lots going on
but also of the fact that different individuals had worked on different
sections of the exhibition. To try to reduce this potential ‘bittyness’
the designers suggested trying to group some of the areas together so
that visually and spatially they could be linked. Everybody was rather
pleased when they collectively managed to come up with a classification
of sections of the exhibition into ‘Where?’ (the distribution and
economics of food), ‘Why?’ (covering diet and eating habits), ‘What?’
(‘what do you need from your food?’ – an area which was now defined
to include not only nutrients but also ‘pleasure’ and ‘food safety’), and
‘How?’ (‘how do you prepare it?’ – covering processing, both domestic
and industrial). This, however, was a further step towards solidifying
the incision, initiated by the professors, between food production and
food and health. Moreover, it gave each of them a particular, conse-
quential, inflection. Under the label of ‘How do you prepare it?’, food
production becomes a purely technical matter, illustrating the ways in
which machines and technologies work. The ‘What do you need from
your food?’, by contrast, becomes very individual-focused – an inflec-
tion which is written deeper into the story here by including individual-
ised matters of taste alongside those of nutrition. This helps the
intended presentation of diet as ‘as individual as a person’s clothes –
what suits one person does not necessarily suit another’. The incision
was made deeper too by the designers’ call to make each of these areas
physically or visually distinct. At the Retreat a lot of discussion was
devoted to how to do this effectively, though none of us even consid-
ered the possible implications that this division itself might have. This
was not just a matter of pragmatic and aesthetic interests predominating
– though they often did – but was also a consequence of the modes in
which the exhibition was projected forward and the visitor imagined.
‘Busyness’ and ‘boringness’, ‘the yawn factor’ and considerations of
the visitor’s physicality – whether they would be tired by this point,
‘overloaded’ – were the conceptual frameworks through which the
exhibition, and indirectly the visitor, was planned into being.
One subject of particular attention was what was called ‘visitor
circulation’ and ‘visitor flow’, the ways in which it was envisaged that
visitors would move through the exhibition. In this imagining of an
embodied visitor into the still virtual space of the exhibition there was
a particular fear of what were called ‘bottle-necks’ (areas where too many
 Reality Sets In 141

visitors might congregate and block the way for others), ‘dead-ends’
(where visitors would have to retrace their steps instead of ‘flowing’
into a new area), ‘throw-away space’ (space which had to be left rela-
tively empty merely to help visitor flow) and, perhaps most particularly,
of ‘confusing space’. This was in many respects a consequence of the
‘busy-ness’ that the Team wanted and their own resistance to the
exhibition having any one specified direction. In turn, it was linked to
their desire to create an exhibition which would not be too didactic,
which they associated with unidirectional exhibitions. Important to
them was that the visitor should not be compelled to take a particular
route but that they would have choice in the way they moved through
the exhibition. As we shall see in the following chapters, this idea of
consumer choice was written deeply into many aspects of this exhibi-
tion. In this it was not alone as we have already seen in relation to the
multi-museum idea discussed in chapter three. However, the desire for
choice and variety on the one hand, created problems for visitor
circulation and the creation of a ‘non-confusing space’ on the other.
The resultant mapping created during the Retreat was to some extent
a fragile compromise – an exhibition containing many small diverse
sections and alternative directions which visitors could take, but
nevertheless with routes of flow and certain broader ‘theming’ (which
the designers intended to mark stylistically through what they called
‘visual punctuation’) to ‘tie it together’.
Although there were moments, especially in the kitchen, when some
of the Foodies grumbled that the designers were ‘trying to have too
much curatorial input’, on the whole the ‘brutal cuts’ were managed
in a relatively consensual and good-natured way. This was, perhaps,
partly due to the manner in which the Johns, often supported by Jane,
explained their suggestions (as well as the fact that they were careful
to present them as suggestions even if they were more than that). It
was, perhaps, also due to the informal surroundings (all were in jeans
and we had to take turns making tea and stoking the fire) and most of
all to the fact that it became quite self-evident that there was simply
too much to fit into the available space. Now and then one of the
Johns would whip out a large wooden tape-measure to show just how
big a likely space (comparing it to the size of the room that we occupied)
or exhibit would be. By physically demonstrating the ‘spatial con-
straints’, the necessity for cuts was made incontrovertible.
142 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Making Cuts

The cuts were many and various. They included a large part of the
section on ‘sugar’ (including a proposed computer game about factory
production and a working demonstration of sugar packing) and on
‘snacks’, some of the area devoted to staple foods, and specific exhibits
in many areas (the ‘mediaeval market’ shrunk to ‘a mediaeval hag sitting
with a basket on her knee’). Despite the variety of items cut, certain
legitimations for doing so tended to predominate. One of these was
whether an area was ‘really’ about food or ‘really’ relevant to a particular
part of the exhibition. Thus, for example, Jane said that showing
something on squirty cream and the ozone layer was ‘getting too far
off the topic’. Another justification was whether something would
become ‘dated’ or a ‘dead issue’ by the time the gallery opened and
into its lifetime, as was said of the emerging salmonella in eggs scandal.
Whether an exhibit would have interesting interactives was often
crucial, as was, to a lesser extent, whether there were inventoried objects
or other three dimensional exhibits which would be included. Inter-
actives demanded a particularly large amount of space – five square
metres was reckoned by the designers to be the necessary area for these
– and this sometimes meant that for already commissioned interactives
to be included other things had to be excluded. Thus to include the
interactive sugar centrifuge, other aspects of sugar processing and
history were cut.
Sue’s proposed section on the psychology of shopping, to take one
notable example, fell victim to a combination of these. Sue had wanted
‘to show, basically, how supermarkets try to con us into buying things’
by explaining how, in the usual layout of supermarkets, shoppers are
first confronted by fresh fruit and vegetables which are both colourful
and appealing but also relatively expensive items that we might be
more likely to miss out on when we have spent too much; how staple
items, such as bread and milk, are usually located well into the store,
meaning that one has to pass lots of other goodies before reaching
them; or how more expensive items are often placed at eye-level. Most
of these were ideas that she planned to show through text and pictures,
though she did have some ideas for three-dimensional exhibits, such
as one demonstrating how lighting is used to make meat look more
appetising. This relative lack of interactives or objects, however, was
one of the features of this area leading to the decision to cut it, particu-
larly when Sue was faced with a choice of cutting other parts of her
section on shopping which were to include interactives and original
 Reality Sets In 143

items, the creation and acquisition of which had already begun. In

contrast with these, she herself came to the conclusion that the
psychology of shopping was ‘nebulous and difficult to do in a gallery’.
The material world of the Museum could not afford it space. She was
also persuaded by arguments that this section would rapidly become
out of date as supermarkets would draw on new research and current
wisdoms would become obsolete. She also acknowledged, with some
reluctance, that it would probably prove ‘very contentious, very
awkward’ with the sponsors. Generally the latter would not be some-
thing to deter her, though in combination with the other factors it
could be seen as an element of self-censorship. Thus through these
multiple ‘pragmatic arguments’, as Sue described them, the psychology
of shopping was eliminated. Later, she was to regret this when the
finished exhibition was criticised for being what food companies and
supermarkets would surely have wanted.

One outcome of the Retreat was a realisation that for the exhibition to
be ready on time, the Team would need to finalise ‘scripts’ much sooner
than had been envisaged. That is, they needed to decide in even more
detail just what objects and exhibits would finally be included (many
were still in the stage of negotiation), just how large they would be,
and how much text and graphic material would accompany them. On
their return to the Museum, the Foodies went into overdrive to try to
get all of this ready. However, something else was to shortly disrupt
their timetable. This was a call by the Director for them to thoroughly
‘rethink’ the whole exhibition – only ten months before it was due to
open.

The Rethink: Messages, Messages, Messages

What felt at the time like ‘a major bombshell’ (Jan) began as what was
intended to be a carefully orchestrated presentation to the Director.
The Foodies were concerned that he might ‘try to throw a spanner in
the works’; he was often regarded as wanting to intervene in how things
were being done (though he insisted to me, partly perhaps in awareness
of this reputation, that he was being ‘extremely hands-off with this
exhibition’). They planned to ‘deflect his attention’ by all going in
and talking about their own areas, showing him some detailed layout
plans and attractive objects, and making him wait until the end to ask
questions so that he could not easily ‘get on one of his bloody hobby-
horses about history or whatever’. Sue has also picked up the phrase
144 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

‘visual shorthand’ on one of her industry visits and they planned to

make use of this: ‘It’s not a museum word but the Director will love it.’
Unfortunately for the Foodies, the strategy to ‘deflect his attention’
with lots of detail and historical snippets turned out to be a bad idea.
On the appointed day in November, all dressed rather smartly, we
file into the Director’s spacious office, quarter of an hour before the
meeting is due to begin and arrange some choice objects – mainly food
packaging – on the sideboard and coffee table, and place the plans of
the gallery on the large board table. Dr Cossons enters, ‘his usual boyish,
enthusiastic self’ (Ann), and says how much he is looking forward to
hearing how things are getting on and how, as ‘everybody knows what
the project’s about. . . you don’t need to explain it all’. Jane takes this
up to say that they will just give a quick account without stopping for
questions at this point. She passes around a six-page paper, entitled
‘Outline Story’ which lists some of the main themes of the exhibition
and their content. The document states that the exhibition is ‘about
food and how it has changed’ and sets out the new ‘What?’, ‘How?’,
‘Why?’ and ‘Where?’ classification as well as the previously established
headings (such as ‘Tea and Coffee’ or ‘Shopping’), saying something
about each of its areas.
In her introduction to the meeting, Jane emphasises the fact that
the gallery is to be ‘determinedly populist in approach. It’s not a gallery
for specialists, it’s a gallery for the general public’. She also says that
the Team has identified ‘about five hundred possible objects for the
gallery’ (a consequence of the object love and attempt to counter in-
Museum criticism), though they do not propose to include all of them.
The rest of the presentation proceeds as though walking through the
gallery, though entering from three different directions, with each Team
member giving an account of the areas for which she is responsible.
This all takes much longer than the allocated twenty minutes but Dr
Cossons restrains himself from asking questions, though I notice that
he is becoming increasingly fidgety. Jane winds up by concluding: ‘But
it’s not a normal sort of Science Museum exhibition. . . in any way!’
with which Dr Cossons laughingly agrees and begins, with a charmingly
disarming modesty, what is to feel to the Team like a rather devastating
response:

That’s as good a starting point as any, isn’t it, because it seems to me

that the gallery is not setting out to present a great collection. It starts
off from a series of themes and there are materials in the Museum’s
collections which can underline or illustrate some of those themes and
 Reality Sets In 145

in other areas you haven’t got objects and you’re going out to find them.
In other areas objects aren’t appropriate anyway so you’re using other
types of medium. And my initial reaction was that I’ve lost contact with
your initial aims and objectives in what seems to be a wealth of statements
and themes. And I’m just wondering whether it might be useful to step
right back and say what the gallery is to say. Or what you want to say
through the gallery. And how each of these contributes to the building
up of that statement or series of things. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t,
I’m just a bit lost or confused in my mind. The other one is, I think
you’re saying a fantastic amount in the gallery [Jane: Yes we are] And
I’m just wondering whether the clarity of your central message might be
lost in the wealth of individual elements within the gallery – and this is
only a question at this stage, for debating – any one of which may in its
own right be fascinating. But how does it actually contribute to that
central message? [Jane: We are slightly concerned about the quantity of
information] It looks, and I’m not suggesting that I’ve paced it out on
the ground, chalked the floor and so on, tremendously densely packed
with ideas and messages. And just taking for example the ‘Tea and Coffee’
one. . . what is the essential message of the ‘Tea and Coffee’ section?

Jane says that it is ‘that tea and coffee are your main source of dietary
water’ to which the Director says:

That seems a super, absolutely clear message which I missed in all this
business about teapots and so on. I don’t know what teapots contribute
towards that message. We are familiar with teapots because that’s what
we get tea out of. But is anything to do with the history of tea. . . .
anything to do with the essential means, basic means, of getting that
message across?

The Director continues to press the Team to tell him what different
parts of the exhibition are trying to ‘get across’ and what the ‘central
messages’ are:

So what is at the root of the gallery, then? I’m just trying to get down to
one-liners if you like. Because I think that you will see much more clearly
– I’m deliberately playing Devil’s Advocate you understand – how each
of these messages reinforces that central message. It’s a sort of pyramid
really, isn’t it? There’s a central message, and there might be a series of
sub-messages which guide the geography of the gallery in each of your
areas. And then there might be separate little messages and so on. My
146 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

anxiety is just how much there is in it and how many messages you
might have got and I’m just wondering whether we can trace each of
these little messages right back up a hierarchy to some central one-liner
which says the Food Gallery is to do this.

After some discussion of whether the message is that ‘food has changed’
(Director: ‘Food has changed – yawn, yawn – so what?’) Jane changes
tack and says that it is ‘to help people understand food’. The Director
takes this up as referring to the nutritional content of food and
challenges the relevance of various sections which have been presented
to him. He is also concerned with how the ‘messages’ that the Team
suggest are there are translated to visitors in the exhibition (‘How do
they know ‘Tea and Coffee’ is ‘dietary water’?’) and with whether visitors
are likely to be interested in these messages anyhow. Several hours later,
when many parts of the proposals have been explored and when I have
at last had the pleasure of hearing one of the Director’s infamous ‘when
I was a lad in Nottingham’ anecdotes, the Foodies are sent away to
come up with the ‘pyramid’ of messages – formulated as questions and
answers – for which the Director has been searching. As they leave he
tells them:

The key thing is messages. The gallery will stand or fall by that. It is
important for you to go through the process of wooing the unbeliever.
The ultimate unbeliever is the visitor.

Back in the offices, although feeling rather deflated, the Team concede
that they have ended up with far too much going on in the exhibition
and that the Director’s comments have been useful in helping them
acknowledge this. However, Jane is concerned about the possible
slippage of time that the kind of going back to basics that the Director
has suggested will entail. They had expected that the Director would
have liked the historical emphasis that they gave in the presentation –
‘he’s usually into this’ – and concerned that if they follow his advice
‘it will be all nutrients, all modern’, ‘it will be the historical bits that
will go. . . these are the interesting bits’. Looking back at the transcripts
of the meeting, however, it seems that what was involved was not the
Director contrarily being ‘not as keen on history as usual’ – had there
been some interesting core historical message he might well have been
satisfied – but, because of an implicit tendency to contrast ‘the history’
with ‘the science’, his comments were prone to be read in an ‘if not
one, then the other’ kind of way: today he wanted science not history.
 Reality Sets In 147

More generally, the case was typical of a tendency that I witnessed in

other contexts in the Museum for staff to calculate their actions in
terms of what they perceived that the Director would or would not
like, a consequence of the perception that only he could ‘grant life or
death’. In some contexts this could be a constraint on creativity and
autonomy for, instead of sticking to thinking up their own ideas and
trying to persuade the Director of their worth, staff would, as in this
example, expend energy on trying to orchestrate a favourable outcome
by giving him what they perceived he wanted. Yet this did not always
work, because he was not necessarily looking to have what he had liked
last time played back to him. Another consequence of this was that
the Director was often depicted as contrary by staff, as ‘changing with
the wind’ or ‘going for the flavour of the month’ because he did not
always like what staff had prophesied that he ought to like.
In the following days, the Foodies grapple with what they call ‘the
Rethink’, the two objectives of which, according to Jane, are ‘to clarify
our understanding and to get it past the Director’. It is decided that a
‘rigorous conceptual framework’ is needed and ‘rigorous’ becomes the
word on all our lips (we sometimes even drink ‘rigorous’ coffee). At Mr
Suthers’s insistence, although the Team are initially not very keen
on this, a consultant is employed to help them with their rigorous
task. Over hours and hours of meetings the exhibition proposals are
thoroughly dissected, titles change (‘Tea and coffee’ to ‘Drinks’) and a
pyramid of questions and answers, as the Dr ordered, is produced. Some
of this rethinking means that some of the physical layout of the
exhibition needs to be changed (swapping around ‘Sugar’ and ‘Snacks’,
for example), though this is kept to a minimum in order to make as
little disruption to the ongoing design work as possible. The newly-
defined aim for the gallery is ‘to help people understand the impact of
science and technology on our food’, with an accompanying question:
‘How does science and technology affect what you eat?’ The fore-
grounding of ‘science and technology’ here is a product both of the
contrast with ‘history’ mentioned above and of a turn to what is seen
as fundamental to the Science Museum during this difficult time. In
trying to formulate an aim which will satisfy the two objectives
identified by Jane, and allow as much as possible of what was already
going on to be included (so as not to disrupt the timetable too much),
‘science and technology’ is seen as a good bet because, as is said
(sometimes a little wearily) on more than one occasion ‘we are the
Science Museum after all’. ‘Science and technology’ is also seen as
relatively ‘safe’ and ‘value-free’, an easier route to display and one
148 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

which, in providing for the inclusion of all of the large industrial

machinery and interactive exhibits whose momentum is already
thrusting towards the finished gallery, is fully and easily legitimate.
What we see, then, is a kind of ‘institutional regression’ – a going back
to what is seen as established and uncontroversial about an institution
– at a moment of crisis.
Figure 5.2 shows the first line of the pyramid – the aims and questions
for each of the exhibition’s main areas. The ‘How?’, ‘What?’, ‘Where?’
and ‘Why?’ framework – which has now been deemed too difficult to
‘translate’ to the public – has been forgotten and instead each section
has a title including the word ‘food’ which it is hoped will make sense
to visitors. History has not been eliminated, however, but has become
subsumed to the overall ‘science and technology’ message. In being
pressed to be clear about the content of the exhibition, the Team defines
part of its remit as being about the increase in food choice in Britain
over the past century. Coupled with the ‘impact of science and
technology’ main message, the story becomes one of how science and
technology have brought us greater choice. At the same time, under
the new explicit aim, explaining technical matters becomes central to
the exhibition. This leads Heather, who fights hard to retain what she
calls her ‘more social’ and ‘more interesting bits’, to worry that ‘this
exhibition is becoming a hymn to the food-processing industry’. Her
concern, however, is not explored: the Team already feel themselves
to be under too much pressure and too far behind schedule.

Managing ‘Muscling-in’
The process of making the exhibition is one in which the Foodies must
constantly manage relations with others; it is a process which in many
ways is one of struggling to maintain a semblance of authorship in
the face of other kinds of players ‘muscling-in’. This is a process also
of managing professional identities. The Foodies perceive their profes-
sional identities as entailing an authorial role and frequently talk of
having ‘editorial control’, which they vest with a higher ‘Science
Museum’ authority in referring to it as ‘Science Museum editorial
control’. This leads, them, for example, to insist that the role of the
outside consultant brought in for the rethink is only as ‘a wall to bounce
our ideas off’ and vehemently resist the suggestion that she writes the
exhibition text. As part of their perception of their professional identity,
they accept that they have to address the issues raised by the Museum
Director, their ‘line-manager’, but nevertheless seek to do so in ways
which limit the impact on what they are already doing.
 TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER
TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Reality Sets In
Figure 5.2 Part of the ‘rigorous conceptual framework’ after the Rethink.

149
150 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

In relations with scientists, and especially sponsors, ‘Science Museum

editorial control’ is of particular importance to the Foodies. They
manage relationships between different groups of scientists to keep at
bay what they sometimes depict as the rather predatory ‘commercial
scientists’ (who are perceived as wanting to use the exhibition to make
a case for their own products). Notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘factual
accuracy’ – terms with which, it is assumed, no scientist can possibly
quibble – are considered by the Team as crucial in this protection of
their own professional boundaries. Yet in practice, it is infrequently
on these grounds that disputes emerge and this rhetorical armoury is
only occasionally appropriate and even more rarely successful.
In the days when Nestlé was still being courted as a sponsor, the
company had objected to aspects of the way in which the Foodies
intended to depict the history of the invention of instant coffee; more
generally, Nestlé was said by the Team to want an inordinate amount
of space devoted to this topic (‘they would have us forget about
everything else in the exhibition if they had their way’). In particular
the company was said to want an account which would emphasise
their own place in this history and ignore that of General Foods. While
the Team countered that this would ‘not be entirely factually accurate’,
it did not constitute as strong and incontrovertible an argument as
the ‘factual accuracy’ gambit was always imagined to. Firstly, ‘the facts’
were disputed: both Nestlé and General Foods had produced their
own historical accounts and there was no absolute higher authority.
Secondly, it would be quite possible to tell a ‘factually accurate’ story
of Nestlé’s own invention of instant coffee – ‘factual accuracy’ is not
in itself a protection against bias or artful silence. Thirdly, the rhetoric
of ‘factual accuracy’ was of little use in relation to the question of the
amount of space to be devoted to the topic. Rather than ‘factual
accuracy’, then, most of the difficult cases concern more nebulous and
perceivedly ‘subjective’ matters such as the best or ‘most appropriate’
way to say something to the public.4 Another example of this is when
a Department of Health scientist tells Jane that she has ‘the story a St
John’s ambulance man [a non-professional paramedic] would know’;
her account, in this case of food-poisoning, is ‘useful but not strictly
accurate’. This, however, he judges appropriate for a public exhibition
as the more scientifically correct picture is too uncertain and too
complex to be ‘helpful’ (and less likely to make people alter their habits
to avoid food-poisoning).
In addition to the designers, also crucial for translating the Foodies’
dreams into reality were numerous technicians and other workers,
 Reality Sets In 151

inside and outside the Museum. These included, for example, the
outside companies whose facilities were used to edit film (mainly of
factory production) for the exhibition, those which came to make the
graphic and text panels, and those which supplied the fake food. These
relationships were not always harmonious, especially when it came to
issues of deadlines, and in some cases there were misunderstandings
of the kind of product that was being produced. On the whole, however,
they were relatively straightforward for the Team to manage because
they were sporadic and for specified and clearly limited tasks. More
difficult was the much longer term and absolutely crucial relationship
with the company responsible for the physical construction of the
exhibition and its ‘shop-fitting’. Jan ended up spending almost all of
her time in the last six months or so just making sure that all of this
went to plan, which meant that she spent an increasing amount of
her time in a room set up as the ‘site office’ directly adjacent to the
gallery. She described what went on here as ‘a different culture
altogether’ – one which involved her in a characteristic ‘straight talking’,
different from the way that she dealt with others in the Museum. She
seemed rather good at it; her northern accent would become more
marked and she would adeptly shift from joking to being very firm
and direct. It entailed mastery of a specialist language and knowledge;
‘otherwise they’ll try to fob you off’. There was a set of specific interests
connected with the thickness of battening for the stud-walls (the
partitions which divide sections of the exhibition), of the functioning
and malfunctioning of the ‘cherry-picker’(a kind of small crane) and
dealing with the fire officer’s regulations. This work had its own
particular smells – the smoky office and the warm dusty gallery with
its pungent top-notes of strong glue.
The building work was also conducted in conjunction with the
Museum’s own building department – Construction and Building
Services (CABS) – which was responsible with the Team and the
designers for drawing up the tender for the exhibition and for the
provision of information and overseeing. Also smoke- and straight-
talk-filled, meetings with CABS would often seem to me, I have to
confess, direly boring with what seemed like interminable discussions
of the weight limits of particular bits of floor. CABS had their base
outside the Museum itself in one of the prefabs in the car-park – an
indication, perhaps, of a role which was perceived as somewhat
tangential to the main business of Museum work. Indeed, CABS tended
to be talked about by curatorial staff as something of an irritant, a
group which they depicted as almost out to scupper any creativity by
152 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

its discovery of ‘problems’, slow head-shaking and even slower move-

ment towards solutions. The use of an outside company to carry out
the work on the gallery (‘otherwise there would have been simply no
chance of opening in 1989’) was intended partly to ‘break the hold of
CABS’. Even so, negotiations with them were vital for the construction
of the gallery.
Others groups within the Museum were also involved in the exhibi-
tion’s making. Of these, some of the most important were the Education
section (which created a pack for teachers and schools to accompany
the exhibition), the Interactives unit (‘Launch Pad’) which created the
interactive exhibits, ‘Audio-visuals’ which was responsible for technical
assistance with the videos and handsets, and the workshops (which
created any replicas or sets and which restored items for display). Of
these, the relationships with the first two were considered the most
problematic and the reason was, again, a question of ‘creative involve-
ment’, ‘interference’ and the amount of professional autonomy which
different groups were perceived to seek. In relation to workshops and
Audio-visuals the boundaries of expertise were generally clear, the Team
deferring to the technical competence of these groups which they saw
as not infringing their own domain of ‘content’. This content versus
technique division was not so clear in relation to Education and
Interactives, however. As part of the new Public Services Division
arrangement, the Education section was supposed to have a greater
involvement in exhibition-making and, to some extent, it did. The
Feasibility Study of the exhibition was commented on by the Education
section and later a presentation of the proposed exhibition was made
to teachers in conjunction with a member of the Education staff.
Nevertheless, despite Mr Suthers’s hopes of forging closer collaboration,
this did not really happen, due partly to the fact that the Team perceived
the involvement of the educationalists as a potential threat to their
own authorial autonomy (as ‘muscling-in’) and because they resented
some of the remarks made about the exhibition by the member of the
Education staff who had commented on the Feasibility Study. This,
they suggested, showed that the educationalists did not properly under-
stand what they were trying to do and looked at it too much through
the narrow lens of education. One outcome of this relatively distant
relationship was that the education pack produced for teachers depicted
the exhibition in a way that was rather different from that envisaged
by the Foodies, even giving sections different names and grouping them
in ways not anticipated by the Team. The Foodies were very annoyed
about this and claimed that this was one reason why teachers some-
 Reality Sets In 153

times said that they found the gallery ‘confusing’. The Education staff,
in response, said that they had had to re-label the gallery for teachers
in this way because it had failed to respond adequately to the demands
of the new national curriculum (a common syllabus for schools in
England and Wales which was being introduced at the time) and that
the organisation of the gallery was difficult to grasp.
Similar disputes, which also revolved around professional identity
and autonomy, occurred in relation to the Interactives group which
was referred to by the name of the main Science Museum interactive
area – Launch Pad. Many interactive science centres or exhibitions were
being set up across the country, and as one of the relatively early groups
working on these matters the Science Museum Interactives group were
in some demand to advise others elsewhere and even under commission
to create exhibits for other locations. As an earlier offshoot of the work-
shops, they had moved from their previous location in the basement
of the Museum to acquire their own offices, and became increasingly
unwilling to accept a relationship with curatorial or interpretive staff
on the lines of the workshops-model. One dimension of this was that
they asserted the needs of their creativity: theirs was not a task, they
maintained, in which an exhibit could simply be built to order. Instead,
it involved thinking carefully about the best way to achieve the idea
that was wanted and a degree of experimentation. This made it difficult,
Launch Pad claimed, to ascertain quite how long the making of any
item would necessarily take. To the Team, this was frustrating because
they were working to tight deadlines and needed to know exactly what
would go where. They talked about Launch Pad as having become ‘semi-
detached’ and ‘too big for their boots’; and they interpreted some of
Launch Pad’s demands as more concerned with ‘making their own poli-
tical point’ than with the task itself. Nevertheless, the Interactives team
did also have to deal with some very difficult practical matters in which
they struggled to find ways of overcoming physical dilemmas as they
tried to create interactive exhibits that would realise the hopes invested
by the Team.
More generally, materials – objects and the physical space of the
gallery – also made their demands. They did so on quantitative (how
much space?) and qualitative (what kinds of space and qualities?)
grounds, and also in concert with curators’ own rather particular affect-
ive relationships with them. Not only as the designers struggled to
find spaces on their tissue-paper plans, but also later in the actual
physical encounter with gallery space, objects and exhibits sometimes
refused to go where it had originally been hoped that they might (they
154 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

proved too heavy for the ‘floor loadings’ in certain positions, or they
obscured access to important power points, or they demanded more
space around them than had been envisaged). Sometimes they were
altogether elusive. The body-in pea freezer that Sue had set her heart
on including – the headline exhibit announced at a press launch held
eight months before the opening of the gallery – was never completed,
partly because Launch Pad never succeeded in solving what they
regarded as problems with the design. Heather devoted enormous
amounts of energy to including a sausage-making machine in the
exhibition. When she finally found one that seemed suitable it proved
awkward in terms of its weight and operating demands. Eventually it
had to be surrounded by protective glass (to protect the visitors from
it rather than, as in many cases, the exhibits from the visitors) and
only shown in action at specified times with human assistance [Figure
5.3]. Even so, it insisted on producing repulsively pasty-looking
sausages, causing the Meat and Livestock Commission to complain
about its bad behaviour. (The Commission, of course, chose to blame
the Food team.)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 5.3 The naughty sausage machine performing at last with human
assistance.
 Reality Sets In 155

Money, or ‘the budget’, also made its intervention. Despite what

seemed like a large amount of money to work with, the costs of many
items turned out to be considerably more than had been envisaged.
Jane struggled to ‘keep to budget’ and the search for extra sponsorship
for particular items continued during the making of the exhibition.
Some items which might have been included could not be for reasons
of ‘the budget’. The most notable of these was the accompanying eating
area which right from the earliest days had been seen as an important
accompaniment to the exhibition. The search for sponsorship for this
was not successful – partly because potential sponsors did not want to
be subsumed to ‘the Sainsbury gallery’ – and in the end this was not
constructed as had been hoped.
Time was another crucial factor which often seemed in much too
limited supply. Moreover, as the days ticked by, not only was there less
time remaining before the opening date, but also there was reduced
opportunity to unpick what had already been put into place. This gave
the whole experience of exhibition-making a relentless hurtling forward
character and any calls or suggestions to rethink or rework what had
already been done were experienced as deeply disruptive. One conse-
quence of this was a ‘salvage tendency’: much of what had already
been done had to be kept, otherwise it would be as time lost. This
salvaging was also understandably accompanied by a reluctance to ‘dig
too deep’ or ‘go too far’ in any revisions – these were all perceived as
running counter to what felt like the primary aim, to open on time, or
at least not to ‘slip’ too far beyond the planned date.

What we have seen in this chapter is a journey from ‘very creative to

hard slog’, from proliferation to constraint. It was not, however, a
straightforward linear process: it involved far more than merely
‘packaging’ and ‘transporting’ ideas taken from one world (that of
science) to another (that of the public). Imagined visitors, and some-
times real ones too, constantly intruded (as we shall see in the following
chapter) even in the kinds of science that scientists themselves chose
to present to the curator-interpreters.
My account here has, of course, been of the making of one particular
exhibition in one particular institution. Other places, and other times,
will, to varying extents, do things differently. My aim has been to
highlight some of the assumptions and legitimations – some of which
will have broader currency – that were mobilised during the making
of this exhibition. In particular, by focusing on three ‘key moments’ –
the Reorganisation, the Retreat and the Rethink – in the planning of
156 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Food, I have sought to highlight some decisions – often thought

relatively minor or innocuous at the time – which came to have greater
significance in the finished gallery and visitors’ interpretations of it.
In the next chapter I will look more specifically at the ways in which
visitors were imagined in the construction of the exhibition and at
the related matter of how science, and more specifically the politically-
sensitive subject of food, was represented.

Notes
1. See Bud 1988.
2. This is regarded as a significant aspect of museological training even
though it is often not formalised. The Science Museum did, however, sometimes
arrange group visits for its staff to other significant museums, visits which
some staff referred to as ‘jollies’. Sue, for example, had recently visited the
recently opened science centre in Paris, the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie at
La Villette, on one such trip.
3. I have told the story of the fate of these sections in Macdonald 2001.
4. See Handler and Gable 1997 for a discussion of the way that ‘the rhetoric
of fact at Colonial Williamsburg [makes it] often difficult to raise the question
of what the facts are being made to add up to – of what, that is, particular
histories mean’ (p. 97).
 s i x

V irtual Consumers and

Supermarket Science

D uring the exhibition’s making, it was peopled with a ‘phantom

public’ – spectral or virtual visitors.1 In this chapter I look at the
ways in which visitors were imagined into the Food exhibition and
more generally at the process of ‘configuring the user’ in the museum
context. As Steve Woolgar puts it, configuring ‘includes defining the
identity of future users, and setting constraints upon their likely future
actions’.2 This process is also intimately bound together with the
‘product’ that is more explicitly being ‘configured’ – in this case, the
exhibition and science itself. Just how visitors are perceived, and just
how the practices of exhibition-making implicate virtual – and some-
times actual – visitors, inevitably has consequences for the finished
exhibition and, to varying extents, the ways in which actual visitors
will relate to it. This, however, is not a simple writing-in process in
which the visitor will behave as the exhibition-makers explicitly
envisage: on the contrary, as we will see in chapter eight, visitors refuse
in various ways to conform to the visitor-model that the exhibition-
makers construct. Neither is ‘writing-in’ solely concerned with the
explicit matters of trying to define ‘target-audiences’ and draw up
‘visitor profiles’. Numerous other, sometimes overlooked, matters also
shape the way in which the finished exhibition will invite visitors to
relate to it, and one aim of this chapter is to highlight the most
significant of these matters which, to varying extents and with different
inflections, are likely to be of significance in the making of many
exhibitions.
The Food exhibition, as part of the new emphasis on consumer
sovereignty within public services in the UK in general and of the public
understanding of science approach in the Science Museum in particular,
attempted to prioritise the visitor as never before. For the Food Team,

157
158 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

this new approach was one which they saw primarily as positive and
democratising: as a chance to create an exhibition which would be for
‘ordinary people, for everybody’ rather than one which would ‘go over
all normal people’s heads’. It was an exhibition which they hoped would
appeal to groups which they thought were under-represented by the
Museum’s current exhibitions, in particular, women and ethnic minori-
ties. This vision was not simply a managerially-calculated approach
designed in order to increase ‘visitor numbers’. The Team was undoubt-
edly personally committed and enthused by it (especially at the
beginning of the exhibition-making process before reality began to take
its toll). It was a vision to which, as I noted in chapter four, they articul-
ated their own gender and structural position in the Museum. At the
same time, as we saw in the previous chapter, they also tried hard to
maintain their ‘editorial control’, particularly in relation to ‘commercial
scientists’.
When the exhibition opened, as well as the Team’s disappointment
that it seemed ‘a bit flat’, they were also annoyed at some early criti-
cisms: that ‘it [did] not do much for women’ (a female member of the
Science Museum staff), that it had ‘a supermarket logic’ and was very
much what Sainsbury’s would have wanted’ (Derek Cooper, The Food
Programme Radio 4). How could the exhibition be read in this way given
the intentions of the Foodies? What was going on between ‘encoding’
and ‘decoding’? This chapter takes an ethnographic look further into
these matters of authorship and authority, of the production of culture
and science in the making, by focusing mainly, and first, upon the
configuration of ‘virtual visitors’. Then, later in the chapter, it looks at
some aspects of the finished exhibition with particular reference to
the ways in which science – and more specifically contentious and
politically significant matters to do with food – was represented.

Imagining the Public

Food was one of the first exhibitions in the Science Museum to carry
out what was called ‘formative evaluation’ – trialling some of its ideas
and exhibits on visitors prior to exhibition completion and using new
computer ‘readability’ programs to try to ensure that its text would hit
the right visitor ‘reading level’. All exhibitions inevitably construct a
‘virtual visitor’ not only through explicit statements about ‘target audi-
ences’ and ‘expected audience’ but also, often more tellingly, through
decisions about text (what knowledge and levels of ability should it
presume?), about content (what will already be familiar?), about media
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 159

(will it engage or distract?), and about aesthetics (will they be entranced

or repulsed?). Exhibition-makers try to imagine visitor responses. Will
they understand? Will they become fatigued (or ‘exhibitioned-out’)?
Will they be able to find their way around – and out of – the exhibition?
The questions that they ask, and the relative weight with which these
questions are accorded, are all part of envisioning the exhibition visitor,
and they all play into the shaping of the exhibition. Certain other
questions are not asked, and certain exercises of imagination not made.
These ‘silences’ or ‘non-thinkings’ are also crucial to the legibility of
the ensuing exhibition.
Much of the time, exhibition-makers evoke a standardised visitor.3
This is their ‘ideal visitor’, not in the sense that this is the best possible
visitor that they can hope for but in the sense of an abstract vision of a
fairly coherently behaving visitor. However, this ideal visitor will not
necessarily be imagined free from contradiction. Just as anthropologists
have found in other contexts, such as interpretations of ritual symbols,
different meanings are only rarely brought together and made explicit.4
Contradictions are not, therefore, brought out into the open. In
addition, sub-categories of imagined visitors – or ‘special visitors’ – are
also conjectured in some contexts. Thus, the ‘woolly hats’ or ‘buffs’
mentioned previously are one particular visitor sub-category for which
some curators might try to cater (though the Foodies were adamantly
against doing so). So too are specialists and scientists. Even in the case
of Food, which was explicitly intended to be ‘populist’ rather than
‘specialist’ it was, as we have seen, regarded as essential to strive for
‘factual accuracy’ and to ‘get our facts right’. One reason given for the
importance of doing so (in additional to the reasons discussed in the
previous chapter) was that to have a visitor (a scientist perhaps) point
out an error in the finished exhibition would very embarrassing. Being
‘shown up’ in this way would cause professional ignominy by publicly
revealing that a topic had not been properly researched.
This was a matter of concern even to curator-interpreters in the case
of Food who simultaneously vaunted their lack of specialist expertise.
Imagined critics here were sometimes reviewers in the public media,
who at the same time were being increasingly sought out as another
aspect of the Museum’s ‘cultural revolution’. (The press launch held so
long before the opening date was an example of this new emphasis in
the case of Food.) Most often, however, imagined critics were other
Museum staff, especially other curators. As we have already seen, the
Foodies were often preoccupied with how they imagined other Museum
staff would react, and while they sometimes enjoyed the idea of making
160 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

something which other – especially ‘old guard’ or ‘boring fart’ – curators

would not like, they also sought to counter potential criticisms (by
including objects, for example). In this they were certainly not alone
and indeed it was often said in the Museum that ‘exhibitions are made
by curators mainly for other curators.’ (It was to try to prevent this
that the making of exhibitions had been transferred away from curators
and to a Public Services Division.) Nevertheless, even in an exhibition
organised within this new framework, the way in which an exhibition
would be received by fellow professionals, who would after all visit the
exhibition, remained a significant concern to the exhibition-makers.
In everyday talk in the Museum it was fairly common for visitors to
be referred to as problems, as ‘in the way’, as disruptive and as ‘stupid’.5
As Woolgar observes in his ethnography of computers, one function
of such talk is to reinforce divisions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’,
in our case, museum professionals and visitors. While from the financial
point of view there seemed to be too few paying visitors in the Museum,
for staff who had to walk anywhere near the Museum’s interactive
displays, there were usually too many of them. Visitors were described
as ‘stupid’ or ‘sheep-like’ for clustering in certain galleries rather than
dispersing to emptier parts of the Museum. For many curators that
visitors might not understand certain Museum-imparted information
was evidence of visitor ignorance. Stories would circulate about visitors
who had completely misunderstood exhibits in amusing ways – perhaps
trying to look into the wrong part of an interactive or confusing an
effect with a cause.
Visitors were also sometimes depicted as deviants, especially as
vandals. In the making of Food a lot of energy was put into making
the exhibition ‘vandal-proof’. This was seen as a particular problem
because of the exhibition’s philosophy of trying to remove psycho-
logical and physical barriers between visitors and the Museum, between
the public and science. Avoiding physical boundaries around exhibits,
and allowing visitors as far as possible to get their hands on them, was
seen as the logical materialisation of the aim to present science in as
unintimidating a fashion as possible. Yet this often raised problems
for the conservation and protection of objects and exhibits. In response,
the designers endeavoured to provide barriers which would be as
‘unobtrusive’ as possible, often using clear perspex and a case design
with few visible supports. The exhibition was also built to try to avoid
certain other kinds of ‘deviant’ behaviour. Dark enclosed spaces were
regarded by Museum staff as potential haunts for child molesters (this
was said to be one of the ‘real reasons’ why the Science Museum’s
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 161

mining exhibit had been closed down). Sue, for example, had to be
careful to provide as much lighting as possible in the lorry container
that she was using as part of her section on the transport of foodstuffs.
But it was not just child molesters and intentional vandals who were
perceived as annoyingly deviant in their use of the Museum. One day
when I walked with Mr Suthers on one of his regular ‘site visits’ to see
how the construction of Food was getting on we passed a family
squatting on the edge of an exhibit in the Agriculture gallery eating
sandwiches. ‘That’s our biggest problem’, he said to me as we walked
on, ‘not so much the ones who are out to wreck things as those who
are so busy trying to cut corners and save a bit of money. It’s middle-
class families who are probably our worst hooligans!’.
The ‘hooliganism’ of the middle-classes was in some respects a side-
effect of the Museum’s emphasis on consumer sovereignty, just as Food’s
‘vandalism’ problem was partly a consequence of its pro-visitor philo-
sophy. In contrast, it is impossible to imagine visitors to the British
Museum in the nineteenth century deciding to stop and snack in a
museum gallery. As Kenneth Hudson describes, prospective visitors to
the British Museum had to send in a letter giving their credentials and
assurance that their motives were curiosity and study; if accepted, they
would then be allowed a half-hour accompanied tour, on a specified
date at a precise time, with no information given about the objects
and no opportunity to stop and gaze at any artefacts in detail, never
mind to eat a sandwich.6 In the 1980s, however, the introduction of
more interactive areas, the raised noise levels which these and audio-
visual exhibits produced, and the reduced visibility of the policing of
exhibition space (in the more relaxed style of dress of ‘museum
attendants’ and in the demise of ‘Do not touch’ signs) helped to make
certain modes of visitor conduct less clearly unacceptable than previ-
ously. Curators in the Science Museum often grumbled that the
presence of Launch Pad introduced a type of visitor behaviour which
spread beyond its boundaries.

The trouble with Launch Pad is that they [the visitors] don’t know when
to stop, so they go round wrecking the rest of the Museum. You see
them trying to press and pull and swing on everywhere. But the older
galleries, they’re just not built for it. They weren’t supposed to be. And
we don’t want everything to be turned into Launch Pad anyway!

Including interactive exhibits alongside historical objects in one

gallery, as was intended in Food, was potentially a risky strategy. The
162 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Team were keen to do this, however, because of their exhibition philo-

sophy and the visitor configuration that this entailed, which, to some
extent, sought to elide the ‘insider’-’outsider’ distinction.

‘Pick and Mix’: the Visitor as Active Consumer

The projected visitor of Food was imagined as one who would want to
participate, who would appreciate the opportunity to be ‘active’ and
‘busy’ and relish (if sometimes perhaps too much) a relaxing of
boundaries, who would want a choice of modes of presentation and
content, and who would be in the Museum in search not just of ‘under-
standing’ but also of ‘fun’. As well as being likely to find traditional
Museum presentation (‘rows of glass cases’ or ‘brass and glass’ as well
as panels) boring, visitors were generally considered by the Team as
uninterested in, and relatively uneducated about, technology and
science. A number of strategies was devised to try to cater specifically
for this entertainment-seeking visitor who would choose to come to
this exhibition, or the Museum, only if the kind of ‘product’ they liked
was on offer.
One strategy was the incorporation of ‘fun’. Although the use of
interactive exhibits in science museums and science centres has been
especially justified by arguments about their educative potential, the
fact that they would be regarded as ‘fun’ by visitors was of equal
importance to the Team in their own informal discussions. While some
of the interactive exhibits were designed to illustrate a scientific
principle (such as the role of emulsifiers in mixing oil and water) others,
such as an exhibit in which the visitor would be buffeted by cold air
like a frozen pea, were acknowledged as being much more about enter-
tainment. More generally, as noted already, there was an attempt to go
further with amusing exhibits such as an enormous model of a pot of
chocolate mousse. ‘Fun’ was regarded as important because it made
exhibits accessible: it disrupted what was sometimes characterised by
the Team as a distancing authority in the traditional Museum. As such,
fun and pleasure were equated with democracy in a conflation that
has also been identified in other contemporary cultural technologies.7
Also conflated with democracy was an emphasis on building ‘choice’
into the exhibition. Incorporating a mixture of types of media –
interactives, inventory objects, audio-visuals, replica sets – was one way
in which visitors were seen to be being offered ‘choice’ (see Table 6.1).
Choice would mean that visitors would have to be ‘active’ rather than
‘passive’ (to use a distinction used in the Museum as well as in cultural,
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 163

Table 6.1 Mixed Media: Exhibit Types in Food for Thought

No.
Interactives 48
Working demonstrations 3
Videos and/or handsets 11
Computer information points 6
Inventory objects 87
Replica sets 11

sociological and media studies): rather than just receiving whatever

the Museum presented them with, visitors were conceptualised as
actively making choices between different types of display. These were
visitors as shoppers, busily making their way through aisles of products,
picking things out and handling them, choosing whatever caught their
mood.
Not only would the different types of media present a variety of
modes of imparting information, but they would also encourage
different kinds of visitor activity (‘hands-on’, ‘body-in’, ‘using a hand-
set’) and the use of a full range of the visitor’s senses. The visitor would
be invited not only to use sight, but also touch (as in ‘hands-on’), smell
(as in the ‘smellerama’ exhibit or a spice cabinet), sound (as in the
‘identify foods by their sounds’ exhibit) and, in the original plans but
not in the final realisation (due to health and safety regulations), to
experience taste. The Team’s wish to include a very wide range of differ-
ent topics (which had caused some of the difficulty leading to the
Rethink) was also a consequence of the attempt to provide ‘choice’. In
addition, visitors were to be provided with different ‘levels’ of text –
one relatively short and straightforward and the other more detailed
(see below) – so that they could select how much information they
wished to acquire. This was taken still further with the provision of
computer information points. Even in relation to visitor movement
through the exhibition, the Foodies were keen to provide ‘choice’ or
the opportunity to ‘pick and mix’, and ‘visitor flow’ had to be negotiated
in relation to this. Again, this provision of ‘choice’ was regarded as
democratising in contrast to other, ‘more traditional’, ‘unilinear’
exhibitions. The latter were regarded as ‘didactic’ (one version of
‘authoritative’), as the Museum foisting an already formed story upon
the visitor. An exhibition with multiple possible alternative routes, by
contrast, was seen to offer visitors agency over where to go and what
164 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

to see. So important was this to the Team that they struggled to make
this idea work within a space for which it was in some ways ill-suited:
namely long thin galleries which opened onto the Museum’s central
atrium on one side [Figures 6.1 and 6.2].
The Foodies’ understandings of the roles that the particular technolo-
gies of display and exhibition architecture play have resonance with
analyses in critical museology.8 The presentation of unilinear narratives,
and their mapping onto exhibition space such that the visitor must
follow physically the narrative set out, has been seen as particularly
significant in the representation of ideas of evolution and progress.
This form of spatial configuration, especially characteristic of the
nineteenth-century public museums (though continuing well into the
twentieth century), thus tries to ‘close off’ potentially deviant or ‘wrong’
readings by coercing the visitor to proceed in the ‘right’ direction. To
the Foodies this form of presentation was regarded as disempowering
of the visitor and, therefore, anathema to the democratising politics
which they embraced. However, whether more ‘open’ and ‘multiple’
forms of display can be seen as unequivocally empowering the visitor
is far from clear. Just as we cannot necessarily and unproblematically

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.1 Empty but shaped space: the gallery about six months before
opening.
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 165

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.2 Plan of Food for Thought.

166 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

read an intended politics back from the finished cultural product,

neither can ‘culture makers’ necessarily ‘write in’ their preferred politics
by their choice of media and other display strategies. These are politic-
ally ambiguous. So too was the emphasis upon choice.
Choice was also a theme in the exhibition’s messages. In the post-
Rethink ‘conceptual framework’ the idea of ‘choice’ appears at several
points: the aim of the section on food production is, for example, ‘to
show how the historical development of food preparation and preserva-
tion in industry and in the home have affected the choice of foods
today’; the message of eating habits (now called ‘Food and People’) is
‘to show what influences food choice’; and that of distribution (under
a title of ‘How has Science and Technology affected where you get your
Food from?’) is ‘to show how the development of trade and distribution
systems have affected choice of foods’. Although it is not explicitly
stated, perhaps because it is viewed as self-evident, the assumption is
that in all of these matters there is in Britain today greater choice than
has ever been the case. Choice is, throughout exhibition-making,
considered to be inherently a good thing. More choice is equated with
more agency.

Consumer-friendly Science
Choice features as part of the exhibition’s ‘messages’ in other respects
too. As I have noted in the previous chapter, ‘diet’ was presented as a
matter for one’s individual lifestyle. It was also the intention of the
Foodies that visitors should, as far as possible, be given information to
choose between the views of different scientists (which, as we have
seen, was to some extent sabotaged by the scientists themselves). This
was again part of a conscious attempt to shift the balance of power
between scientists and consumers by telling the latter that the former
were not necessarily right: it was, therefore, up to consumers to ‘make
up their own minds’ (a phrase frequently used by the Team). The
Foodies attempted this in other ways too. One panel states: ‘Not all
scientists agree about a “healthy diet”. Information and ideas about
foods you should eat have changed and are still changing’. The
exhibition also includes height and weight charts not only from the
UK but also from the US, thus relativizing the scientific knowledge on
display.
One of the biggest tasks of the Team, as they saw it, was to make
science and technology ‘accessible’. Presenting it as ‘fun’ was one strand
of this. Interactivity also involved making science physically accessible,
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 167

thus inviting visitors to interact with, rather than be passive observers

of science. The aim was also to present all exhibits in a manner which
would make them as physically and visually accessible as possible. Cases
were thus to be avoided wherever feasible.9 Another strategy was to
present visitors first with familiar everyday experiences so that science
would not seem difficult and esoteric. The exhibition’s foregrounding
of food consumption – shopping and eating – was integral to this
strategy. This was one reason why shopping, in the form of a super-
market check-out with a scanner placed adjacent to a reconstruction
of a 1920s Sainsbury’s, was situated at the entrance to the exhibition
through which most visitors were thought likely to enter. It was also
the justification for organising the exhibition around ‘familiar foods’,
such as baked beans and fishfingers.
Another indication of the importance accorded to making the
exhibition accessible was the immense effort the Foodies put into
making the text of the exhibition as easy to read as possible. After
reviewing a number of recently completed galleries in the Science
Museum, two members of the Food Team wrote a short report and the
Team decided collectively upon the following conventions. Text would
have two ‘levels’: a short ‘story-line’ with a maximum of fifty words in
bold typeface, and a longer account of up to one hundred words. The
Team decided to aim at a ‘reading age’ of twelve years old. At this stage,
this was based not on formal criteria but selected because it was at the
upper end of the classification of ‘child’ (before the teens) and so
allowed for the ambition that the text would be accessible to ‘children’
without being unduly simplified and constraining.
Writing the text for the exhibition began in the February before the
exhibition opened and took months to perfect. It was common in the
offices as the Team wrote their text to ask each other about the clarity
of their writing. For example:

Ann: Does this make sense? Do you really think it’s clear enough?
Heather: Well, I understood it – and if I can understand it anybody
can.

I was also enlisted in this, sometimes on behalf of my children: ‘Sharon,

what do you think would make most sense to your children – bacteria,
bugs or germs?’. In such exchanges, visitors were imagined into the
text of the exhibition as laypeople and as children. Women were consid-
ered to be particularly good at substituting such visitors. This informal
visitor-substitution was also coupled with an extensive more formalised
168 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

editing process. This entailed members of the Team first reading each
other’s text and commenting on it; then Jane and Jan read and
commented on it; then another curator from elsewhere in the Museum
(chosen because she was regarded as having ‘good common sense’, ‘she’s
straightforward and sensible’) did so; then a computer readability
program was employed. After this process the text was submitted to
Mr Suthers and Dr Cossons, to members of the advisory panel and
also to all sponsors. Alongside, individual Team members sometimes
chose to consult specialists over specific issues which they were finding
it difficult to express (as with Jane’s discussions with the Department
of Health scientist over how to talk about food poisoning). Everybody
found the whole writing process extremely exhausting and often
somewhat agonising. As Sue recollected afterwards: ‘The writing was a
bit of a torture, just to get it right. And the cuts at first – well, squeals
of pain. All those precious words! But then when you’d been through
it a few times you didn’t care any more. Yes, fine!’.
Each of the editorial layers, each of which constituted a visitor-
substitution, inevitably made slightly different suggestions and the
Team had to manage these, which they tended to do by according
varying degrees of authenticity or objectivity to their visitor-substitutes.
The curator from Collections Management tended to want more
explanation. This meant that her suggestions were not always accepted
and she was sometimes ‘demoted’ from her role as an ‘ordinary visitor
equivalent.’ (‘I think that’s her wanting more technology but that’s
not necessarily what our visitors will want’.) The computer readability
program’s assumptions were more formally codified, though not into
specific ‘reading ages’ as the Team had expected.10 The Team selected
‘children’s story book’ for the ‘story-line’ and ‘simple newspaper or
magazine article’ for the fuller text. This latter was somewhat over the
‘Ladybird-book’ level that Heather had talked of, but, even so, the Team
often found it difficult to convey what they wanted in terms which
the program would not classify as ‘pompous’ or ‘foggy’. The program
highlighted complex syntax and vocabulary and offered synonyms but
it neither corrected text nor ‘knew’ whether what was fed into it actually
made sense or not. Nevertheless, its interventions and rather rude
classifications were generally accepted without demur by the Team: a
technological unlike a human commentary was perceived as ‘objective’,
not bound up with personal positioning and as relatively discreet in
that it would not gossip about the quality of the text with others in
the Museum. This was the first time that such a program had been
used in the Museum, and was another dimension of the fast expanding
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 169

theory and technology for visitor management characteristic of the

museum world more generally at that time.

Managing ‘Real’ Visitor Input

But what of ‘real’ visitors? Despite the rhetorical emphasis on visitors
from the beginning of the project, research on what Museum visitors
might have to say was done only after the project was well under way
and largely on the prompting of Sue who had been inspired after having
attended an international conference of Museum Evaluation (run by
the World Heritage Association) in September 1988. There were mixed
feelings about carrying out such research: one of the designers argued
strongly that it was a waste of time because visitors wouldn’t really
know what they would want until they saw it (he also claimed that it
was usually just done ‘to be seen to have been done’); other members
of the team thought it a good idea in principle but too late now that
so much had been mapped out and that it would be potentially
disruptive to the tight schedule. Jane told Sue that if this was what she
wanted, she had to do it on top of her ordinary workload. In the end,
Mr Suthers – who was trying to promote visitor research wherever
possible – funded a consultant to carry out the research based on
questions formulated by the Team, especially Sue.
It was not until February and March before the intended opening of
the exhibition in September that the study was undertaken. By this
time much of the three-dimensional design of the exhibition was
complete, interactives had been commissioned, many objects selected,
and the actual text had been begun. For this reason, the questions were
all fairly specific and aimed at information which could, as the report
put it, ‘assess visitors’ understandings and use of language with regard
to certain topics in order that team members could gain insights of
help when writing exhibit texts’. Questions asked were specifically
intended to ‘confirm and re-inforce decisions to include certain topics
in the exhibition’, though also ‘if need be, [the Team would] modify
planned presentations of them in light of visitor responses’. Questions
like ‘What is an organic food? What makes a food organic?’ and ‘How
would you describe what a Calorie is?’ helped to confirm the Foodies’
suspicions that visitors were far from clear about these matters. Visitors
were also asked (mostly in multiple-choice format) about whether and
how often they ate canned and frozen foods as well as other foods
which had been selected as ‘familiar’. There was some difference over
the interpretation of some of these results. The consultant, for example,
170 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

noted that a high proportion of visitors (about a third) did not eat
baked beans. Sue, however, who was responsible for the section of the
exhibition on canning and who had chosen baked beans as an example
of a commonly-eaten food, preferred to interpret this as a majority
which did. Arguably, only a question inserted by Mr Suthers, held the
potential to allow visitors a significant input into the exhibition
content: ‘Is there anything you would be especially interested in seeing
or finding out about in our exhibition about Food and Nutrition?’.
Slightly irritated by his ‘muscling-in’ (‘He always wants to get involved.
But what are we supposed to do with it at this stage?’), the Foodies
breathed a sigh of relief when a third of respondents said ‘no’ or
‘nothing in particular’; others mostly mentioned matters that were
being covered, such as food-poisoning (a topic much in the news at
the time) and nutrition (many comments being about healthy diets,
good and bad foods), or those which could be defined as ‘too specific
to be representative’ (a request to show something which would help
to deal with a particular relative’s illness, for example).
Later, in August, some prototype interactive exhibits and sample
labels were taken into the Museum and to a Science Museum exhibition
in Hyde Park to try them out [Figure 6.3]. This was only a tiny propor-
tion of the overall number of exhibits to be included in the gallery but
nevertheless it led to some minor adjustments. Like the other ‘forma-
tive’ (prior to exhibition completion) visitor evaluation, this was consid-
ered a relatively new attempt to involve visitors, albeit in a somewhat
limited way, in the construction of the exhibition. It was also part of
other forms of evaluation in the Museum, such as workshops being
run for staff to help them ‘assess the communicative effectiveness of
exhibits’ (as the information sheet of an evaluation workshop for
Museum staff that I attended explained). The vision of the relationship
between Museum and visitors implicit in much of this was of the
Museum being in the business of conveying cognitive ‘messages’. For
example, question one of the list of questions at the workshop was ‘Is
the exhibit getting a clear message over to the public?’, and others
continued in similar fashion. Not only did this take as axiomatic that
visitors were in search of such ‘messages’, but it also cast the conveying
of messages as the task of the Museum. At the time, however, being
‘message-based’ and ‘object-based’ were more often seen as two different,
and not easily compatible, enterprises.
The involvement of ‘real’ visitors in the exhibition’s making was in
many respects closely circumscribed. While given some agency to
change the exhibition’s content, this was strictly delimited by the
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 171

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.3 Formative evaluation: trialling food exhibits about two months
before opening.

format in which visitors’ participation was invited (especially the closed

format of the pre-determined questionnaire), its timing (too late to
change much) and the way in which it was interpreted (as far as possible
not to disrupt too much). ‘Real’ visitors’ involvement was circumscribed
by the virtual visitors who were already imagined into the exhibition,
whose desires, boredom thresholds, and ‘reading levels’ had already
been decided upon.

The Nation’s Diet

Another dimension of imagining the public into the exhibition was
in the Team’s invocations of ‘Britishness’. As noted earlier, ‘British’ was
regarded as a ‘natural’ category insofar as it simply continued the logic
of the Museum’s national status (as well as of ‘British year of food and
farming’). Moreover, ‘the British diet’ was often mentioned in the media
at that time, as well as in certain official reports, as a generalised
‘unhealthy’ diet, based on mode- and median-based statistics. In the
references to ‘the British diet’ in their study and general exhibition-
planning, it was to this statistically-homogenised national construction
that the Team oriented themselves, so reproducing and materialising
172 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

this concept into the fabric of the exhibition. The exhibitionary

principle of ‘beginning with the familiar’ and arranging the exhibition
around ‘familiar foods’ was interpreted as referring to foods common
to this ‘British diet’. (‘Natural and synthetic sweeteners have been
chosen. . . as they are a familiar part of the British diet’, to take an
example from the Feasibility Study.) What was reproduced in the
exhibition, then, was a ‘British diet’ – partly modelled on the Foodies’
own (ethnically white) visitor-substitution – centred on the following
foods: bread and potatoes, milk and dairy produce, fruit and fruit juice
(with special focus on jam), margarine, vegetables (with baked beans
and frozen peas as exemplars), tea and coffee, meat and fish (with
sausages and fish-fingers as exemplars). Each of these was to be an
area of the exhibition (an idea, which although it had been questioned,
still largely remained). In this way, a rather stereotyped and homogen-
ised vision of Britishness was deeply inscribed into the content and
organisation of Food. Having a black woman next to a trolley-load of
food for a month of ‘an average British adult’ (backing up against a
white boy) at one of the gallery’s entrances could be argued as incorpor-
ating potential ‘difference’ – of race, gender and age – into this
homogenised national picture [Figures 6.4 and 6.5].

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.4 Representing gender, age and race: entrance feature.

 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 173

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.5 Representing gender, age and race: entrance to the gallery, looking
into Food and the Body.

At the same time, however, there was an awareness of both gender

and age differences as well as what the Education officer had called
‘the ethnic issue’ – Britain as a ‘multi-racial’ society. The latter was
tackled explicitly in the area of the exhibition called ‘Eating Habits’
which was to deal with changes in what was eaten in Britain over the
past century and – for religious, cultural, ethical or medical reasons –
among different groups. Like so many areas of the gallery, Eating Habits
covered a very broad topic and there was an enormous amount of
material which Heather was hoping to include: the development of
eating-out and fast-foods, changing ideas about ideal body shapes,
different people’s diets, information about special medical diets such
as low-salt diets for patients with kidney problems, different ‘religious’
diets, vegetarianism and so on. She brought some very nice ideas to
this. For example, in the section on changing body ideals she included
mirrors to show visitors slightly fatter and slightly thinner reflections
of themselves, and she included silhouettes of some ‘ideal’ figures at
different points in the century (including Twiggy and Daley Thompson
– the choice of a black athlete as ideal showing the attempt to be racially
aware). Moreover, her decision to use representations of particular
individuals helped her to avoid the problem of looking as though she
174 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

was implying that everybody held the same body ideals (the ‘generalisa-
tion problem’ inherent in concepts like ‘the British diet’).
Partly because of the large areas of material that she was trying to
group together, and partly because of the generalised ‘British diet’
against which she was implicitly defining her material, Heather tended
to classify all of the ‘different’ diets together in planning the gallery:
medical (diabetic diets, for example), vegetarian, and ‘religious’. The
last were Buddhist, Jewish, Latter Day Saint and Moslem. As with the
body ideals, Heather also individualised these sections, in this case with
narratives from ‘real people’ who had agreed to contribute information.
This was standardised into a common format: ‘My name is [. . . .]. I am
a [Buddhist, Jew, Latter Day Saint, Moslem, vegetarian]’, followed by
an explanation of what they do and do not eat, and in some cases an
illustration of celebration meal (such as at Ramadan or Passover). A
‘Christian diet’ is not individualised in this way, however, but instead
is associated with ‘Britishness’. Thus a depiction of Christmas dinner
has the caption: ‘Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ. In
Britain we traditionally eat turkey and plum pudding’.
Although in the final exhibition there is some spatial and stylistic
differentiation between the medical and the religious diets, this is fairly
slight and they use the same basic format. This is largely a consequence
of their having been grouped together against the implicit norm: these
were ‘exceptions’, or – in the language that Heather used as she created
this section – ‘restricted diets’. When I first heard Heather using this
term in my early days at the project, I was horrified and dedicated a
page and a half of my note-book to worrying over whether I should
tell her just why I thought that defining all these diets together as
‘restricted’ was deeply questionable. I decided that I simply had to and
the next day I said to her: ‘You’re not going to actually call it “restricted
diets” are you?’. She looked at me as though I was slightly crazy and
said, ‘Of course not!’. It was, she explained, simply her own way of
grouping these matters in order to fit them all in. At the time I felt
relieved and, like Heather, did not really think about how it might
look in the finished exhibition. However, as with other examples,
groupings and terms used for convenience in the early stages of
exhibition-making could leave an initially unnoticed imprint, rather
like stains which seem to have been washed out but which reappear
later.
The other area where ethnic difference was explicitly represented in
Eating Habits was in a row of larders (one of which is a domestic deep-
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 175

freezer). Again, this was a good idea for an eye-catching visual repre-
sentation. (Heather had a special talent for this.) Again, Heather brought
some more individualised life to the display by including taped
commentaries about food by particular people (including Cathy’s dad,
Heather’s gran and one of the manual attendants in the Museum) which
would play as the larders were opened. During the making of the gallery,
Heather found – as did all the Team to varying extents – that she had
less space than she had hoped and she could not have as many larders
as she had wanted. In the face of this, she decided to collapse together
the themes of change over time and contemporary variation: thus the
1950s larder became Jamaican (the 1950s being a time when many
Jamaicans came to Britain). This ‘compression’ was given added impetus
too by the Rethink, during which one aim of the gallery became to
show ‘change in Britain over the last hundred years’. Although this
had in many ways been implicit already, it was an explicit nationalisa-
tion of the main ‘message’ of the exhibition to which all sub-areas
and themes had to be oriented. Variation over space – another main
theme of the Eating Habits area – became subsumed to a narrative of
increasing variation, or choice, over time. The Jamaican larder thus
became part of a story about bringing more choice to Britain. At the
same time, however, because of difficulties in getting many of the
packages and foods to put into the 1950s Jamaican larder, and none at
all in stocking the present-day deep-freezer, the larders could be read
as a kind of evolutionary development, in which the Jamaican is back
in the past, and a generalised fish-finger and frozen-pea-eating Briton
is at the current apex.
In all of these examples, what we see is how the generalising force of
orienting categories such as ‘British’, ‘national’, ‘familiar’ and ‘increased
choice over time’, end up running against the grain of the Team’s more
explicit intention to be ‘politically correct’ (another concept in relatively
new usage in Britain at the time). Just as ethnic difference is often
argued to be marginalised within national constructions, so it is in the
making of this exhibition, despite the best of intentions. The same
problem could be said to be characteristic of the way in which ‘political
correctness’ tends to be thought about, with emphasis on the evident
visual or aural level – using the ‘right’ forms of language or images –
and less attention on the underlying structures. What we also see in
this example is how sometimes unexpected editorial decisions, interven-
tions and events during the making of a gallery can lead to unantic-
ipated connotations in the finished exhibition.
176 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Pasteurised Production

The finished exhibition had other unexpected connotations too,

though, again, ones whose archaeology can be unearthed from the
ethnography of the making of the gallery. One was the way in which
food production was presented in the exhibition. As I have noted, in
the organisation of the exhibition, consumption was to be fore-
grounded and less familiar aspects of food – which included food
processing – were to be introduced by way of consumption (and
particular ‘familiar’ foods). Moreover, the ‘familiarising strategy’ was
two-pronged in relation to factory production by also being conceptu-
ally linked with the preparation of food in the home. The processes
involved in the former were seen as largely like those of the latter –
just bigger and more automated.
At the same time, as we have seen, rather than being closely bound
up with social and cultural information about particular foods, food
production became a distinct area in the exhibition (a consequence of
the various interventions and editing discussed in the previous chapter).
Food in the Factory and Food in the Home were featured with an
overarching aim: ‘To show how historical development of food prepara-
tion and preservation in industry and in the home have affected the
choice of foods today’. Another consequence of the editorial decisions
discussed in the previous chapter was that matters of nutritional content
and other qualities of foods were kept distinct from consideration of
food production. In addition, a decision right at the beginning of the
making of the exhibition had eliminated any attention being given to
primary production – animal rearing and so forth – from the remit
(chapter four above). While all of these individual decisions were based
in sound localised reasons, together they produced a depiction of food
production with a rather specific inflection.
Largely cut off from wider information, factory production is repre-
sented as a pure clean process of harnessing the capacity of ‘science
and technology’ to do better and faster what is done in the home. The
juxtaposition with Food in the Home acts to domesticate factory
production, making it a safe and cosy process. Moreover, as with the
larders, there is an evolutionary narrative here too. In Food in the Home
a set of reconstructed kitchens is presented: 1780, 1900, 1956 and 1989.
The oldest kitchen is relatively grimy, with a stuffed cat, and then each
becomes progressively cleaner and more empty-looking. The newest
kitchen is not behind perspex (one reason why it does not have the
domestic clutter of the older kitchens) and it spills into the Food in
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 177

the Factory section, creating a linkage between the two areas. As with
the larders, this evokes an evolutionary reading, moving progressively
from dirty old domestic practices to clean modern factory ones.
Although, for practical reasons, the 1989 kitchen is next to that of
1780, it is noticeable that visitors often try to put the kitchens into a
time order, looking from the turning information panels about the
kitchens to each in turn, and swinging round to try to get them ‘in
line’. Such reconstructed scenes are, after all, typical of historical
narratives in heritage exhibitions and, as such, the mode of display
invites this kind of reading. At the same time, the large and clean
processing machines themselves – mostly behind clear perspex in order
to protect them from the public and vice versa – appear as traditional
museum objects. They sit, inviting the visitor’s admiring gaze, and tell
little of the (perhaps) difficult lives in which they were entwined.
Neither do they tell of the possible nutritional and health disadvantages
of factory processed foods: nutrition and health are not the concern of
this part of the exhibition. These objects – a milk pasteurisation plant,
a sausage-making machine, a margarine homogenizer – have all this
possible ‘dirt’ removed: they are themselves ‘pasteurised objects’,
‘pasteurised against the threat of indigestibility’11 [Figure 6.6]. So –
partly as a consequence of fears of presenting the public with too heavy
an exhibitionary diet – processing ends up as largely a matter of the
domestic writ large and how to do it faster, on a larger scale, better.

‘You should always wash your hands’: Food Poisoning

Another area of the exhibition in which the consumer focus led to a
representation of food production as relatively ‘innocent’ was that
concerning food poisoning.12 This was also an issue which became
considerably more prominent in the media during the period of the
exhibition’s making. Concerns were raised in particular about salmon-
ella in eggs. A major storm followed an infamous claim in November
1988 by Edwina Currie, a junior minister at the Department of Health,
that most of the egg production in Britain was infected with salmonella.
Mrs Currie’s claim was highly controversial and she was sacked for
making it, only to be vindicated later when, following a number of
deaths from salmonella poisoning, the government had to issue
guidelines warning ‘vulnerable groups’ against consuming eggs. During
the course of 1989, as the Food team struggled to prepare their exhibi-
tion for opening, other ‘food scares’ (as they were often called) also
appeared in the media: listeria, botulism and BSE (or ‘mad cow disease’).
178 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.6 Pasteurised production: clean machines on display.

Indeed, scarcely a day went by without there being some reporting of

food concerns in the newspapers. As Jane remarked in a mixture of
exasperation and pride: ‘This subject is so bloody topical it’s just not
true!’.
Its topicality, and the uncertainty about ‘just what are the facts?’
(Jane), created problems over how to deal with it in the exhibition.
One of the questions raised by some, especially in the farming lobby,
was whether there was really an increase in the incidence of food
poisoning or whether there was just more reporting and more ‘scare
mongering’. Were the cases of ‘listeria’ poisoning, for example, a
reflection of a genuine increase in this type of infection or was it ‘listeria
hysteria’ (a term used in many newspapers), a moral panic fanned by
the media itself? If there was an increase in food poisoning, what was
its cause? Were more intensive farming methods and contaminated
animal feeds to blame? Or new types of food processing (perhaps using
parts of animals not previously used)? Was storage during transport
and in the shops a problem? Or were consumers at fault because they
failed to follow sensible and sound food hygiene practices? Getting at
‘the facts’ was, as Jane observed, ‘almost impossible!’.
So how to deal with these controversial matters of food safety in the
exhibition was extremely difficult. Not only were ‘the facts’ elusive,
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 179

but also there was a sense that information was changing rapidly and
‘the facts’ today might be proved wrong tomorrow. Jane was also con-
cerned that the subject was surrounded by ‘a lot of media hype’ and
might in retrospect look ‘like a bit of a storm in a tea-cup’. Salmonella
in eggs, in particular, would, Jane judged, ‘be a dead issue by the time
the gallery is open – all the infected flocks will have been disposed of
or something.’ Moreover, food poisoning became ‘a major issue’ in
the press after the Food exhibition had not only been mapped out but
had also gone through some difficult layers of editing. Although there
had already been an intention to devote a small part of the section on
Food and the Body to food safety, the question was whether this could
be expanded when so much else was being cut. And how could this
subject, which did not look very promising in terms of including either
objects or interactives, be represented? In the end, an area of Food and
the Body bordering onto that of Food Production was devoted to the
topic (promisingly opening up the possibility that links might be drawn
between the two). The name was changed from Food Safety to Food
Poisoning (Jane – ‘Quite frankly there doesn’t seem to be any point in
calling it anything else now’), and the ‘message’ from ‘Most food we
buy is safe. The way that we treat food at home can make it unsafe’ to
‘Our bodies need safe food. What is food poisoning?’.
Nevertheless, the fingerprints of the earlier idea that ‘we’ make food
unsafe at home remain clearly visible. The food poisoning section
contains five panels – all topped with a dramatic yellow warning sign
showing a skull and crossbones – and an exhibit set into one wall which
shows apparently clean cooking implements which glow purple when
a button is pressed. This exposes, as the surrounding text puts it, the
‘Hidden Menace’, warning the viewer that ‘even though your dishes
or hands may look clean they still carry hundreds of germs’. A panel
next to this, entitled ‘How do Germs get onto Food’ [sic], shows pictures
of domestic kitchens and continues the message: ‘Hands that look clean
can often carry germs. They need to be washed frequently, especially
before handling food and after going to the lavatory’. This panel also
lists some of the foods that are most likely to cause food poisoning,
and it explains that: ‘The common food poisoning germs are often
found in the gut and dung of animals we eat for food. When animals
are killed such germs can be left on the carcass. . . If we prepare food
carelessly at home or in a factory we spread germs from these sources
onto cooked or clean food’. Although there is a brief mention (in small
print) of the possibility that contamination may occur in a factory,
the emphasis is on ‘us’, the consumers. We need to wash our hands
180 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

and take care to follow proper hygiene rules. This is further emphasised
in a panel entitled ‘Golden Rules for Avoiding Food Poisoning’. All of
these are what ‘you’, the consumer, or ‘we’ the consumers (the elision
of viewers and the makers of the exhibition runs throughout) can do,
such as ‘Cook prepared food exactly as the packet says’. While this is,
of course, potentially useful for consumers, it does not address the fact
that one could follow all of these rules and still end up getting food
poisoning because contamination can occur long before the food gets
to ‘you’ or to ‘us’.
A neighbouring panel, headed ‘Why is Food Poisoning Increasing’
(the graphic designer has an aversion to question marks), notes the
increase in reported cases (‘22,000 reported in 1987, over 44,000 in
1988’) and states that: ‘Scientists are convinced the increase is real but
argue about the reason. Some say that new ways of raising animals,
preparing or cooking food produce infected food. Others say that we
ignore basic hygiene at home and do not treat our food properly’. (Jane
had decided, somewhat reluctantly, that those arguing that the increase
was just a matter of more reporting were too much of a minority ‘to
count’.) Given the fifteen consumer-directed ‘golden rules’ on the
following panel, the viewer could easily conclude that the exhibition
was saying that the ‘others’ were right.
Despite the fact that the Food exhibition, in some ways unusually
for a Science Museum exhibition, covers a controversial topic and one
which could potentially lead to major criticisms of the way that food
is produced (and has certainly led to major public concern), it scarcely
even touches upon the areas of how food can become dangerous before
it reaches us. The reasons for the lack of attention to this were partly
the earlier assumption that ‘most food is safe’ but also that primary
production would not be covered at all in the exhibition, that the food
processing sections of the exhibition should have a ‘how it is done’
message and that the exhibition would, overall, foreground consump-
tion. The last of these was interpreted as the things that visitors could
do at home to help to protect themselves.

Visitors, Politics and Supermarket Science

Earlier decisions – often conceived as purely organisational or pragmatic
– joined with the vision of visitors to produce an exhibition which
could in some respects be seen as having the ‘supermarket logic’ that
the critic identified. Foregrounding consumption, presenting produc-
tion as pure technology unimplicated in environmental or health risks,
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 181

assuming a wholehearted narrative of progress, and celebrating choice

all contributed towards a representation which could be read as ‘very
much what Mr Sainsbury would want’ (as the critic put it) or ‘a hymn
to the food processing industry’ as Heather had feared. David Harvey’s
comments on commodity fetishism, and the way in which looking
beyond immediate appearances is closed off, are ones which can be
readily applied to the Food exhibition:

The conditions of labour and life, the sense of joy, anger, or frustration
that lie behind the production of commodities, the states of mind of the
producers, are all hidden to us as we exchange one object (money) for
another (the commodity). We can take our daily breakfast without a
thought for the myriad people who are engaged in its production. All
traces of exploitation are obliterated in the object (there are no finger
prints of exploitation in the daily bread). We cannot tell from the
contemplation of any object in the supermarket what conditions of labour
lay behind its production.13

Similarly, contemplation of any object in the Food exhibition does not

lead to a revelation of the conditions of labour lying behind it. This
was not, however, due to a calculated strategy to present the food
industry in this way. On the contrary, the Team attempted to distance
themselves from the food industry (as in their avoidance of ‘commercial
scientists’), and saw themselves as ‘rather radical even’ (Sue) in their
championing of visitors and of a consumer-choice perspective, as well
as in the making of references to women and ethnic minorities. So
how did the exhibition come to be legible in this way?
In this chapter and the previous one I have shown how earlier
decisions acquired unanticipated inflections. As in the ‘Hidden Menace’
exhibit, invisible ‘germs’ which had made their way in earlier could
show up when put under the spotlight later. The conclusion that I
wish to draw from this is not that exhibition-makers can never really
know just how an exhibition will turn out (which may well be true at
a banal level) but that we need to understand what kinds of practices
and ways of thinking lead to particular results. We need to understand
how inflections slip in; the consequentially implicit needs to be made
explicit.
The virtual visitor of the Food exhibition was in many respects
conceptualised as a child. In casual discussion as the exhibition was
made, Team members often thought about whether children would
understand something or not: they aimed for a text of Ladybird or
182 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

children’s book level, they enlisted me as a vicarious child-visitor substi-

tute, and when they formatively tested their exhibits in the Museum
they made sure that they paid attention to children’s responses. This
was not the studious adult imagined into so many exhibitions: the
visitor to Food was anticipated as easily bored, possessing only a short
attention span, lacking in knowledge and advanced cognitive skills,
seeking fun and choice, and relatively uninterested in science. All of
this was done to avoid creating an exhibition which would ‘go over
the heads of ordinary people’, which would be inaccessible to those
without the prior knowledge, skills or patience that so many other
exhibitions demand. Imagining visitors in this way, however, also
meant that certain other exhibitionary features were not given such
emphasis. In particular, visitors were not conceptualised as likely to
make a rigorous political critique of the exhibition. While the Team
was well aware that some visitors (some curators and some pressure
groups for example) might, they did not build a consistent interrogation
of political inflections of the exhibition into its making. Instead, the
overwhelming critique to which the exhibition was subjected during
its making was to questions of its internal coherence and the clarity of
its messages. These received considerable time and effort but there was
no process in place to assess the potential side-effects.
This is not to say that the Team members never thought about the
political legibility of the exhibition. On the contrary, they did, both in
terms of what they sometimes referred to as their ‘exhibition philo-
sophy’ and in relation to specific topics and perspectives (such as gender
and ethnic minorities). Yet as I have shown in the examples above, in
both cases these could become readable in ways not entirely anticipated
by the Team. In order to identify more fully what was involved here
and in more generalizable dilemmas, it is worth looking at them and
at some further examples more closely. I begin with some of the specific
politicised topics and in the following section consider further the
Team’s exhibition philosophy and the conception of the visitor and
Museum role that this entailed.
Incorporating reference to different ethnic groups and to women
was perceived as important by the Team in ‘getting away from a Great
White Male perspective’ (Sue). As Sue explained to me, just including
any reference to different ethnic groups or to women was ‘pretty
revolutionary in this place’. She was not alone in this perception, and
indeed after the exhibition opened one female member of the Museum
staff came up to her to say that she had found it ‘so refreshing’ that
here was an exhibition that ‘actually includes some images of women’.
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 183

Simply to include images of, and text mentioning, women or ethnic

groups was a creditable achievement. At the same time, the very fact
that it was seen as such was part of the problem: mere inclusion seemed
to be enough. The language of some of the planning documents, which
noted how certain topics would help to ‘deal with’ or ‘tackle’ ‘the ethnic
issue’, and comments during the making of the exhibition about
‘getting in’ an image of, say, a women or black person, are illustrative
of this way of thinking. There are two related dangers with this. The
first of them is that of ‘tokenism’ (with which the Food exhibition was
charged by a feminist curator from another museum), topics or perspect-
ives being included without any significant challenge to the status quo
(the feminist curator claimed that the exhibition did not ‘do much for
the representation of women’). That we might see an image of, say, a
female cashier, would not be likely to change ideas about women and
science. The other danger, highlighted by the example of ‘ethnic’ diets,
is that in the effort to ‘get something in’, the alternative narratives
through which it might be read (such as an evolutionary narrative) are
not investigated.
Museum staff may undoubtedly find themselves in a difficult position
here for they are often rather ambivalent about their role in relation
to the status quo. Is their task to try to change things or to ‘represent
reality’? Including images of women and ethnic minorities was talked
about by the Team as ‘redressing the imbalance’ of other exhibitions:
theirs was an exercise in the ‘remembrance’ of the existence of these
groups which other exhibitions tended to ‘forget’. This, they saw as a
legitimate and even necessary task. But whether they should go further
and try to ‘do something’ about the way in which women or ethnic
minorities were perceived more generally was reasonably seen as
beyond their remit: they could seek only to ‘represent reality’ not to
change it. In another exhibition whose planning meetings I attended
– the Information Age project – this matter was rather more hotly
debated. This group had been told by the Museum’s management that
the gallery might make an important contribution to government and
industry initiatives to get women and girls more involved in computing.
The planning team was therefore asked to see what they could do to
show more women and girls involved and to encourage them to regard
computers in a more positive light. Some on this team, however, saw
this as contrary to the Science Museum’s representational role: ‘It’s
asking us to do social engineering and that’s not what we should be in
the business of doing. That might be the government’s job but it’s not
the Science Museum’s.’ This response was part of a more widespread
184 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

insistence that the Museum must stick to ‘the facts’ and ‘factual
accuracy’ (an insistence which was also a means for exhibition teams
to reject suggestions from others).

Facts and Social Responsibility

‘The facts’ and ‘factual accuracy’, while generally regarded as safe and
unproblematic (provided you could ‘get hold of them’), could them-
selves generate dilemmas. As discussed in the previous chapter, many
areas of dispute could not be resolved by recourse to ‘the facts’, being
more about matters of slant, exclusion or presentation. To give another
example: at one point in the making of the gallery, Sainsbury’s suggested
that there ought to be the inclusion of a reference to alcohol somewhere
in the exhibition as this was becoming a more common element in
British people’s diet. At one of their planning meetings the Team
discussed whether or not it should be included. Jane agreed that it was
‘a fact’ that more alcohol was being consumed today but then, in a
familiar move, argued that it was now too late in the exhibition’s
making ‘to do anything major about it’. Nevertheless, the ‘obvious
place’ to include ‘something’ on the subject, she thought, was in Food
and the Body, an area predominantly about nutrition. But what ‘facts’
about alcohol would be included? The Team discussion went like this:

Sue: So, are you going to say that alcohol rots your liver?
Jane: No. And we don’t in Sugar [one of Sue’s areas] – don’t say that
sugar rots your teeth.
Sue: But that’s because Sugar is about processing.
Jane: Hmm. . . We could say how many calories there are in alcohol?
Sue: But we shouldn’t be encouraging drinking. We should say about
the health risks
Jane: We are not talking about health risks anywhere in the whole
gallery – not even in Fats.
Sue: But we shouldn’t be encouraging drinking – especially in the
present climate. Edwina Currie was on the front page of the
Guardian today about drinking, you know, the Christmas
campaign.

What we see in this exchange are many of the factors that come into
play in negotiating the presence or absence of particular topics or angles
on them: (1) ‘the facts’ (what can be said ‘factually’, such as the
‘number’ of calories); (2) the framework already mapped out (what
different areas of the gallery are ‘about’ and what the gallery is and is
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 185

not doing overall); (3) social responsibility (health consequences); (4)

topicality (whether or not a topic or angle can be ignored given its
external significance). This fourth factor also shows awareness of the
political legibility of the exhibition – without warnings about alcohol
the gallery would be likely, ‘especially in the present climate’, to be
seen as socially irresponsible. The negotiation of all of the different
elements eventually led to the inclusion of beer as one example in one
of the interactive games in Food in the Body but with a note added
about government recommended levels of alcohol consumption (a note
which forgot the usual casting of the visitor as a child).
What we also see in this example, as in Nestlé’s arguments about their
role in the history of the invention of instant coffee (chapter four), is
that sponsors were also capable of mobilising a rhetoric of ‘the facts’
in order to try to persuade the Team to accept a particular topic or angle.
Another instance of this which caused considerably more difficulty
than Jane’s limited acceptance of the inclusion of alcohol in the
exhibition concerned the reproduction 1920s grocery shop. This was
in the Shopping section of the exhibition organised by Sue, one of the
Team members who was most likely to voice concerns over the politics
of subject-matter. In researching this section (and some others) of the
exhibition, Sue had used the Sainsbury’s archive amongst other sources,
and the archivist had become quite interested and involved in the
exhibition. She helped Sue to find good source material for the shop
reproduction. Sue’s idea had been to have a generalised reproduction
rather than a specific shop but the archivist challenged this, arguing
that it would be ‘more accurate’ to include a specific shop, and provided
information for reproducing a 1920s Sainsbury’s. Sue was reluctant to
accept having a Sainsbury’s grocery store in the exhibition, fearing that
it would ‘look too much like sponsor bias’, and she tried to accept the
basic model but without the actual shop name on the reproduction.
This led to some heated exchanges in which the archivist argued that
the reproduction would be ‘inaccurate’ if it did not include the name
because this was part of the ‘authentic original’. By mobilising the usual
arguments used by Museum staff – arguments about accuracy, the facts
and authenticity – the archivist won the case. Sue’s concerns about
political legibility, which were not so fully a part of institutionalised
priorities, had to be put to one side (to her considerable annoyance).
As we see later, this very visible presence of Sainsbury’s at the exhibition
entrance (where Shopping had already been placed because of the
consumption-focus) was to have marked consequences for the visitors’
reading of the exhibition.
186 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

In these examples, what we see, then, are specific decisions being

taken – often legitimated by a rhetoric of ‘factual accuracy’ – without
their possible consequences for the political legibility of the finished
exhibition being fully extrapolated. What often matters is the specific
physical arrangement of exhibits – where they are laid out relative to
others, their positioning at certain ‘key points’ and so forth. Yet, these
are often matters to which little attention is paid. ‘Messages’ are thought
of as essentially explicit and verbal, and more subtle three-dimensional
matters are given much less shrift in the exhibition-making process.

Democracy, Citizenship, Choice and Enterprise

The exhibition did, however, have a philosophy shaped by a politicised
vision of the role of the Museum and the nature of the visitor. This
was followed through into ideas about the mix of types of exhibits,
the gallery layout and the mode of presentation. Key aspects of being
‘democratising’ in the exhibition were the emphases on choice,
consumption and fun. All of these were implicitly associated with
agency. Providing more choice, consumption and fun was providing
more agency and, therefore, was more empowering of visitors. This
was a concept of the visitor as an ‘active citizen’, which contrasted to
the more passive visions of them elsewhere.
It was part of a broader shift in understandings of citizenship which
has been identified as under way at the time. Nikolas Rose, contrasting
this ‘new’ vision with an earlier one, explains: ‘Citizenship is to be
active and individualistic rather than passive and dependent. The
political subject is henceforth to be an individual whose citizenship is
manifested through the free exercise of personal choice among a variety
of options’, and he notes that the then Home Secretary argues that
‘“The idea of active citizenship is a necessary complement to that of
enterprise culture”’.14 As Rose argues further, this reconceptualisation
of citizenship is not confined to the political Right of which the Home
Secretary was part and it is not simply articulated through ‘technologies’
directed by ‘the State’.
While there may be broad agreement that citizens should be encou-
raged to be active rather than passive, there have also been criticisms
of the ways in which this is conceptualised within an enterprise culture
perspective. In the casting of citizens, and, more fundamentally,
‘properly constituted persons’, as choice-makers, consumption comes
to have iconic status as the realm par excellence in which citizenship
and personhood are performed. The metaphor of the shopper becomes,
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 187

perhaps, especially apt not only to characterise museum visitors but

this new kind of citizen. But what kind of shopper? Not the careful
constrained shopper desperately trying to make ends meet on a limited
budget who might well find shopping a depressing chore, but like the
imagined shopper of the Food exhibition, a shopper actively seeking
pleasure and fun from their experience, relishing making choices, not
particularly wishing for in-depth information but being happy to be
‘busy’, to act on impulse and desire. This casting of choice-making as
central to citizenship is part of what Marilyn Strathern terms ‘prescript-
ive consumerism’: personhood becomes a matter of making choices,
and individuality comes to be seen as a cumulation of the choices that
we have made. Choice becomes ‘the only source of difference’.15
Moreover, ‘prescriptive consumerism dictates that there is no choice
but always to exercise choice’.16 You cannot choose not to be an active,
enterprising choice-maker. However, while the enterprise perspective
celebrates difference in some respects, it simultaneously fails to recog-
nise it in others. Not only is the option to be not entrepreneurial not
countenanced, understanding consumers as ‘sovereign’ also fails to
recognise differences which affect the choices open to them, for
example, those of income, education, and upbringing. In the enterprise
perspective, differences of life-outcomes all become a result of different
lifestyle choices (just as diet becomes a matter of individual taste)
uninfluenced by social, political and economic structural factors.
The celebration of choice per se also ignores the fact that choices
must be made from the range of whatever is on offer. As Strathern,
among others, observes, not only are the choices on offer ultimately
determined by producers, they are often tightly bound up with percep-
tions of what ‘customers want’ in a self-perpetuating feedback loop.17
Thus, not only are consumers cast as responsible for the choices that
they make, they are also cast as responsible for the choices on offer.
We are being given, we are told, what we want. If visitors seem to want
something in a finished exhibition that is not there, then at least part
of the blame lies with those visitors consulted during formative
evaluation, matters of responsibility being shifted from producers to
consumers. However, as in the Food exhibition, where the idea that
visitors should ‘make up their own minds’ threaded throughout the
making and much of the finished exhibition, this begs the question of
what information we are given to make our choices.
One implication for knowledge provision of this emphasis on what
consumers want, argue Heelas and Morris, is a ‘lowest common
denominator effect’.18 Because not all possible consumer desires can
188 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

be met in practice, there will be a tendency to go for majority wishes –

which may be relatively uninformed – and those that can be relatively
easily met. This easily panders, they suggest, to philistinism and perhaps
rather superficial cultural products. Moreover, while requests for ‘know-
ledge’ tend to lead to ‘what knowledge exactly?’, those for pleasure,
fun or entertainment are more likely to be perceived as ‘in themselves’,
requiring no further elucidation. This also makes them the most likely
candidates of ‘what people want’. And if fun is ‘what people want’,
fun, and the popular more generally, come to be seen as innocent of
any socio-political influences (‘fun is fun, and has nothing to do with
power’).19 This positions fun and the popular beyond critique: they
are seen straightforwardly as democratic expressions.
More generally, knowledge comes to be regarded not so much as a
body of accumulated truths but as a matter of information from which
consumers choose that which they want or need: it is turned into a
matter of ‘pick and mix’. This kind of ‘knowledge’, while undoubtedly
worthwhile in many respects, is also limited by the fact that it is
localised to matters of individual choice; as such, it is not capable of
‘travelling’, of being transferable to other persons and fields. For
example, in Food for Thought there are many exhibits, such as the
distorting mirrors and the exercise bikes, whose aim is not to provide
a kind of generalisable knowledge that can be taken away and applied
elsewhere, but which relates to individual experience and subjectivity.
As has been argued for other aspects of consumer and enterprise culture,
this privileging of the individual and experiential can also be a diversion
from asking questions about politics and production. It could also, in
other words, contribute to a ‘supermarket logic’.

In highlighting these alternative possible ways in which the Food

exhibition was legible, my intention is not to say that it ‘really’ meant
one thing or the other. It was legible both ways (and more). One of
the reasons for this, as Rose points out, is that the conception of citizens
as active is much broader than the enterprise perspective alone, and
many of the basic ideas involved are shared across the political
spectrum.20 David Marquand points out the overlap between the
enterprise culture perspective and what he calls, after Samuel Beer
(1982), ‘romantic revolt’: ‘a new assertion of the “romantic” values of
authenticity, spontaneity and individuality and a corresponding
rejection of hierarchy, bureaucracy and externally imposed classifica-
tions and identities’.21 For members of the Food team, as for many
other museum staff at the Science Museum and elsewhere, this period
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 189

felt like one in which ‘romantic revolt’ might just be possible and they
liked to articulate what they were doing – to a degree – in such terms.
They were against traditionalist, patronising, masculinist ways of doing
things; they were for the public, the popular, ordinary people.
At the same time, however, much of the rhetoric was also shared
with the New Right, many of whose views were not shared by the
‘romantics’. Talking about ‘active visitors’, ‘participation’, ‘access’,
‘accountability’, ‘choice’, ‘consumers’, ‘public understanding of science’
– and seeking to champion visitors – was part of the same language
but with rather different political inflections. As we have noted in other
contexts, different inflections do not easily come to light precisely
because of the fact that they share a common form.22 Moreover, in
the practice of exhibition-making they are often embedded non-verbally
in three-dimensional exhibits and this also easily contributes to
obscuring their different possible legibilities. Coupled with the lack of
institutionalised means for exploring the potential readings of an
exhibition, this leads to it being open to interpretations which might
even be distasteful to its makers.
In the next chapter we see something of this as we follow the gallery
through to its opening and reception by the media, other Museum
staff and by those who have made it. Let us turn to the frenzied
preparations for the big day – and beyond.

Notes
1. The term ‘phantom public’ I take from Bruce Robbins 1993 (who in turn
borrows it from Walter Lippmann 1925) who uses it in a discussion of the
difficulty, or even impossibility, of creating genuinely participatory forms of
citizenship as well as to highlight the rhetorical or political place of ‘the public’
in debates about society and citizenship.
2. Woolgar 1991: 59. The notion of the ‘implied reader’ in literary studies is
similar to, though not perhaps as extensive as, that of configuring the user. So
too is the notion of ‘preferred reading’ used in Hall’s encoding/decoding model
(1980). The metaphor of a text, used also to some extent by Woolgar in his
study of computers, is useful but fails to get at some of the interesting questions
about materiality and objectness which are so relevant in the case of the
museum. A similar point is made by Silverstone in his emphasis on television
as technology (1994, 1999).
190 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

3. Or ‘generalised user’ as Woolgar 1991 terms it.

4. The classic example of this is Victor Turner’s study of the Ndembu ‘milk
tree’: Turner 1967. See also Cohen 1985. Ardener’s concept of ‘hollow categories’
(1989) also captures the way in which different meanings can come to occupy
a shared form. A similar phenomenon, in relation to a natural history museum,
is discussed by Star and Griesemer 1989 in terms of the formation of ‘boundary
objects’.
5. Cf. Woolgar 1991 on ‘atrocity stories’ about computer users, and Forsythe
1992 on ‘blaming the user’. Staff at Colonial Williamsburg also talk of ‘clueless
visitors’ (Handler and Gable 1997: 28). A recent book about what goes on
behind the scenes at the British Museum includes a list of amusingly ignorant
questions asked by visitors (Burnett and Reeve 2001: 104). There are similarities
here too with the ways in which students are sometimes talked about within
universities. Consider, for example, the common practice of sending around
email lists of ‘exam howlers’ – foolish things that have been written on exam
scripts.
6. Hudson 1975. See also Wittlin 1949. These rules were officially changed
only in 1963, though their enforcement had been relaxed (Hudson 1975: 190).
7. Berland 1992: 47; and see discussion below.
8. See, for example, Bal 1996; Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995; Jordanova 1989.
9. Cf. Harvey, Penelope (forthcoming). A similar aim for transparency and
interactivity in as many domains as possible characterised the display of a
historically important computer at the Manchester Museum of Science and
Industry.
10. They used a program produced for IBM by Scandinavian pc systems,
1988. The way that this program, and other similar programs, works is by
identifying matters such as the length of words and certain syntactical
structures. Such systems cannot detect semantics and therefore whether
something makes sense or not is beyond their remit. Long words are automatic-
ally considered ‘difficult’ – even though children may find certain long words
easy to recognise. See Carter 1999 for a discussion of some of the readability
tests used in museums.
11. Silverstone 1994: 174. He is writing here of objects of consumption more
generally and arguing that commodities are not so much alienated objects as
ones which have been specially prepared for our consumption.
12. This is discussed more extensively in Macdonald and Silverstone 1992.
13. Harvey, David 1989: 101.
14. Rose 1992: 159. He explains: ‘Mentalities of government in the first half
of this century operated in terms of an image of the citizen as a social being.
They sought to open a kind of contract between government and citizens,
articulated in the language of social responsibilities and social welfare. In these
 Virtual Consumers and Supermarket Science 191

forms of political thought, the individual was a locus of needs that were to be
socially met if malign consequences were to be avoided, but was reciprocally
to be a being to whom political, civil and social obligations and duties were to
be attached. This political rationality was translated into programmes such as
social insurance, child welfare, social and mental hygiene. Pedagogic technolo-
gies from universal education to the BBC were construed as devices for forming
responsible citizens. Planned and socially organized mechanisms were to weave
a complex web that would bind the inhabitants of a territory into a single
polity, a space of regulated freedom’ (1992: 158). See also Roche 1992.
15. Strathern 1992: 172, 170. See also Strathern 1992a and 1992b.
16. Strathern 1992: 170. See also Giddens 1991: 8; and Marquand 1992.
17. Strathern 1992. See also Miller 1998.
18. Heelas and Morris 1992: 14. See also Susan Leigh Star’s (1991) argument
about standardization and the problem of dealing with minorities, a problem
also noted in George Ritzer’s account of McDonaldization (1996), and more
extensively discussed within Bowker and Star 1999.
19. Berland 1992: 47.
20. Rose 1992. See also Cohen 1992.
21. Marquand 1992: 65.
22. See footnote 4 above.
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 s e v e n

Opening and Aftermath:

Ritual, Reviews and Reflection

T he months before the exhibition opened were extraordinarily

hectic. There had been a sense of working at high pace against an
impending deadline for much of the previous year but now things
moved up another gear. Although the ‘slog’ of writing was finished
and the panels were all in production, and much of the content was
now decided upon, making sure that everything that was supposed to
be in the finished exhibition actually arrived seemed to entail endless
‘chasing up’ and a myriad of miscellaneous tasks. The ‘manatts’
described the Team as ‘running around like demented bed-bugs’ – a
description which they quickly adopted for themselves.
Here are just some of the things going on in the penultimate week.
Heather is busy getting recordings done for her larders; Sue spends
much of a weekend sticking lids on jars for her 1920s Sainsbury’s and
has to take a taxi to Paddington to buy a bag of builder’s sand so that
the workmen can construct a wall in her Sainsbury’s shop; Cathy,
Heather, Jan and I spend an afternoon making up frozen-pea boxes;
Jane says that she has to keep a notebook by her bed so that when she
wakes up worrying about something she must do she can at least write
it down and hope to get back to sleep. The Team makes numerous
trips to Wandsworth to the company making the panels to check that
these are correct before they are finally completed (otherwise correcting
them is considerably more costly); even so, some eventually turn up
with the pictures missing or with the wrong text. The Team also goes
to the Science Museum’s warehouses and workshops to inspect objects
and exhibits prior to installation in the gallery. Sometimes, together
with the designers, they roam the gallery – now at the stage called
‘shop-fitting’ – checking that all is going to plan and trying to map
the workmen-thronged tangle of stud-walling, wires, rolls of carpet,

193
194 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

and cases onto their visions of how the gallery will, hopefully, finally
look [Figures 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3].
There were, of course, ‘last minute disasters’, unexpected hassles,
disappointments and frayed nerves. Only just over a week before the
opening did it become clear that the frozen-pea blast tunnel interactive
would not be finished (though it might be added to the gallery after
its official opening). ‘I could kill’, fumed Sue. ‘In fact, I think I will. . . .
I don’t think the bloody gallery will be open on time. I really don’t.
There’ll still be contractors working.’ The hydrogenation demo also
looked likely not be completed, though an intervention by the Director
meant that it was – late on the day before opening. Many of the working
demos ‘played up’. The milk-bottling plant, for instance, had a tendency
to drip, to smash the milk bottles, and it proved surprisingly difficult
to create a milk substitute which looked convincing but which could
also be easily washed off (otherwise the bottles looked permanently
grimy, which the National Dairy Council found ‘very unsatisfactory’).
Practical problems come in rapid succession. The tea-packing machine
will not fit flush against a wall as intended and then turns out to be
covering a duct. The ‘unobtrusive’ cases that have been selected for
displaying many objects turn out to be rather dangerous – they jut out

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.1 Inspection time: Jan, Mr Suthers, Jane and John Redman in the
gallery about five weeks before opening.
 Opening and Aftermath 195

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.2 The exhibit that never was: Sue inspects what there is of the pea-
freezer tunnel about three weeks before opening.

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.3 Taking shape: Giant chocolate mousse pot goes into the gallery six
days before opening.
196 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

further from the wall than expected, have sharp corners and are not
made of toughened glass; moreover, they have no base and so every-
thing has to be wired to the back. The Foodies are annoyed with the
designers about this. They have also to acquire new transparencies for
the bakery as the frames these are to fit into turn out to be smaller
than expected; the brackets to hold the video monitors are wrong (I
drive to Oxford to exchange them – though even the new ones have
to have ugly bits of wood attached to make the monitors fit); Ann
desperately tries to ‘age’ the settle in her 1780s kitchen with turps,
Oxo and coffee; Heinz keep sending Sue the ‘wrong’ cans for her
canning exhibit; one of the famine medals she had wanted to include
can’t be found; and she has to get the Jamaican High Commission to
fly her in a piece of sugar-cane as Safeway’s are out of stock. Heather is
distraught when she finds that her silhouette figures are not ‘real-life’
height (the graphic artist had reduced them in order to make them fit
in the space available); she is still struggling to get the sausage-machine
to function (it seems now to be demanding an extra attachment); and
Lionel, who is being interviewed for the Jamaican larder, doesn’t come
up with quite the right answer when he says that he would buy foods
for his special celebration meals from Sainsbury’s.
There are also some last minute difficulties with sponsors: somebody
from the National Dairy Council phones up a week before the opening
of the gallery having ‘noticed some changes’ in the script (and is told
that ‘unfortunately it is too late to change it’). The Sainsbury’s archivist
comes to have a look at how the supermarket reconstruction is going
and a row ensues about the light-fittings which Sue has, with great
difficulty, found. The archivist says that they ‘are much too ornate’.
(Sue later transforms this into a hilarious story about the archivist
having thought that the fittings were ‘too phallic’.) Sometimes it seems
that there are so many hassles that the only answer is to joke about
them. Jan comments: ‘I’m sure that the magnitude of seriousness of
each problem is going down now – it’s just that there seem to be lots
more of them’, and Cathy remarks: ‘I think that we’ve got to the point
where we don’t care any more – we just want it to be finished. I suppose
we’ll start worrying about whether it is right after that.’
But it is an exciting time too. The first object, a coffee-roaster, goes
into a case at 11.10 a.m. on Tuesday the 3rd of October, nine days
before the official opening, after a ‘hairy moment’ when it looked as
though it would not fit. (Cathy has to leave out three other objects
which were also supposed to be in the case.) We all celebrate this as a
significant marker in the move towards the completion of the gallery
 Opening and Aftermath 197

(and I am told to record it precisely). At last it seems to be possible to

see that the exhibition really will be completed, that the dream will –
somehow or other – actually become ‘reality’.

Counting-down. . .
As well as finishing the gallery itself, there were also other matters to
attend to in the last couple of weeks. One was dealing with reviewers
from newspapers, radio and television. Jane generally handled this
(though most reviewers also interviewed the Director) and she some-
times found it quite difficult to move between dealing with the hassles
of completing the gallery and presenting an up-beat account of it.
Coping with some of the reviewer comments was also hard, as I discuss
further below. Also to be dealt with were the preparations for the
opening ceremony. This was to be a grand affair, performed by the
Duchess of York who was Patron of Museums Year. Invitation lists had
to be drawn up, invitation cards specially designed and decisions made
about what ‘gift’ to give the Duchess – the Director wants something
‘loony and foody’, not the usual plaque, and when an exquisite basket
of flowers made from sugar is planned he excitedly asks, ‘Is it in bad
taste? Is it kitsch? Is it St Paul’s cathedral in matchsticks?’ Safety and
anti-terrorist precautions have to be put in place, school parties selected,
‘baby-sitters’ found to look after special guests such as the sponsors,
the protocol of where to put eminent guests figured out (‘Where do
we put the Duke of Kent?’), and the whole day and route carefully
planned out and rehearsed, taking into account the Duchess’s dislike
of escalators and back-tracking (‘Oh no, that means she’ll have to go
through the Agriculture and Gas galleries’!).
In the last couple of days before opening the Team work almost non-
stop around the clock getting things into cases and cleaning the gallery.
Audio-visuals only start being put in place two days before. Late into
the last night panels are still going up, joiners are still sawing and
hammering and many objects still need to go into cases. We all vacuum
and polish madly, trying to get rid of the dust that seems to pother up
constantly and cling to all surfaces. Everybody is comparing this gallery
with others that they have worked on, nearly all of them saying that
this one is running dangerously late, though stories abound about
working until minutes before opening and having to stand in front of
certain exhibits on the big day to hide the fact that they are incomplete.
Sometimes, populated with their objects at last, cases and sets look
strangely empty, so we hasten to find things to provide background.
198 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

On the day before the gallery opens, for example, I am sent rushing
off to buy a 1950s-looking drainer for Ann’s kitchen and a small
rucksack (‘preferably khaki’) for one of Sue’s cases, as well as some
‘gardenia-coloured’ paper for Sue to make fake labels because the ‘real
labels’ had turned out to be too big for the case. Looking at this list in
retrospect, it looks like the Team might have been trying to get rid of
me: to stop me taking photographs and making myself unpopular by
announcing that ‘these are my 24-hours-to-go photos’ [Figure 7.4], or
‘these are seventeen hours to go’, perhaps! But we are all racing around
dealing with what, now, in retrospect, seem like incredibly arcane and
specific details, which, at the time, felt absolutely crucial.
On the last day before opening there is also another unexpected
intervention from Sainsbury’s. The archivist had noticed, on one of
her visits to help with the reconstruction, that there were some foods
from another supermarket in a couple of exhibits. The Director soon
received a complaint from the Sainsbury’s Press and Publicity manager
saying that the company had stipulated in giving their sponsorship
that no other retailer’s products should be shown (though branded
products were acceptable). Most Team members seem to be unaware
of this stipulation or to have forgotten it and are very annoyed, not

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.4 Counting down: the gallery at 24 hours before opening.

 Opening and Aftermath 199

least because this is yet another matter to deal with at this late stage.
Cathy exclaims: ‘They’re having their pound of flesh. I think they think
they’ve bought the gallery and can do whatever they like. They’re just
screwing the Museum for all they can get, pardon the expression.’ Other
Team members think that this is nothing to do with ‘the Sainsbury
family’ but is just about some of the ‘minor employees throwing their
weight about’. Later, up on the gallery, the Director says to me, in front
of the Sainsbury’s archivist, ‘I’m looking forward to seeing what you
write’ – reminding her, I suspect, of my ‘reporter’ role. All the other
supermarket foods are replaced, however, with Sainsbury’s packages
and tins that the archivist herself provides [Figure 7.5].

The Big Day

On the night before the opening of the gallery, work goes on into the
early hours. Jane and Jan stay at a hotel nearby and are back at 7 a.m.
and the rest of us are there soon after [Figure 7.6]. Things are still at
‘panic stations’. During the press briefing at 9.30 there is hammering
and sawing to be heard (joiners were still at work at 12 when some
panels were still only just going up), making it hard for me to hear

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.5 Changing names: removing non-Sainsbury supermarket products,

fifteen hours before opening.
200 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.6 Will it be ready?: Fitting a case at 8 a.m. on opening day.

some of the questions, though it is clear from their answers that the
Director and Jane are facing questions about sponsorship and the line
that the gallery is taking on various aspects of consumer advice. I can’t
attend directly because, so thoroughly enlisted in action, I am busy
making the bread rolls for one exhibit. When the press come round
the gallery after the briefing session, some members assume that I am
giving a demonstration specially for them (and even take my photo-
graph). At lunch-time I go on yet another shopping errand – this time
for a bin to place next to the sugar-packing machine (otherwise the
litter scatters everywhere), some greaseproof paper to wrap Ann’s fake
cheese in, and a pair of tights for Cathy. We all race around with vacuum
cleaners and dusters yet again and then dash to get ourselves ready.
The Foodies have begun to refer to the gallery as ‘this monster’ and, as
I comment in my notebook, ‘there is a feeling of it as being something
organic, with a life of its own’. Will it condescend to be ready on time?
Quite extraordinarily, it does – or at least, it puts on an appearance
of being so, there still being hammering from behind the scenes as we
wait for HRH. The Foodies, all looking amazingly smart and elegant
after their frenetic days, are waiting at various points in the gallery to
greet the Duchess and answer any questions that she may have about
their areas. I sit in the audience, looking in on the gallery from outside
 Opening and Aftermath 201

now, the giant chocolate mousse pot just visible through the entrance
between the white screens which bear the exhibition’s logo and title,
Food for Thought: The Sainsbury Gallery. The Duchess arrives, flanked
by the Director and Lord Sainsbury, and all make speeches. The Director
emphasises the way in which this gallery is a ‘first’ for the Museum –
in its subject matter (which he observes was not so topical when
exhibition-making began), in having the privilege of such extensive
patronage and sponsorship, in being a new way of doing things in the
Museum, and in having been created by an all-female Team. He does
not say that it is the first exhibition to be created from start to finish
under his directorship, one of the particular significances that this
gallery has acquired within the Museum and the wider museum world;
also he effectively cautions against reading into this the direction in
which the Museum will be going in future. Lord Sainsbury says how
honoured his family charitable trust is to be the Patron, notes the
Sainsbury family’s more general support of interactive exhibitions, and
says how much the trust wanted to contribute to this enterprise because
it saw the exhibition as ‘part of our aim of letting our customers know
as much as possible about the products that they are buying’. The
Duchess makes some general comments about the importance of
museums and endears herself to the audience (and the Team) by saying
how delighted she is to open an exhibition on a topic in which she
has such a keen personal interest. She is presented with her gift amidst
a flurry of camera flashes, and then taken into the exhibition. The
gallery is now officially open.
Later, after a lavish tea in the Fellow’s room, we go back to the offices
and just sit there, rather bedraggled. One of the Johns falls asleep; Ann
and I, out of some strange urge for distraction from our exhaustion,
do a crossword puzzle. Later we go back up to the gallery for an evening
reception to which many more guests are invited than the more
exclusive gathering earlier in the day. It is also an event intended to
thank the many people who have helped in one way or another with
the making of the exhibition. In my exhaustion, compounded now
by too much wine, I drop and smash my camera. This feels strangely
symbolic, as though my own observer role has come to an end.

The Ritual Process

In some respects the making of the exhibition seemed to follow the
classical structure of a rite of passage as set out by Van Gennep: ritualised
separation, followed by a transitional or liminal (‘betwixt-and-between’)
202 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

period, and then, often the high point in ritual terms, a ceremonial
reincorporation in which a new life-phase and status are marked.1 Like
a group of initiates for a coming of age ritual, the Foodies went through
special ceremonies (interviews, preparing the Feasibility Study and
joining the select group) which performed their symbolic separation
from the rest of the Museum. This entailed a degree of physical
separation too: they moved to their own offices set apart from those
of other curators as well being separated from many of the humdrum
tasks and events governing the everyday lives of other Museum staff.
For the initiates, there followed months of battling to achieve tasks
which had been set for them by their elders, a transitional phase during
which they had to face and overcome numerous physical and psycho-
logical hurdles. It was a time of being tested – sometimes to the limit.
It was also a liminal period in which the Foodies were neither ‘normal’
curators nor clearly ‘non-curators’ either. On the one hand set apart
from the rest of the Museum, they were simultaneously central to it.
The Museum’s reputation would rest, at least in part, on how well they
coped with the tasks they had been set.
The liminal period, Victor Turner suggests, is often characterised by
a symbolic emphasis on ‘anti-structure’ – a highlighting of difference
from normal or ordinary structures.2 Rituals during this period may
turn normal practices or relationships upside-down. In so doing, they
also serve to highlight those normal structures or practices. In the case
of the Team, and other exhibitions in the making that I observed, anti-
structuring was evident in a pervasive rhetoric of difference from the
‘usual’ (or ‘traditional’) way of doing things. This rhetoric thus high-
lighted, especially by caricature, the normal. One effect of this was
also to generate a sense of ‘communitas’ – of belonging – within the
group. Alongside the anti-structural rhetoric, however, there was also
an affirmation by the Team of certain key aspects of cultural ‘normality’,
fundamental principles which, whatever else might be turned on its
head, ultimately remained sacrosanct. Even if, at the beginning of the
ritual process these were symbolically thrown into question, by the
end their sacredness was affirmed. In the case of the Food exhibition,
these sacred principles included ‘objects’, ‘curatorial control’, and
notions of ‘being the Science Museum’ and all that this was seen to
entail.
The ceremonial opening of the gallery was the ritual high point mark-
ing the end of the rite of passage. Preceded by rituals of cleansing, of
purification, (our manic dusting and vacuuming, the changing into
smart outfits) as is very common at this stage of initiation rituals, the
 Opening and Aftermath 203

ritual high-point is in some respects a denial or ‘deletion’ of the preced-

ing months of work and difficulty.3 Mess, dust, imperfections, sweat,
under-eye shadow – all must be hidden in this performance of comple-
tion. It is a kind of epiphany, a moment of truth, though one which
rests on a lie. One effect of this lie or denial is a performance of
incontrovertibility: negotiation and struggle are erased and things are
presented as inevitable. Like the clean machines, which do not tell of
the lives entangled in their earlier history, the gallery presents a face
cleansed of the struggles to achieve it. And the opening ritual – the
moment when the gallery is officially declared ready to be visited by
the public – is the marker of this newly pure state.
High point rituals also often contain within themselves a symbolism
of journey, the crossing of thresholds and opening up. All of these can
be seen in the opening ceremony: the Duchess’s walk through the now
presentable gallery can be seen as the transformative moment when
all of those earlier work-oriented journeys through the gallery give way
to a new kind of journey – that of the visitor. One reason why it is so
important that everything is as perfect as possible for this first visit is
that it regarded as an omen for the future of the gallery, for all of those
journeys that are to come later. The opening ceremony is also a
performative utterance of the importance of the gallery and, vicariously,
of the Science Museum itself. The presence of a member of the Royal
Family and a member of the House of Lords, a long and distinguished
list of guests, and a stylish and opulent ceremony, tea, and evening
drinks all serve to signal that the gallery’s opening is a significant event:
they bestow a kind of magic upon it.
For the gallery itself, the ceremonial opening was also its own opening
onto a new life. It marked a new beginning, a new phase. For the Team,
however, this was only partly the case. They had been initiates on the
long and difficult journey; they had dealt with adversaries; they had
pulled through. But what now? While they moved into a new phase –
they would no longer be preoccupied with completing the gallery for
October 12th – it was not quite clear whether the transformative process
which they had undergone would result in a new status. Would they
just return to their previous jobs and grades within the Museum? At
this point it looked as though they might. Cathy and Ann both received
rather abruptly worded letters just days after the opening telling them
that they should attend a training course for the grade which they
were on (G) before they worked at their temporary higher grade (F) on
the exhibition. So rather than the rite of passage leading to a sense of
renewal and effervescence as Van Gennep suggests is usually the case,
204 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

it led more to a feeling of deflation – of ‘coming down to earth’ as Jan

bluntly put it.

Entangled Identities and Authorship

In some respects the gallery’s ‘completion’ is a fiction and the opening
ceremony a ritual punctuation of a process that might otherwise have
no clear end-point. Once the gallery is officially open the Team
continues to work on it, mainly carrying out what they call ‘snagging’,
(dealing with things which were not quite complete or with new
‘hassles’ that arise as the exhibition meets its audience). This includes
getting some of the panels corrected, adjusting the colour on all of the
videos, repairing the sugar centrifuge which is already breaking down
and trying to find ways of protecting exhibits from the unexpectedly
bad behaviour of visitors. The Team also has to write thank you letters
to those involved and, in some cases, deal with sponsor complaints.
(Heather refuses to answer her phone for days because she thinks that
the Meat and Livestock Commission will be ringing to complain about
the colour of the sausages, a problem she is still struggling with; and
she receives a letter from the National Dairy Council saying that if the
bottling machine cannot be improved the Museum ‘should find a new
way of representing bottling’.) They also have to prepare documentation
for all of the exhibits, with lists of suppliers and other information, so
that knowledge which is currently personally held by them can be
transferred into more general knowledge, useable by others in the
future. All of this is important work, and Jane manages to get a ‘stay of
execution’ for the Team to remain together (on their current grades)
until Christmas to complete it. The process is also, though, one of
disentangling themselves from their own very intense and personalised
involvement – a disentangling which is in many respects very difficult.
I am engaged in a similar process. After the exhibition has opened I
continue to spend a good deal of time with the Team. Being there at
this time is important for seeing how the gallery continues to be
‘constructed’, not only physically but also in the emerging discourse
about it within and beyond the Museum. It is also important to see
how the Foodies reflect back on their experience and the gallery, and
it is an opportunity to check on paperwork as they tidy their desks. It
is a time for chasing up various people for interviews, for hanging
around the gallery itself and thinking about how to do research on
visitors. But there is more to my continued presence in the Museum
than this: I have become a bit addicted to the place, to the Team, and
 Opening and Aftermath 205

I’m not sure that I’m ready for the degree of disentangling that I need
in order to move to my own next stage of trying to make sense of it
all. I feel almost ‘lost’ or ‘bereft’ now that the gallery is open at last
and the heady hectic days are over.
Another reason why the disentangling process is difficult for the
Foodies, however, is that, while formally their involvement with the
gallery is coming to an end, talk about the exhibition within the
Museum and beyond serves to entangle their professional identities
with it still further. I have written earlier of how museum galleries (or
collections) are often identified by reference to their curators and vice-
versa. This identification, which has begun during the making of the
exhibition, ramifies once the gallery is open to public view. No longer
do other Museum staff need to rely upon rumours and leaks about the
exhibition: now they can go and see for themselves what they think
about it – and about Jane, Jan, Sue, Heather, Cathy and Ann. But, of
course, their views are based not only upon their own observations
but also on sources such as the comments of others and reviews of the
gallery which appear in the media. These all circulate rapidly around
the Museum, reviews being eagerly devoured and discussed, especially
negative reviews. As Heather observes: ‘People in the Museum love it
when we have had a bad review.’ One reason for this is the entangle-
ment of professional identities with galleries. As Jane points out, these
reactions are a consequence of the fact that Museum staff ‘can’t divorce
what they think about the gallery from what they think about us.’
And in the Foodies’ case, Jane thinks, staff are predisposed to hope
that the gallery will not do well because:

As a team we did avoid a lot of the depression and flak that hit the rest
of the Museum while we were working on the project. We were to an
extent isolated from all the horrors that were going on in collections
management. . . And we were definitely seen and to a certain extent are
still seen as the Director’s little buddies. . . . Some people were very jealous
I suppose that we had a lot of access to the Director while we were doing
the project and that he spent quite a lot of time with us. . . everybody
got very uptight about that you know.

The others agree and explain how they think they were viewed by others
in the Museum:

Heather: There was also a feeling that it was about time that we were
slapped down actually.
206 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Sue: Put us back in our places: ‘Back in your box!’

Heather: There was definitely a feeling like that you know: ‘They have
had their moment of glory – now put them away.’
Sue: What would really actually enchant them even more is if we
didn’t get our promotions. That would actually be the
epitome of joy for quite a lot of people. . . . Because they like
people – there is this malicious thing – they like seeing people
fail. It’s quite extraordinary really. . . . People are very jealous
by nature. . .
Cathy: . . .should see it as somebody succeeds for the whole system.
They tend to see it individually: ‘Oh, they’ve done very well,
therefore it must look like I’m doing badly. . .’
Sue: . . .I mean, surely we are all here for the greater good of the
institution not for our individual selves. Surely that is what
the aim of this is all about.
Jane: Yes, but . . .this place is very anti-. Doesn’t see things as a
corporate venture at all. Sees it as perhaps theirs.

Team members point to a more general tension here: between the

individualisation that goes on within the Museum and the fact that
galleries are officially the product of the institution as a whole. (The
names of the Team members do not appear on the list of credits at the
gallery entrances.) Within the Museum, the opportunity to create an
exhibition is a valued and scarce resource. This creates competition
and jealousy among staff as they vie for this opportunity, the bestowing
of which is largely in the hands of the Museum’s Director. Consequently
(in ways reminiscent of an analogy with the court of Elizabeth I that
some Museum staff suggested to me), charges of favouritism abound,
together with attempts to discredit those favourites so that the con-
tinued flow of scarce resources their way may be stemmed.
The tension here is also one of the politics of signatures and the
local construction of authorship – of who is said to be the author of
the exhibition. This is almost always an ambiguous matter. Here, the
Team is saying on the one hand that the exhibition should be recog-
nised as the product of the Museum as a whole – and we have seen
earlier how Team members are sometimes willing to subsume their
own work to the institution, to allow ‘being the Science Museum’ to
override other ambitions they might have. On the other, they want
individual recognition for their creativity (and the promotion that they
think this should bring). Not only is the Science Museum positioned
as an alternative author to the Team, but so too is the Museum’s Director
 Opening and Aftermath 207

– and, indeed, much that goes on in the Museum is perceived as

entangled with his identity. Many reviews of Food for Thought discuss
the gallery with reference only to the Director – as though it is his
creation alone. This is a source of some annoyance to the Team. A review
by cookery writer Prue Leith, for example, while mentioning Jane as
‘the new gallery’s curator’, began:

Neil Cossons, the 50-year-old director of the Science Museum is, in the
museum world, something of a phenomenon. Anti-bureaucratic, pro-
the-public, as keen (if not keener) on making museums exciting places
to be as on improving the minds of the masses, he is the perfect man to
produce the nation’s first Gallery of Food and Nutrition.

The piece concluded: ‘Dr Cossons doesn’t think it can fail and, since
he was the man behind Ironbridge, I don’t think it will either.’ Sue
described to me the reception of this particular review:

Four days after the gallery opened somebody came in – who shall remain
nameless – and waved it and said ‘have you seen this?’ And of course we
had. We had seen it two days ago. It was the sort of glee on that person’s
face as they came in the door – it really was quite visible. I just said ‘Go
away!’.

The fact that other Museum staff know that this is a review which the
Team will not want to be reminded about – even though it is a very
favourable account of the gallery itself – highlights the touchy nature
of authorship and ownership. It also indicates the discomfort that the
Team felt about the way in which the long labour of producing the
gallery was sometimes talked about in terms of producing ‘the Director’s
baby’. All of these constructions felt like an erasure of their own input
and work, that also seemed to have a gendered dimension in the
construction of their role as one of mere ‘carrying’.4 At the same time,
the Director was not fully comfortable with the role that he had been
allotted in this nativity story. When I interviewed him he seemed keen
to try to disentangle himself from too much responsibility for the
gallery, stressing, as I noted before, that he saw himself as having ‘a
very hands-off approach’. In some of his public statements too he
seemed to be wanting to distance himself from the gallery, a stance
also noted by some other Museum staff (who were always attuned to
reading nuances and subtexts into the Director’s utterances).
208 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Also sometimes credited as author in reviews of the exhibition was

Sainsbury’s. This was, of course, the name which always appeared under
the main title of the exhibition – Food for Thought: the Sainsbury
Gallery – and it was probably unsurprising that it was read as an
authorial signature (even its font looks signature-like) [Figure 7.7].
Moreover, there was a clear link between the subject-matter and the
sponsor, making it seem likely that Sainsbury’s would be the author in
a way that would not be the case with, say, their sponsorship of a wing
in the National Gallery. The fact that a member of the Sainsbury Gallery
was present at press launches and made statements about the import-
ance of helping people understand food served to cement this. A review
in the Daily Mail, beginning and ending as follows, was typical in
attributing the existence and aims of the gallery to Sainsbury’s:

No-one knows better than David Sainsbury of supermarket fame that

we are sometimes baffled by the choice and variety of modern food.
‘Forty years ago we could get fruit and vegetables only in their normal
season. Packing and refrigeration was minimal’, he says. ‘The housewife
was much more knowledgeable about the food she prepared. Now it is
much more difficult because of the range of what we buy’. The answer
to this problem was some lateral thinking. And yesterday the Science
Museum unveiled their plans for a major new gallery dedicated to the
impact of science and technology on food. . . . David Sainsbury said: ‘The
time couldn’t be more right. The problem at the moment is a lack of
information. People need the confidence to make up their own mind
about what they should eat’.5

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.7 The politics of signatures: the gallery name.

 Opening and Aftermath 209

This piece depicts Sainsbury’s giving the Science Museum the task of
creating a gallery which would help the supermarket aim of giving
people confidence in their food choices. For this reviewer this seems
to be wholly acceptable. For others, however, it was not. The accusation
that the gallery was ‘sponsor-led’, and in the lap of the food industry,
was also made in reviews of the gallery. The account by Derek Cooper
on Radio Four’s ‘The Food Programme’ (broadcast three days before
the opening of the gallery) was one of the most damning of such
reviews. Derek Cooper asks about the presence of Sainsbury’s and
McDonald’s, each of which Jane justifies (‘They’re [Sainsbury’s] a very
good example of a grocer’s shop in the 1920s. . .’), and whether
essentially the gallery is ‘saying that 1989 is better than 1889’, to which
Jane agrees, observing that it is because in 1989 there is more choice.
The programme winds up saying that the gallery is a ‘non-controversial
approach to Britain’s food. . . . it is ducking all the issues. It offers very
little real food for thought at all’. The identity of the gallery, such
reviewers were saying, had become much too entangled with the
identity of the supermarket.

Responses and Reflections

What did the Foodies make of these criticisms? And how did they them-
selves see the exhibition now that it was completed? Why did they
think that it had turned out as it had?
In response to negative reviews the Foodies were often defensive and
bullish, particularly to other Museum staff, precisely because they knew
that their own identities were also at stake. ‘I’ll defend my areas to the
hilt’ announced Sue the day after ‘The Food Programme’ review. Being
up-beat about the exhibition and pointing out the positive as well as
the negative reviews was part of a continued impression-management
in which the Team also sought to influence the information circulating
in the Museum.
But the Foodies were also rather surprised by the amount of negative
coverage that the exhibition received. To some extent this was because
more press coverage had been sought than for previous exhibitions.
In addition, Food was covered by the national and popular media to a
greater extent than most Science Museum exhibitions (which tended
to be covered only by more specialist publications). This was because
of the ‘topical’ subject matter: food. It was also because of the greater
interest that museums were generating in the media generally, especially
in the new context of charging for admission. And it was in these terms
210 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

that most reviews were framed. Thus, some reviews looked for informa-
tion relevant to the current food scares and controversies, seeking, it
seemed, an authoritative answer from the Museum. This was evident
at the press launch at the opening and the Director had to repeatedly
emphasise that the exhibition ‘had been overtaken by events’, thus it
could not cover all the most recent matters of concern (the ‘inertia
problem’ of the exhibition medium discussed in the previous chapter).
Also, Jane tried to point out that scientists were not always decided
about these matters and the gallery represented this uncertainty too.
Reviews framed in terms of museological concerns were likely to point
to the existence of charging (as in the cartoon depicted in Figure 7.8)
and of sponsorship, and to suggest not only possible ‘sponsor-bias’
but also an ‘aggressive populism’, dumbing down and a denigration of
‘the power of objects’.6
The Foodies frequently complained that the reviews were ‘unfair’,
that they had ‘missed the point’ of what the exhibition was trying to
do, that the reviewers had failed to ‘read it [the exhibition text]
properly’, and pointed to aspects of the exhibition or even areas where
supposed omissions were mentioned. For example: in response to a

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.8 Charging at the check-out: cartoon of Food for Thought. Courtesy
of Colin Wheeler.
 Opening and Aftermath 211

critical review in Hotel and Catering Management, which stated that the
exhibition did not say anything about cash-crops, Sue is annoyed that
they do not acknowledge what she has included on famine; and Jane
points out that of course they hadn’t discussed cash crops because this
was concerned with agriculture and thus beyond the scope of the
gallery. Heather is surprised that her inclusion of McDonald’s has caused
so much criticism because as she saw it she was simply saying that
‘this is what is actually happening in 1989’ and she does not see inclu-
sion as endorsement [Figure 7.9]. More generally, the Team also dismiss
accusations such as those of ‘dumbing down’ by accusing the reviewers
of elitism and failing to recognise what the exhibition was trying to
do: ‘to speak to ordinary people’. What the Team’s responses also show,
however, is that they want the exhibition to be read thoroughly, like a
book, and as a text in itself, in terms of the messages and objectives
which they had set out. Instead, for the most part, reviewers ‘looked
at’ the gallery rather than read it; the ‘messages’ that they picked up
were not drawn from what was written on panels but from the three-
dimensional exhibits and the impressions they drew from them.
Furthermore, their accounts were framed not by the internal pyramid

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.9 Representation as endorsement? McDonald’s in the Sainsbury

Gallery.
212 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

of interlinking aims but by external concerns about food or the way

that museums were going more generally. It was these alternative
framings that the Team had not fully bargained for.
As the Team acknowledge, however, the exhibition does not make
its rationale very clear. Heather reflectively points out: ‘We don’t say
anywhere that we are covering the most popular food in 1989. I think
if we had said that explicitly somewhere. . . We have no explanation
for why we lighted on the areas that we did light on.’ Looking back
after the gallery is open the Foodies are, amongst themselves, critical
of other things about the gallery too. One of them is its overall feel.
This they sometimes describe as ‘not as lively as I’d expected’, ‘it’s a bit
flat’, ‘lifeless’, ‘I think we felt there ought to have been a bit more
excitement there’. This is sometimes related to a ‘loss of quirkiness’ –
the main outcome of the Rethink as the Team describe it. The demand
for clear messages is regarded as having eliminated odd things which
were included just because of the Team’s attraction to them. But they
equate this loss with one of individuality and ‘life’ (rather than
questioning other aspects of the Rethink procedure).
Heather also explains that the opened gallery seems less original and
different than she had expected:

I think my greatest problem was that it doesn’t look so very different

from everywhere else. I think that we all thought that it was going to be
– and whilst it is wildly different from other things in the Science Museum
– it’s very similar to things in other museums, local government muse-
ums, and all those. So I think my complaint would be that it isn’t so
very different.

Much of this, they suggest, is a visual matter. In particular, ‘it’s still

panels and cases and things to do. I didn’t originally want it to be like
that’ (Jane). Yet none of the Team members seems sure quite how it
turned out like this and what they might have done instead. Jane
suggests that the problem was money: ‘Once we got the costings in for
the overall building and things it became very clear that there wasn’t
enough money to do very adventurous things. I mean we had to go
back to the panel.’ More generally, the idea that money was the ultimate
limiting factor in the exhibition’s shortcomings runs like a mantra
through the Foodies’ reflections. It is understood as something incon-
testable and beyond the agency of those involved.
But there are other suggestions too. Some Team members think that
the designers should have come up with some ‘creative solutions’. (‘I
 Opening and Aftermath 213

think it’s probably something up to our designers to be honest because

I don’t know that there is any other way of getting all that information
across’: Jane). And, more generally, while they had specifically wanted
designers who would not ‘try to lead on content’ and while they had
bitterly opposed some of the cuts that they felt the designers had forced
them to make, Heather suggests that in retrospect that ‘we were very
curator-led in the end and it’s backfired a bit’. Other designers, she
thinks, ‘would have just said “you can’t have a panel there whether
you want one or not. There isn’t room. You’ve got to change your
ideas”’. The general sense of insufficient ‘liveliness’ of the gallery they
think may be partly due to the designers’ choice of a ‘muted colour
scheme’ – fashionable grey carpeting and walls and cream panels with
splashes of primary colours. Accusations that the gallery layout was
‘confusing’ should, they think, also be directed at the designers who
had not made the organisation clear enough. The designers themselves
disagree about the lack of ‘liveliness’ and the colour scheme, though
they suggest that there should have been ‘more visual punctuation’ in
the gallery. Presenting a layout is, however, always a difficult matter
because, the designers think, nobody ever stops to look at an overall
plan of a gallery. From their point of view, trying to deal with so many
staff and such a large gallery was a difficult task and ‘not the ideal way
of creating something that really hangs together’. Although they agree
that there are too many panels, their perception is that they pushed
the Team to reduce this number as far as they felt they could within
the difficult circumstances of the Rethink and the time slippage that
this generated.
In response to some of the criticisms about the politics of the exhibi-
tion the Team acknowledge that there were some sections of the
exhibition, notably Shopping, that ‘took on a life of [their] own’, an
expression which again illustrates the extent to which the Team felt
that their own agency in the matter was depleted. The way that the
Shopping section, which lies at what is the most used entrance to the
exhibition, ‘has Sainsbury’s written all over it’, is seen as particularly
unfortunate. Part of this was due to the archivist’s insistence on
authenticity (and thus the prominent display of the name) in the
reproduction of the 1920s shop, and to the replacement of some foods
by Sainsbury’s labels. Additionally, however, the tins and packages
supplied for the interactive supermarket checkout scanner are all
Sainsbury’s’ – just because these were supplied free by the company.
As Sue observes: ‘It’s cost basis – practicality of replacements. It’s easier
for us to do it through Sainsbury’s. And OK you have, there’s a
214 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

compromise there, you lose perhaps, people might say, integrity for
practicality.’ Nevertheless, she feels that the purpose of the exhibit was
to illustrate the use of bar-codes and in the terms in which she intended
it, the exhibit is successful.
This kind of reasoning, in which presence can always be legitimated
in relation to intended aims and objectives, is, as we have seen,
common in the making of the exhibition. So too is legitimisation in
terms of the nature and aims of the institution. In discussions about
the way that the gallery has turned out the Team make comments such
as: ‘We are a museum of science and technology – it’s not our job to
tell people what to eat. We have to talk about processes’; ‘The Corporate
Plan is to raise the public understanding of science – how can we then
rush off on a completely different tack?’; ‘I don’t think that we consid-
ered any other approach really to be quite honest. I don’t see how you
can in a museum of science and industry. . . We were keen to add the
social history in.’ As Sue explained, ‘If we had to cut. . ., science and
technology would have to remain in because objectively that had to
be so in our gallery by definition of the nature of our Museum.’ While
Cathy expresses doubts about this ‘science and industry’ approach, she
too thinks that there is an inevitability to the gallery’s stance:

What can you expect though with sponsorship? It’s also being the
museum. You can’t expect ever to say anything that isn’t biased. If we
had wanted to do a green version of things the Director and Terry, never
mind the sponsors, would never have let us get away with it.

Whether Cathy and the others are right or not about what might have
been allowed (and it is difficult to know given that it wasn’t put to the
test), what their words highlight is their perception that only certain
approaches were going to be possible in the Science Museum. This was
their own ‘secular theodicy’.7 It defined the horizons of the thinkable
from the very beginning. It also meant that other ways in which the
gallery might be read, and in particular dwelling on the unsaid or
unrepresented, were only rarely countenanced.

In this chapter we have moved from the final stages of preparing the
exhibition, through the transformative moment of its ceremonial
opening and on to some of the reflections on it by the Team themselves
and reviewers. But as the Team sometimes pointed out (especially in
response to reviews which they classified as elitist or specialist), what
really mattered with an exhibition like this were the visitors. The proof
 Opening and Aftermath 215

of the pudding, so to speak, was in the eating. In the case of this

exhibition, which had been explicitly populated with virtual visitors
of an ‘ordinary people’ variety, what visitors would make of it would
be crucial. It would be crucial within the Science Museum’s public
understanding of science approach and cultural revolution more
generally. So what did visitors make of it? It is to this that we turn in
the next chapter.

Notes
1. Van Gennep 1960. Originally published 1909.
2. Turner 1967.
3. See also La Fontaine 1985, and on the ‘deletion of work’ Bowker and Star
1999 (especially ch. 8).
4. See Delaney 1991 for an anthropological analysis of such gendered
conceptions.
5. Daily Mail 23.3.1989
6. Deyan Sudjic ‘Science Museum offers food for thought’ in Sunday
Correspondent 7.1.90
7. This term is from Herzfeld 1992.
This page intentionally left blank
 e i g h t

The Active Audience and the

Politics of Appropriation

S ometimes, especially when school parties ‘descend’ (to use the word
often used by museum staff), the Food gallery throngs with noisy,
‘busy’ visitors. There is scrabbling and pushing as children snatch tins
and packets from the shelves at the checkout and scan them; receipts
– churned out by the till – scatter the floor; at the chocolate mousse
pot visitors press buttons to turn a plate of chips blue, they pump air
into flour, expanding its volume, and, at the other end of the gallery,
they peddle frenetically on the exercise bikes and race around pressing
buttons and piecing together puzzles which show the nutritional
components of pizza and fish and chips [Figures 8.1 and 8.2]. But at
other times the gallery receives just a slow trickle of visitors and it is
rarely as busy as Launch Pad or even galleries such as Space on the
ground floor, and some parts of the gallery, especially the displays of
production processes, seldom teem. Some visitors stroll through, hands
in pockets, casually surveying the exhibition, only occasionally tempted
to stand a little closer to a panel or to peer into a reconstruction. Others
flit from one thing that catches their eye to another – a visitor type
which has been called a ‘butterfly’ in contrast to the ‘strollers’ who
have been characterised as ‘fish’.1 Some visitors begin with studious
attention (owls perhaps?) but then give up and metamorphose into
either butterflies or fish. There are also ‘ants’ – visitors who move
purposively as though looking for something in particular; there are
those who back-track or beat a hasty retreat, others who seem bemused
or lost, and some who are definitely more interested in their compan-
ions than anything on the gallery walls.
This chapter looks at what visitors make of the exhibition, the
creation of which we have ethnographically followed in the earlier
chapters, and asks whether these visitors, who variously scuttle or

217
218 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 8.1 Visitors getting their hands-on at the check-out.

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 8.2 Getting the message? Visitors in Food and the Body.
 The Active Audience 219

saunter through the now opened gallery, bear any relationship to the
phantoms who helped shape that display. More generally, this chapter
is concerned with the question of how audiences engage with, or relate
to, exhibitions; and how this can be researched.
In this chapter, I describe visitor research on Food for Thought which
I carried out with my colleagues.2 This research aimed to consider the
reception of the exhibition in relation to some of the dreams and virtual
visitors implicated in its making and also, more broadly, in terms which
visitors themselves employed. That is, it sought to understand how
visitors culturally framed their experience: how they recoded as well
as decoded the exhibition. In so doing, the research sought to go beyond
the often rather cognitive emphasis on ‘what visitors have learned’ or
whether they have ‘got’ or ‘not got’ the ‘messages’ intended, which
has been typical of a good deal of museum visitor research.3 Such an
approach characterises the audience as relatively ‘passive’. It is based
on a conveyor-belt model, like that of scientific literacy noted in chapter
two, in which information does or does not succeed in being effectively
‘transmitted’ to the public, and in which the emphasis is often on
discovering barriers (which might include, say, educational ability or
pre-existing ‘false’ ideas) that might impede this process. This approach
has been characteristic of some work in, and also received criticism
within, various fields, including cultural and media studies and the soci-
ology of science (with particular reference to the public understanding
of science), as well (though generally more recently) as museology.4
In response to this criticism a new wave of research has emerged
which has begun from a premise of the audience as ‘active’, as construct-
ively appropriating cultural products in potentially myriad ways. Yet
some of this new wave research has also been questioned for its
tendency to celebrate uncritically anything that audiences or consumers
do as ‘active’ and to regard these as manifestations of ‘agency’ or even
‘resistance’.5 As we have seen in the virtual construction of visitors
discussed in chapter six, the conceptual conflations involved construe
‘activity’ as in itself a manifestation of ‘democracy’. However, as I argued
there, this may involve a framing of activity or participation – as well
as ‘choice’ more generally – in such a way that rather than opening up
possibilities for critical engagement these are actually restricted. Thus,
rather than just reading off ‘democracy’ or ‘empowerment’ from
‘activity’ or ‘choice-making’, it is important to try, as in earlier chapters,
to understand just how activities are conceptualised and performed by
those involved, what kinds of questions are asked and, equally crucially,
what are not.
220 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Another feature of some of the new wave research – sometimes called

‘the new audience studies’, ‘the new revisionism’ or ‘the popular culture
project’6 – is an emphasis on the diversity of individual interpretations
amongst audiences, which, as Roger Silverstone has pointed out, is itself
again conflated with activity.7 While it has surely been important to
highlight the fact that there is rarely a single uniform response to any
particular cultural product, the specificity of cultural products is
sometimes ignored.8 The other problem with this approach is that the
notion of audience variability is sometimes extended to suggest that
the range of potential readings is so infinite that analysis is almost
redundant. This was a perspective sometimes voiced in the Museum
and at other museum events in which I participated, some museum
staff suggesting that as the possible range of visitor interpretations was
infinite, it was hardly worth trying to take them into account.
As will be described in more detail below, the visitor research in Food
for Thought did show differences amongst visitors. However, amidst
the variety were also certain patterns which, while not necessarily
common to all those studied, could be seen as part of a repertoire of
prevalent interpretations. These varying interpretations and modes of
engaging with the exhibition did not seem from our study to map
neatly onto any particular social variables – no distinct differences
between, say, men and women emerged from the account – though
our research methodology may have made us less able to map differ-
ences in this way (see below). Nevertheless, neither did the patterns
identified seem to be groundless or the chance outcome of purely
individualised constructions. On the contrary, they needed to be
understood in relation to wider types of cultural framing (concerning,
for example, the nature of a museum visit or of science) and also to
more specific cultural accounts produced from the encounter with this
exhibition, such as issues related to the subject matter, the exhibitionary
media and specificities of content and display.9

Catching Cultural Accounts

The research on visitors to Food for Thought was rather different from
the ethnographic research on the exhibition’s making. Visitors’ own
experience of the exhibition was relatively fleeting: typically, they would
come just once, for half an hour or so. Research with the visitors was
likewise relatively fleeting: about twenty minutes discussion with them
after their visit. This was coupled with a degree of general hanging
around the gallery and observing, visiting ourselves and with friends
 The Active Audience 221

and relatives, as well as discussions with the museum staff such as

warders and explainers (whose task was to help visitors use the
interactive exhibits in particular and to give help more generally). The
Foodies carried out some of their own visitor research and also struggled
to deal with some of the consequences of visitor misbehaviour in the
exhibition. This also informed our understanding of visiting. Overall,
however, the research on visitors was framed by the encounter with
the exhibition itself rather than the lives of those visiting; though some
of our questions were oriented towards the place of the visit within
those lives.
Because an encounter with an exhibition is three-dimensional and
physical rather than purely cognitive and verbal, part of our research
involved direct observation of visitors in the gallery. This entailed some
fairly unstructured general observation and also more structured
‘tracking’ – that is, following visitors through the gallery and charting
their movements, recording which exhibits they spent time on, what
they said about them (if this was loud enough to overhear), and their
overall length of visit.10 Partly because we thought that interaction
among visitors would be of interest we decided to focus the research
on small groups rather than single individuals. We further justified
this to ourselves in terms of the fact that the gallery was specifically
aimed at ‘family groups’. Consequently, we chose to track groups which
consisted minimally of one ‘child’ (somebody looking under about 16)
and one ‘adult’ (somebody who looked over about 18), and we aimed
for as broad a range of possible participants as possible.11 In addition,
we tracked groups entering the gallery from two different entrances
(‘Shopping’ or ‘Food and the Body’) in proportion to the overall usage
of these (which we monitored first): almost three-quarters entered
through ‘Shopping’.12
After groups had been tracked, the researcher (most often Gilly Heron,
sometimes me) approached the group, explained that we were from
Brunel University, that we were studying the exhibition and asked
whether the visitors would be willing to be interviewed. Not all did so.
In total forty-two groups (composed of 123 individuals) were both
tracked and interviewed.13 Group interviews took place in a room
adjacent to the gallery and were tape-recorded. These interviews lasted
on average nineteen and a half minutes, the shortest being ten minutes
and the longest fifty-five.
We began with an open question which aimed to elicit visitors’ own
accounts of their experience in the exhibition: ‘Could you please
describe where you went and what you saw?’ and followed this up
222 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

with, ‘What did you think of the exhibition? Please feel free to say
whatever you want’. We used prompt questions where we felt that we
needed clarification or further information, and tried to draw in all
members of the group (as there was sometimes a tendency for just one
member – generally one of the adults – to adopt a role of spokesperson).
This was followed by a semi-structured interview with questions
concerned with the following (the full interview schedule is in the
Appendix):

(a) The visit – our interest here was in the way visitors framed their
visit, their motives for coming, and their patterns of museum
visiting and leisure activities in general;
(b) The exhibition – as well as the account of their experience we also
asked about who they thought had created the exhibition, about
its content, whether it was ‘scientific’, and how they saw it in
relation to other exhibitions;
(c) Science – here we asked about interest in, and views of, science;14
(d) Visitors – socio-demographic information on age, occupation and
levels of formal education.

In discussing some of the results from this visitor research below my

intention is to focus on a number of matters which are of particular
relevance to this exhibition in terms of issues raised earlier in the book
but which also have wider implications. I begin with the ways in which
visitors framed their visit, for this partly shapes the way in which they
read the exhibition. I then explore some of the ways in which they
talked about this particular exhibition and how they interpreted it.
What is of particular interest here, and of broader relevance, is that
visitors seemed predisposed to read the exhibition in ways which had
not been anticipated by the creators but which took cues from the
exhibition itself. These cues included the exhibition media, the nature
of the institution and perceptions about the genre and topic, as we
shall see in the following sections.

The Visit: ‘on the List’

Why did visitors come to Food for Thought or to the Science Museum
at all? How did they talk about this? In the responses to a question
about why they had come I was struck that visitors often seemed to
employ the idea of a list or programme. For example:
 The Active Audience 223

It’s just on the list isn’t it? (Research manager from Brussels visiting with
wife and son)15

We had a list of things to do and one of them was the Science Museum
[laughs] (Man from Sussex visiting with wife and with three children
from Canada)

We’ve planned a programme of various things. The Science Museum was

on the programme always and it just so happened that this is the way
we’ve fitted it into our programme, but it was always a definite slot,
always (Male economic consultant from Ireland visiting with twelve-year-
old daughter).

The idea of lists is analytically suggestive, as Jean Lave has suggested

in her work on supermarket shopping. It allows us to try to identify
wider socio-cultural patterns as well as to consider visitors’ own
strategies for compiling their more individualised lists.16 So what sorts
of lists feature ‘the Science Museum’ as a place to visit? From this
research four could be identified: a day out, life-cycle, place and
education.

A Day Out
The characterisation of the visit to the Science Museum as ‘a day out’
was predominant in the interview responses. As such, it was part of
leisure activity set apart from ordinary daily practice – ‘a kind of
routinized non-routine’ as John Urry puts it.17 The Science Museum
was on this metaphorical list of places set apart for demarcated ‘special’
time. Sometimes important to this idea of a ‘day out’ was the notion
of ‘family’. This was a ‘family day out’ – an opportunity for the family
to be together. Some visitors talked of the difficulties of trying to find
activities which would interest all members of the family: a male sales
manager from Bedfordshire, visiting with his wife and two children
(seven and four) explained, for example, that Food was a good exhibi-
tion because of its capacity to interest different family members –
‘Anything that’s of interest to the family as a whole. . . I mean, you
know, it’s gotta. . . when you go to something everybody’s interested
in it’. Some visitors explained their presence in the museum in terms
of school holidays, perhaps saying that they liked to do something
‘different’ during them; and several were there to celebrate the birthday
of a child, again showing that the Science Museum as a special site
could help demarcate special time and special social relations. This also
224 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

connects to one of the more specific framings of motivation to visit,

that of life-cycle.

Life-cycle
Some visitors talked about visiting the Science Museum as something
which should be done at a particular stage in the life-cycle (especially
between about eight and twelve years old). There was often a sense of
imperativeness about this – of the visit as a naturalised part of the life-
cycle. For example, a female barrister said of bringing an eleven-year-
old relative: ‘I think we mainly wanted to bring A because we’ve been
and it’s part of his childhood’. In three-quarters of our interviews at
least one adult had visited the Science Museum previously and a semi-
nostalgic motive of providing the same experience for the children
was evident in many interviews. For example, a male estate agent,
visiting with his wife, their two sons (aged seven and two) as well as
the mother’s brother and an adult male friend, explained: ‘We planned
to bring the children to show them round the museums. It’s something
we did as children and we thought it would be good for them to do it’.
As this example suggests, bringing children could also be something of
an excuse for adults to have a reason to revisit the museum themselves.

Place
The Science Museum was often talked about as one of the ‘things to
do’ in London (or sometimes, for overseas visitors, in England). For
example, a twelve-year-old girl visiting with her mother and a friend
told us: ‘We haven’t been to London for a long time and we’re doing,
like, different visits and this is just one of the places we wanted to
come.’ Again, the museum is one possible item on the longer list of
possible places to visit. This is sometimes further specified by type of
location, especially ‘the museums’ or ‘the tourist sites’. Visitors were
sometimes ‘doing the museums’ or going to other tourist sites (includ-
ing Madame Tussauds, the London Dungeon, Buckingham Palace and
the Docklands Railway). The language of ‘doing’ is perhaps of interest
here, suggesting a list of things which can be ticked-off when they
have been dealt with.

Education
While most of our visitors did not specifically give education as a motive
for visiting the museum, there were some who did. A maths teacher,
 The Active Audience 225

for example, told us: ‘It’s educational. That’s what you come to a
museum for really, isn’t it? To learn.’ Moreover, some visitors contrasted
the museum with other kinds of leisure activities, especially theme parks
(for example, one girl was visiting instead of going on a school trip to
a theme park). A primary teacher from Twickenham visiting with two
teenage relatives from Edinburgh explained: ‘We do one educational
visit and a few not so educational visits [laughs]!’ There were also a
few visitors who had a specific interest either in the subject matter of
food, such as a mother and daughter who thought it would help with
the school and college work that they were both doing. More often
visitors had an interest in another subject in the Museum such as Space
or Trains and had also visited Food because it was new. Visitors with a
specific subject interest were more likely to be frequent visitors to the
Museum (some were making their fourth visit in the course of a year)
than were visitors on the life-cycle list who were often making their
first return visit in twenty years or so.

For any visitor to the exhibition, therefore, their own motives for
visiting might include a combination of these or perhaps other factors.
There was, for example, one group which had intended to visit the
Natural History Museum but had made a mistake and ended up in the
Science Museum instead. This should, perhaps, be assigned the category
of a particular type of visit (though not a specific list) for some staff
claim that many Science Museum visitors do indeed really mean to
end up at the museum next door!

Reading the Exhibition: Cues and Connections

Visitors undoubtedly bring much ‘outside’ information – drawn from
their own lives and experiences – to bear as they visit the exhibition or
talk about it. In some cases, exhibits become props for personalised,
often nostalgic, accounts. The reconstructed kitchens and shop were
particularly likely to produce these, with especially older visitors often
standing in front of them and reminiscing about the kitchens and shops
they had known. Exercise bikes and information about diet, as well as
the thinning or fattening mirrors, often produced (mostly negative)
comments by visitors about their own bodies; the food poisoning
exhibit could produce memories of bouts endured by visitors them-
selves; and exhibits about the making of jam or bread, say, might lead
to visitors talking about their own experiences of making these.
Sometimes, however, the exhibition acted as a cue for much more
226 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

‘exhibition distant’ accounts, such as a child, on seeing the stuffed cat

in one of the kitchens, talking about a pet cat that had been run over
or the exclamation from one visitor about hating gherkins on seeing
Henry Heinz’s marketing gherkin. That exhibitions can provide a topic
for group discussion – especially where it is pleasant and nostalgic rather
than distressing – is undoubtedly part of their appeal.18 Two female
pensioners whom I met in the gallery one day were reminiscing about
all kinds of subjects which the exhibition prompted and they explained
their enjoyment of being provided with cues to do so: ‘It’s nice to be
reminded, you see, taken back a bit. We enjoy being nostalgic.’ She
added, however, lest I think otherwise: ‘Don’t get me wrong. We don’t
spend all our time being nostalgic and looking back. We’re interested
in the new things too. But, yes, it’s nice to have the opportunity now
and again.’
Among the diverse personalised accounts, there were some themes
which recurred, especially those of the body and the past. In addition,
however, there was a related tendency to read the exhibition as being
‘about’ certain topics. The latter arose at various points in the interviews,
particularly in visitors’ general descriptions of the gallery and in
response to a question about its theme. The former was especially inter-
esting to me because what became evident in many accounts of the
exhibition was that visitors gave an account in which they linked
together disparate exhibits into a narrative which did not relate directly
to the physical sequence which they had encountered. Moreover, in
doing so, they also conceptually linked exhibits which had not been
linked by the Food Team and which were not formally linked in the
rigorous conceptual framework that the Team had struggled so hard to
create. Two narratives, in particular, occurred many times in the
interviews. These were a historical narrative – a story of transition from
the old days to the present – and a health narrative, about which foods
are good for you and which are not.

The History
In creating a historical narrative, visitors often talked of the historical
reconstructions – especially the 1920s Sainsbury’s, the delivery bicycle,
the market woman, the chestnut seller, the larders, the tea-house, and
the kitchens, often alongside ‘newer’ cases, such as the checkout scanner
and the McDonald’s. These would be talked about as though there was
a theme mapped spatially into the gallery, moving from ‘the old days’
into the present. As a journalist and her visiting relative (niece?) from
 The Active Audience 227

the US put it: Journalist: ‘[It] was well laid out, just sort of progressed
from, you know, one logical thing to the next’, Relative: We started out
in the modern part and came through the history into the 1900s’. That
there is no such neat historical development written directly into the
layout of the gallery – and other visitors perceived it too – illustrates the
power of this kind of reading. It is, perhaps, not surprising given that
this is a typical mode of presenting exhibitions and one which is very
common in relation to the kind of media which these visitors select.
While many visitors talked about the theme of the exhibition being
‘food through the ages’ or ‘history of food in the shops and what it’s
like, or in the home’, and while all saw the exhibition as emphasising
the degree of change, there were different views over whether or not
this was a good or bad thing and what the exhibition was saying about
this. We did not specifically raise this issue ourselves but many visitors
spontaneously talked about either things having been ‘better in the
old days’ (‘less of all that processing’) or as having improved over time
(the larders and the kitchens were both mentioned in this respect).
What may have been happening here was that visitors were reading
the account from already decided positions (they had pre-formed ideas
about whether things had got better or worse on the food front) though
the nature of the display, which was not altogether clear on the matter,
may well have also allowed for some ambiguity. Interestingly, visitors
tended to offer a clear-cut ‘better’ or ‘worse’ account rather than to
suggest that it might be a mixture of the two (though in one interview
participants argued about which it was). This may have been because
they expected a museum exhibition to be giving a single perspective
on the matter.

Good Foods, Bad Foods

The reading in of a categorical statement from the Museum was evident
in the other prevalent narrative, that of ‘good and bad foods’. Here,
visitors again linked together exhibits from different parts of the exhibi-
tion, especially those concerned with additives (in the chocolate mousse
pot), the section with the distorting mirrors, silhouettes and scales,
and – at the opposite end of the exhibition – that on nutrition. Again,
common display media seemed to prompt visitors to make these
linkages, many of these being fairly interactive areas. Of interest here
was not only that visitors made connections between exhibits that were
neither spatially nor conceptually linked according to the Team’s own
plans, but that they specifically interpreted the exhibition contrary to
228 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

a ‘message’ that the Team had hoped to convey. This message was, as
one of the panels stated, that ‘no one food in isolation is “good” or
“bad”’. Several visitors said that the gallery was about saying ‘what is
good for you’ or about ‘healthy eating’. As a female accountant from
Bishops Stortford put it: ‘There’s a lot of emphasis on healthy eating
and what are the right foods to be eating.’ A twelve-year-old girl from
Surrey was specific that the exhibition was about ‘good foods and bad
foods’, and a male lorry driver from Southend stated: ‘What’s good for
you and what’s bad for you, ain’t it?’
Of course, in many respects there is a marked theme in the exhibition
about a healthy diet and what a wood-turner from Huntingdonshire
described as ‘sensible eating’. What was interesting, though, was that
visitors did not pick up the information about not regarding particular
foods as good or bad, or, for the most part, about scientific uncertainty
(on which, more below), but seemed more likely to read the exhibition
as giving them fairly didactic information about what should and what
should not be eaten. Again, this shows a tendency to read the exhibition
in a way which is characteristic of other types of exhibitions – in this
case health education exhibitions.

Vanishing Technology
The ‘official’ main theme of Food for Thought – the theme that crystal-
lised out of the Rethink – was ‘to show the impact of science and
technology on our food’. A few visitors did suggest that the gallery
was about this, the most clearest articulation being from a home
economics teacher from Sussex who stated: ‘I thought the theme was
obviously going through the ages looking at the way [food]’s been
processed and changed. . . how technology has changed food and made
it more healthy.’ Few visitors, however, mentioned science, technology
or food processing in response to questions about what the exhibition
was about, which we found in many respects surprising given that this
was an exhibition in the Science Museum and that the exhibition
contained many large processing machines. Part of the reason for not
expressing the theme of the gallery in these terms may have been that
the topic was not for the most part perceived in this way and that, as
the two narratives discussed above suggest, alternative framings took
precedence partly because of the topic and partly because of some of
the display media. Indeed, when, later in the interviews, we specifically
asked visitors whether they had expected such a topic to be covered in
the Science Museum, the great majority said not.
 The Active Audience 229

Also contributing to the infrequency with which science, technology

and processing were mentioned as themes of the exhibition was the
fact that half of our visitor sample missed out the Food in the Factory
section of the exhibition altogether and half of those who did enter it
walked through it very quickly. Thus, although conceptually central
to the main message of the exhibition, and physically central in the
exhibition’s layout, this section was marginalised in the way that it
was appropriated by visitors. One likely reason for this was that, shorn
of the social and cultural dimensions which were once to have been
part of it, it seemed relatively ‘lifeless’ and so fewer visitors chose to
take this route. Managerially pasteurised, factory processing was, it
seems, less palatable to the consumers after all.

Choice, Transgression and Confusion

Food was regarded by its makers as challenging ‘authoritarian’ exhibi-
tionary modes in its attempt to remove barriers between visitors and
exhibits. Hands-on interactive exhibits were central to this but the
principle was extended as far as possible to inventoried objects too.
Another area perceived as challenging was the offer of choice to visitors
– choice over route, over types of media, and over content. So how did
visitors respond to these?
Visitors that we interviewed frequently stated how much they liked
being able to ‘do and touch’, this being a point which children often
made (in response to a general question about what they liked about
the exhibition). For example, a ten-year-old girl said: ‘It’s fun. There’s
a lot of things to touch and do . . . hands-on and things. So it’s very
interesting’, and a twelve-year-old boy told us: ‘[I] like this – where
you can do things and touch things.’ Some, such as a seventeen-year-
old girl, specifically contrasted this with reading: ‘It’s nice. You could
do things. It’s not just like reading. Like take part, which is really good.’
And others, such as a forty-three-year-old man, contrasted it favourably
with ‘more traditional’ Science Museum exhibitions: ‘It’s so refreshing
to see something where people can interact with the exhibits, take part
and actually touch things. It’s quite different to, for instance, the Science
Museum of my childhood when everything was in glass cases and you
had to read a lot of very small print to know anything.’ For a few
visitors, however, there was not enough to do and some specifically
complained about the amount of what one, tellingly, described as
‘written work’. A woman explained of her children aged ten and twelve,
‘They have to stand and read and they don’t want to. They want to get
in and do it. And I think that’s a big criticism of it really.’
230 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

Ironically, the popularity of the hands-on dimension of the exhibition

was one of the main sources of consternation for the Team members
who had, during its making, seen interactivity and allowing touch as
vitally important. The problem was that some visitors were too active.
Some of this seemed to be outright pilfering and vandalism in a
relatively unprotected exhibition: items like knives and forks and fake
food from exhibits ‘walked’, pieces were broken off one exhibit, and
fake carrots were stuffed in the mouths of the figures in the Sainsbury’s
reconstruction. But the bigger problem seemed to be the mix of exhibits
itself which all Team members decided ‘just doesn’t work’. What
happens, Sue suggested, was that this ‘hypes people up. . . so they have
a go at an interactive and they start wrecking everything else’. She
described some visitors climbing on the tea-packer and ‘hanging off it
like monkeys’. By the time that we carried out our visitor research the
exhibition had already been altered to some extent to try to fend off
over-enthusiastic visitors: rope barriers and perspex panels had been
put up to protect some of the most frequently damaged exhibits and
others had been repositioned. The Team had not, however, gone as far
as putting ‘Do not touch’ or ‘a big red cross’ on some of these exhibits,
although they had considered doing so at a particularly low point of
despair.
The idea of choice was not something about which we specifically
asked visitors but there was nevertheless material in the interviews
which can be interestingly read in relation to this. In giving an account
of the gallery, not only did many visitors reconstruct it into the narra-
tives discussed above, but also many seemed perplexed about not being
able to detect a clear route and narrative. Moreover, as well as those
accounts which reconfigured the exhibition into a story of ‘the history’
or ‘good foods and bad foods’, there were many others which jumped
from one thing to another with no order that we could discern and
with no correlation with the gallery layout.[Figure 6.3] For example, a
trainee teacher and her nine year-old son gave the following account
of the exhibition:

Boy: We went all around it and we saw, we saw the computer thing of
how they make Stilton cheese. I thought that was good. We went all
around to – I liked the McDonald’s bit where they showed the McDonald’s
and all the other things

Woman: That, it was interesting the way you perceive your own body
and they all change shape from the fat one. Yes, it was interesting looking
 The Active Audience 231

at the old kitchens and that but more so looking at the technological
and that Tetrapak thing. And, you know, I go to Sainsbury’s always to
do my shopping and it was interesting to see some of the things that
you see on the shelves, and some of the additives and things.

Some visitors themselves described their own movements through

the exhibition as ‘totally erratic’, ‘peripatetic’, ‘skated over’ or ‘just here
and there’, reflecting the apparent ‘free-association’ of the accounts.
Our own observation notes too are full of words such ‘drifting with
occasional “dipping in”’, ‘a bit erratic’ or ‘wandered’. Some visitors
assumed that they had somehow done the gallery in the wrong order.
For example:

I found it a bit confusing, perhaps because we came in at the output end

of it. There’s no clear direction indicating which end you should approach
the gallery. And obviously it would be better to deal with the basic
nutrition and things, and move around the gallery with the marketing
and output of food as the final piece. That’s a bit confusing. And perhaps
a clearer direction indicating that you should come in via the clock
exhibition would have been of some use (a local government officer).

Others also found the lack of a sense of direction disorienting:

I had difficulty following the theme through it. So it wasn’t, there didn’t
appear to be a predetermined way of walking through it. And I might
have preferred that – that they were taking me through a sort of ordered
thing. Maybe they were and I just didn’t pick it up that easily (employee
in airforce).

You feel a slight bewilderment, a bit like a rat in a maze, not knowing
quite which way to go (wood-carver).

This sense of ‘bewilderment’, of not being quite sure what was going
on, seemed to affect visitors’ own sense of their abilities to comment
critically on the exhibition. A phraseology of ‘deep’ and ‘superficial’
was used by various visitors, and they suggested that they were not in
a position for making a ‘deep reading’. One implied reason for this
was the overall nature of their visit – they were there on a day out,
perhaps to celebrate a birthday or relive an previous visit, and so were
not especially motivated to probe the exhibition content too deeply.
For example, a barrister explained: ‘We didn’t actually come in with
the thought of trying to find out about food. It was a case of it was
232 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

there and we looked at it and it was interesting and off we went. So it’s
not a case of being actively interested’. He also suggested, however,
that the exhibition itself did not particularly invite deep engagement:
‘It doesn’t go into that great depth. You sort of think “Oh well, that’s
that”’. For other visitors the ‘busyness’ of the exhibition, the constant
demands to make choices, seemed to run counter to thinking too hard
about anything. A research manager from Brussels explained:

I still think there’s a problem transferring information in this kind of

display – because you have to make a selection. And in the end you just
zonk out, you have too much. And so you look for some trivial thing
that catches your eye.

He continued by explaining some of the exhibits to which he had been

randomly attracted in the exhibition. Other visitors described a similar
experience of being ‘kept moving’ or being made ‘punchdrunk’.
In offering so many alternatives without a self-evident framework
or narrative, then, it seemed that this exhibition did not prompt visitors
into much reflection. Certainly, this is also partly a consequence of
the nature of the visit itself. As we see in the next sections, some visitors
do comment on the politics of the exhibition’s representation of the
topic. In addition, however, the counter-reflection tendency is further
compounded by some visitors’ views about the nature of the science,
the Science Museum and sponsorship.

Science, Certainty and Common Sense

As we have seen in relation to the construction of a ‘good foods, bad
foods narrative’, visitors tended to read Food as providing categorical
‘answers’ on the subject. Although this ran directly counter to a
statement on one of the exhibition panels, many of the exhibits, such
as the puzzles, can be said to invite the idea of single correct answers.
In general, it was noticeable in visitors’ accounts of the exhibition that
they talked almost exclusively of the three-dimensional exhibits and
only very rarely of what they had read on a panel – a point to which I
shall return below. Other attempts by the Team, or more especially
Jane, to highlight scientific uncertainty were also never mentioned by
visitors. Moreover, only occasionally did visitors raise questions about
the nature of the science and technology on display or the politics of
its representation.
 The Active Audience 233

Indeed, in referring to science and technology in the context of the

Food exhibition, Gilly observed, visitors tended to equate this with
‘health and safety’. For example, on being asked whether the exhibition
had changed her views in any way, a housewife replied: ‘Yes, I suppose
it has. Because I’ve realised that a lot of research does go into the food
we eat – especially with the additives nowadays. It’s nice to know that
the food we eat is going to be safe’, and a sales manager commented: ‘I
think that a lot of people worry about how convenience foods are
packaged and prepared and I think this gives you a better, an idea of
the high standards that are used in the preparation of those sort of
foods’. The processing machines and the interactive sections on
additives – nice clean areas (partly because of demands from sponsors
such as the National Dairy Council) – were most often mentioned in
such discussions.
Interestingly, when we asked visitors directly about science later in
the interviews, more sceptical views emerged. No visitors agreed with
the statement that ‘All of today’s scientific theories will be accepted in
a hundred year’s time’19 although some said that they thought that
the basics of many areas of science would remain. Many visitors pointed
out that scientists can make mistakes (the phrase, ‘They’re only human’,
was often employed here) and some specifically indicated that commer-
cial and political interests can affect scientific work. For example, a
woman doing a degree in applied biology pointed out that ‘if they
[scientists] are involved in industry they may be a bit biased from the
point of view of the profit of, you know, whoever they’re working for’.
In response to a statement that ‘Science and technology are making
our lives healthier, easier and more comfortable’, many visitors pointed
out the ‘bads’ as well as the ‘goods’ of science and gave sophisticated
accounts of commercial and political dimensions of science production.
For example, an economic consultant responded:

They’re capable of doing it. Whether they are is again a matter of who
controls the decisions – or, and who controls the use of what science
and technology is producing. I’d have my doubts about some of the
commercial decisions that might be made about the applications of
technology. I think they give us the – science and technology give us
the capacity for those things but whether it happens isn’t always the
decision of the scientist. It’s just either a political or a commercial decision
that’s often decisive.
234 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

When it came to considering the Food exhibition, however, few

visitors seemed to raise such questions about its content. In some ways
this was especially surprising given that, as we see in the next section,
the great majority of visitors thought that Sainsbury’s was the author
of the exhibition. In addition to the reasons already mentioned for
visitors not engaging deeply with the exhibition, there may also be
some other reasons why they did not raise questions of what in media
studies has been called ‘manipulative intent’.20 One reason concerns
the fact that many visitors did not really regard Food as a science exhibi-
tion (a matter which we specifically raised). For example, ‘It’s not
something that you would naturally think about being a science when
you think about food’ (airforce worker). For some visitors, those seeing
it as primarily a historical exhibition, ‘history’ was contrasted with
‘science’ (a division made by many Museum staff too): ‘I’d personally
say it is more historical than scientific’ (teacher). For many, however,
science was contrasted with common sense and everyday knowledge,
and Food for Thought was seen as more concerned with the latter. For
example, in response to the question, ‘Does this strike you as a scientific
exhibition?’ a decorator replied, ‘Some of it, yes. Others – common
sense’. One couple negotiated the answer as follows:

Man: Not really, no. It doesn’t go into that great an analysis, its. . .
Woman: No, not substantially
Man: Science is everyday and if that’s the case, then, yes
Woman: Not in the case of pure science as it were

What is evident here is a differentiation of ‘types’ or ‘levels’ of science

(terms which visitors themselves employed), though also the possibility
for an exhibition such as this to make visitors challenge their own
ideas about it. In general, however, visitors tended to position ‘real’
science elsewhere – ‘chemistry and physics’. This ‘real science’ tended
to be regarded as something difficult: ‘Things that you don’t actually
know’, as a seven-year-old boy put it. An argument between one couple
over whether the fact that oil and water do not mix is common sense,
and therefore, as he asserted not science, or whether it is science, as
she argued, because many people do not know this fact, highlighted
this distinction. Science is understood as knowledge which cannot be
grasped intuitively or within the framework of everyday activities.
Significantly, she won the argument when he conceded that he was
taught in school that oil and water do not mix.
 The Active Audience 235

As food generally is regarded as being concerned mostly with

everyday matters, this perhaps makes visitors more likely simply to
accept the knowledge with which they are presented in the Food
exhibition. The strategy of presenting science through the familiar and
everyday seems to have contributed to visitors not raising questions:
they are lulled into a sense that they are mostly being presented with
what is common sense. There is a catch-twenty-two situation for
exhibitors here. If visitors do not question the everyday because they
take it for granted, their perception of science as impenetrable by
laypeople equally means that they are unlikely to question the science
or technology with which they are presented. What other research on
the public understanding of science has suggested, however, is that
while lay-people rarely question scientific knowledge, they may
nevertheless raise questions about trust, responsibility and social
relations, just as many visitors did in response to some of our ques-
tions.21 In other words, the kinds of framework that laypeople tend to
bring to bear in raising questions about science are generally not
epistemological but social. It is the likely behaviour of the persons
involved and estimations of their reliability that inform lay judgements.
This has some interesting implications for the public understanding
of science. Many of its policies and programmes are directed towards
increasing ‘scientific literacy’ – in other words to increasing the amount
of scientific knowledge among the public. Not only does this not
necessarily lead, as noted in chapter two, to the public trusting science
more (which is one of the hopes of some of those involved in these
programmes) but it also fails to recognise the viability of the basis on
which judgements are being made. Without sufficient scientific
knowledge, the public is often regarded as coming to conclusions about
science on ‘irrational’ bases. However, we might argue that the citizen-
ship ambitions of public understanding of science projects might be
better achieved by increasing knowledge of how to judge social
reliability and where to go for information on matters such as likely
commercial or political interests.

Whodunit?: Authorship, Sponsorship and the

Discerning Consumer
The question of trust and judgements of reliability brings us directly
to the question of who visitors thought had created Food for Thought.
The overwhelmingly common answer to our question, ‘Who do you
think wrote this exhibition?’ was ‘Sainsbury’s’, several visitors saying
236 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

‘Mr Sainsbury’ (and one, ‘Mr Sainsbury’s grandson!’), ‘somebody who

works for Sainsbury’s’, ‘something to do with the Sainsbury’s enterprise.
I suppose their PR department’, ‘it was obviously someone from
Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s and Rank Hovis – someone who wanted
to promote the company’. Very few visitors regarded the exhibition as
written by the Science Museum.
The main reason for identifying Sainsbury’s as the author of the
exhibition was the name of the gallery: ‘Well, it’s Sainsbury’s isn’t it?
It’s called the J.Sainsbury gallery I think. Yeah, yeah. I noticed that at
the beginning. Yeah, first thought’. The content also contributed to
this, visitors nearly always referring to the grocery store reconstruction
and (to a lesser extent) the checkout scanner as ‘Sainsbury’s’. Many of
the visitors who identified Sainsbury’s as the exhibition’s author also
reckoned that this would mean that the gallery would be ‘an advertise-
ment for Sainsbury’s’ or ‘a sort of PR for Sainsbury’s’. Nevertheless,
only a minority of these visitors extended this assumption to thinking
about just how this might have affected the content. The following
are the only sustained examples from our study:

A woman doing an MSc in applied biology (quoted above for her sceptical
view of science) was critical of the lack of attention to intensive farming
and to the way that additives are presented in the exhibition: ‘I think
perhaps it’s biased in that it tends to point out the good things about all
this obnoxious things that we’re having’. On being asked whether she
thought that the fact that the exhibition was sponsored made any
difference, she replied: ‘It shouldn’t but maybe that’s why it’s biased’.

A man, who ran a transport business with his wife, commented: ‘She
thought it was more – it’s quite obviously biased towards Sainsbury’s.
We didn’t realise it when we were coming in [they had entered at Food
and the Body] until we got here, that it was Sainsbury’s. We thought it
was more like a general idea about food. It’s quite, I know that it’s
sponsored by Sainsbury’s, that’s obviously the reason why. But it’s
obviously, it’s more like walking through a grocer’s shop at Sainsbury’s
rather than telling you in great detail what food is all about, although it
does attempt to do that.’

A research manager said that he thought the exhibition was ‘probably

biased’. He added, ‘probably the underlying theme would be to make
supermarkets and food have a generally nice. . . The bias would be towards
less controversy rather than more. You could have, I suppose, put on a
 The Active Audience 237

sort of anti-food one that, you know, sort of organic food and all those
horrible stuff people put in’. Later in the interview he also said: ‘I don’t
think they were addressed, though, like the mass production aspect. Yeah,
I think that was the main. . . I mean most of the science and technology
is designed to do that, and how do you produce volume at a cheaper
price’. His wife, a schoolteacher, pointed out: ‘There were big areas of
modern technology that weren’t shown, like meat stripping’; to which
he commented: ‘Yeah, well, it just wasn’t, it didn’t touch upon anything
controversial. It was safe subjects’.

Even in this last interview, however, the respondents tended to temper

their criticisms. Continuing from the above, the discussion proceeds
as follows:

Man: Well, it’s quite difficult to say things in public that are controversial
because you get shoved out. . . It’s more balanced here I think, probably
less deliberately anti-food, more towards what actually happens now at
the moment, and yet with the bar-code and things. . .
Woman: But Sainsbury’s have a very respectable image, I mean they’re
very. . .
Man: Well, I have no problem with it being sponsored anyway. I think
it’s very American but I don’t have a problem with that.
Gilly: What do you think the people who wrote this gallery want you to
go away with?
Boy also present (aged twelve): Thinking that, warning you about food but
telling you that it’s not bad, it’s just got bad points and to look out for
them. But generally a good impression on food.

One point arising in the above interview is the image of Sainsbury’s.

Having decided that Sainsbury’s is responsible for the exhibition, and
even assuming that Sainsbury’s are seeking to advertise themselves,
visitors tend not to see this as particularly worrying. The reason that
they often give for this, as above, is the respectability of Sainsbury’s.
For example, an economic consultant mentioned earlier told us:

Institutions like the great museums have got to look for sponsorship. I
suppose that you have to choose carefully. . . but Sainsbury’s is a name
that is well known and does have a pretty high quality connotation. So I
think it’s a good name to be associated with. Because I suppose it’s one
of the biggest of the food companies but it has a quality connotation, a
fairly honest connotation about food. Obviously a sponsor mustn’t jar
238 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

with the message. I think that there are companies in the food sector
that might be thought to be pushing very hard but Sainsbury’s are
internationally highly recognised, so I think it’s a good one.

Others also made comments similar to the following from a clerical

officer visiting with her son:

It’s a name that most people know. It’s a place for shopping and people
have always expected a high standard from Sainsbury’s [. . .] Yes, I think
it’s, I mean, Sainsbury’s is the most, not because it’s the most well-known,
but it’s the one that people associate the food industry with.

In addition to the sense of trust in this particular sponsor, visitors

were also fairly laid-back about the role of sponsorship for several other
reasons. The majority of visitors thought about sponsorship in terms
of financial provision:

All museums have cash-flow problems I’m sure. And any sponsorship
you can get, providing it’s, you know, used in the right way, must be a
good thing. Because I take it you’re always trying to improve on any
particular exhibition so it must be a good thing (sales manager).

I dare say without the sponsorship they couldn’t have actually done it.
Good for the Science Museum. It’s very costly these days with all these
sorts of things. They charge you for admission so it probably wouldn’t
be in the Science Museum I suppose without sponsorship (computer
designer).

What they saw sponsors as getting in exchange for their money was
‘advertising’ and how they tended to evaluate advertising was in terms
of its ‘vulgarity’ (National Health Service manager), or ‘Americannness’
(as above). It was also about making the company name as evident as
possible: ‘It is the Sainsbury’s thing and there are a few Sainsbury’s
products but I didn’t feel that it was too far Sainsbury’s orientated [. . .]
I didn’t feel too much that it was “I’m Sainsbury’s, aren’t I good – buy
me”’ (trainee teacher). ‘I was aware of the sponsorship but it wasn’t
pushed down your throat’ (part-time computer worker). ‘I wouldn’t
say they’ve gone over the top’ (electricity meter reader). Regarding
sponsorship as advertising, visitors construct any ‘manipulative intent’
in terms of trying to persuade them to buy Sainsbury’s products:
 The Active Audience 239

Question: Do you think the fact that it’s sponsored makes any difference?
Man (maths teacher): Well, I suppose it’s an advertisement for Sainsbury’s.
Er, probably because people think. . .
Boy: . . .don’t mind really. . .
Man: Well, food and Sainsbury’s are synonymous. But I shouldn’t think
it has a bad effect – no. I would say it’s a fairly neutral effect. I don’t
think people are going to suddenly rush out and buy all the Sainsbury’s
things because they’ve seen it. So that way it’s not necessarily an
advertisement.
Woman (wood carver): Well, any exhibition of canned goods is inevitably
going to carry some advertising isn’t it? But I mean it’s part of life really
these days isn’t it? I object to it in sport far more than I do here really.
Brand names are the way we buy our food aren’t they really? So, you
know, you’ve got to be able to sort out what you want from them really.

What comes through in the interviews is visitors’ perception of

themselves as discerning or ‘streetwise’ consumers, aware of advertising
but able to decide for themselves whether or not to buy the product.
That the sponsor might shape the exhibition content in more extensive
ways is either not contemplated or assumed to be limited by the
involvement of science and the presence of the exhibition in the
respectable location of the Science Museum. Several visitors, discussing
the question of whether the fact that the gallery had been sponsored
would have made a difference, said that they thought that scientists –
perhaps nutritionists or food hygienists – or Science Museum staff
would have been involved. One teacher told us: ‘I should think that
there’s enough watch-dogs to make sure that the commercial side of it
is carefully watched’. Another teacher: ‘I know that it’s sponsored by
Sainsbury’s but, you know, I would imagine that they would use
experts’.

What we have seen in this chapter is that visitors are indeed active –
sometimes too active from the Museum’s point of view. They construct-
ively appropriate the exhibition into their own cultural lists, and discuss
it in relation to their own lives and interests. However, this does not
guarantee that they subject the exhibition to any kind of critique. On
the contrary, it is in some ways a consequence of that activity – visitors’
appropriation of the exhibition into frameworks of leisure and their
positioning of themselves as certain kinds of consumers – that makes
them relatively unlikely to raise critical or political questions.
240 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

The way in which visitors engage with the exhibition is also cued by
the exhibition itself. In the case of Food for Thought it is in some ways
the very fact of the activity, the ‘busyness’, that is demanded of them
that means that visitors do not ‘read deeply’ (as some put it). The
constant requirement to make selections, having to interact and ‘keep
moving’, seems to make it difficult to stop and think – though some
visitors suggested that they might do so later. In many ways visitors
are active consumers in the ways hoped by the exhibition makers: they
are ‘busy’ and mostly they are having fun. Yet this is not quite the
same as the active citizenship which is so often said to be an aim of
public understanding of science projects. There is little sense that
visitors come away from the exhibition more empowered in relation-
ship to the subject-matter. Indeed, for some visitors it seems almost to
have the opposite effect, giving them the sense of security that science,
expertise and respectability are all at work in producing their food and
making it safe and ‘good’.
Much work on consumption has focused on illustrating audience
activity. Such work is sometimes cast as morally superior to the kind
of research which seeks to consider ‘manipulative intent’. In the binarist
stereotypes employed, one pays attention to ‘the people’ themselves
in their rich variety and recognises the sophistication of, and subtle
resistances in, their readings, and the other positions readers or viewers
as ‘cultural dopes’, mere passive receptacles of producer manipulation.
Here, we have seen that ‘activity’ is itself a more complex matter and
that in some respects it is the fact that visitors must be constantly
‘active’ in certain ways in the exhibition that seems to make it more
difficult for them to be ‘active’ in the sense of being critically reflective
in others. Likewise, that visitors tend to see themselves as relatively
aware of, and hard to influence by, ‘advertising’, seems to mean that
they do not look for sponsor influence beyond the flashing of the
sponsor name.
In considering the material from the visitor research on Food for
Thought what seems particularly important is to go beyond classifica-
tions of ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ to understand more fully the ways in
which visitors are likely to engage with the exhibition. These are not
specific only to this exhibition. The kinds of ‘cultural lists’ on which a
visit to this exhibition features – leisure, life-cycle, place and education
– are likely to be shared, in part at least, with those for visits to other
kinds of exhibitions (and, indeed, other cultural products). Research
across a range of types of exhibitions could yield a fuller set of ‘lists’
which would come into play to greater or lesser extents. Equally, the
 The Active Audience 241

tendency to understand this exhibition in certain ways – the search

for a narrative, the expectation that the exhibition will be prescriptive
and give clear-cut ‘right answers’ – is likely to be widely shared (espe-
cially in relation to similar media and in contexts with an authoritative
national status). Further research could identify a wider repertoire of
cultural framings which are likely to be employed in relation to certain
kinds of exhibitions (between science and art exhibitions, for example),
and this could help exhibitors to engage better with viewer responses.
By ‘engage with’, though, I do not mean just ‘try to meet the desires
of’ – another elision typical of this moment in popularised public
culture. Rather, understanding likely presuppositions and assumptions
could also provide a foundation for creating exhibitions which might
draw impetus from, challenge or reflect on some of them.

Notes
1. Veron and Levasseur 1982.
2. The research was designed by Roger Silverstone, Gilly Heron and myself.
It was based on a pilot study which we ran in a geology exhibition in the
Natural History Museum. Gilly carried out the majority of the interviews and
preliminary analysis.
3. For accounts and critiques of museum visitor research see, for example,
Bicknell and Farmelo 1993; Hooper-Greenhill 1994, 1999a; Lawrence 1991 and
1993.
4. See, for example, Claeson et al. 1996; Hooper-Greenhill 1999; MacKay
1997; Silverstone 1994: especially ch.6.
5. See, for example, Ang 1991; McGuigan 1992; Morley 1995; Silverstone
1994: ch.6; Stevenson 1995: ch.3.
6. It is also sometimes referred to as ‘the new audience studies’ (see Morley
1995). Corner 1991 uses the term ‘popular culture project’. He contrasts this
to ‘the public knowledge project’, the latter being concerned with matters of
public knowledge, definitional power, the politics of information, and citizen-
ship (1991: 268).
7. Roger Silverstone is writing of television research but his point has broader
relevance: ‘The equation of social or individual difference and activity has been
a constant theme in television research. It has been repeated to the point of
banality. .. It implies that viewers (all viewers? all viewers by definition?)
242 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

construct their own meanings from their individual experiences of common

texts. This notion of activity is associated with a notion of difference: different
viewers create different meanings. Correlatively the idea that we may share
meanings, or that the meanings that we do derive from our engagement with
television are necessarily common (and in some sense determined), implies a
kind of passivity’ (1994: 153).
8. This has been called the problem of the disappearing text (see Silverstone
1994: 150). It has parallels with the ‘disappearing science’ problem noted in
chapter one.
9. In their study of readers of National Geographic (1993) Lutz and Collins
use the term ‘cultural discourses’ for the repertoire of ways in which readers
talk about the magazine contents. They also found that social variables did
not seem crucial in the deployment of these discourses (1993: 224).
10. We put up signs at the gallery entrances saying that this observation
was occurring, though we nevertheless aimed to be discreet. In practice, it was
generally difficult to eavesdrop.
11. That is, as broad a range as possible in terms of age and gender. We
made a conscious effort to try to include non-white participants but these
were not well represented in our sample, firstly because they consituted a small
minority of Museum visitors and secondly because we did not continue an
observation if a group was not speaking English. As the research was carried
out in the summer months there were many visitors from outside the UK at
the Museum. In practice, many of those we interviewed were not ‘families’ as
such, though we did not ask specifically about their relationships to one
another.
12. Only a very small minority came in through the gallery’s third entrance
and so we did not include this in the study.
13. In total, eighty-seven trackings were completed.
14. We also included here some questions from a national survey of scientific
literacy which was being coordinated from the Science Museum at the time.
Originally we had intended to compare our visitor sample with the national
sample; and for this reason used questions which the organisers of the survey
had found were ‘good discriminators’. Our attempt was, however, interestingly
unsuccessful. Rather than simply individually answering questions, visitors
generally discussed them collectively and sometimes pointed out different
possible interpretations of the questions or of what might be said.
15. Occupations are as visitors themselves described them. A series of dots. . . .
indicates a pause, but within parentheses [. . .] it indicates that a section of the
interview material has been cut here.
16. Lave 1988. She describes lists as ‘structured. . . expectations about the
process of shopping and what they [shoppers] will buy’ (1988: 152); and the
 The Active Audience 243

shopping trip as ‘one locus of articulation between persons-acting and the

structured arena’ (1988: 152).
17. Urry 1990: 10.
18. This point has been well made by Paulette McManus in her research on
museum visiting: 1987, 1988.
19. This was a statement taken from the National Scientific Literacy survey.
There it was intended to assess ‘attitudes’ to science in closed format. We,
however, found it particularly interesting in terms of the discussion it prompted.
20. Richardson and Corner 1986.
21. See Irwin and Wynne 1996; Irwin et al. 1996; Wynne 1996.
This page intentionally left blank
 n i n e

Behind and Beyond the Scenes

I n Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Ruby relates her life
story – from Conception, through Birth, through The Naming of
Things, to Wisdom (her funeral) and Redemption. (All of these are
chapter titles.) Alongside, or perhaps behind, and interwoven with
Ruby’s narration are chapter-length ‘footnotes’ which delve into the
past tangled lives of Ruby’s relatives. Through the novel, she learns,
and we learn, to decipher the surface appearance of ‘the museum’ –
her strange family. We come to understand why Ruby’s mother feels
about her as she does; we come to know that the slight verbal hesitation
as Ruby’s mother searches for her name has a history and that this
tiny oral tic betrays matters of enormous significance for Ruby’s own
life.

One day, when I was wandering around Food for Thought, I met a
curator who was working on another exhibition. He had come to look
at the new gallery, to see what he liked, what he didn’t like, what he
would like to try to emulate, what he would avoid. Thinking ahead as
much as reflecting on the gallery, he said to me:

I suppose that once the thing is finished, you look at it and think, “How
did it take so much time? How did so much work go into it?” You think,
“I could have done that.” But you don’t see all of the work that it takes
to get there. You don’t see all the things you had to leave out and all the
meetings and agonising over what to put in – the blood, sweat and tears.
You don’t see any of that stuff any more. It’s like, you thought you were
going to give birth to an elephant, and it’s more of a mouse really.

In this book, I have told a story of the work – the blood, sweat and
tears – that lies behind a finished exhibition. It is a story based on
having lived through the experience of its making. But it is not the

245
246 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

only story which could have been told. My own account could have
been considerably more elephantine. In telling of exhibition-making
and the workings of the Science Museum at a time of considerable
change, I have been concerned to recover some of the work, difficulty
and complexity of what goes on behind the scenes – some of the mess
that is tidied away in the finished product. In doing so, I have also
sought to try to understand why things turn out as they do, why
elephants transfigure into mice rather than, say, iguanas, why some
things are thought especially important to erase and others not. This
has led me to pay particular attention to what seemed to shape the
outcome – those, sometimes seemingly trivial or obvious events or
decisions along the way which leave a later trace, like the hesitation in
Ruby’s mother’s use of her daughter’s name. I have also been concerned
with the ways in which the finished, crafted and trace-strewn, cultural
product is interpreted, with the ways in which the makers’ dreams,
hesitations and silences are themselves variously noted, diffracted and
ignored by those who visit.

Specificity and Speaking Beyond

This has been the story of a particular institution – the Science Museum
– and a particular gallery within it, at a particular moment in time.
This particularity, this spatio-temporal location, is important, as I said
at the outset. But just as a novel is not only about the particular fictional
characters and plot that it narrates, an ethnography too speaks of
broader themes and predicaments. Whether Food for Thought: the
Sainsbury Gallery is, or is not, a ‘good exhibition’ (however we choose
to define this), whether one likes it or not, is not especially relevant to
whether it is good to ‘speak from’. Largely, of course, ‘speaking from’
(even if it is left largely implicit) is what the ethnographer seeks to do
in fashioning her narrative, though the capacity to do so is undoubtedly
assisted, as Bruno Latour observes, by ‘good timing’.1 Looking at the
Science Museum at a self-proclaimed moment of ‘cultural revolution’,
and looking at an exhibition that became, uncomfortably perhaps, the
vanguard of that revolution, felt like having chanced upon a time in
which routine practices and long-held assumptions were being ques-
tioned. It was a time in which participants had to come up with visions
and justifications for what they were doing. No longer could accom-
plished expertise be relied upon to deal with the demands; instead,
restructuring, revisioning, rethinking, reskilling and re-presenting were
called for.
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 247

This is not to say that things had been stable previously, or that
nothing was assumed and nothing remained the same. The changes
ushered in new assumptions, and, alongside, many museum staff clung
fast to long-held and sacrosanct principles, and certain enduring ways
of doing and thinking were simply not noticed. In telling the story in
this book, my intention has been to try to make visible what I could
of this. Below I return to some of these matters – the nearest an
anthropologist can get to ‘findings’ – to try to speak from them a little
further. But first, I want to comment briefly on this business of ‘speaking
from’ – which some might refer to as ‘generalisability’ (though to my
mind the ‘how far is it the same elsewhere?’ way in which this is usually
characterised misses some of the potential and spirit of what ‘speaking
from’ is all about).
When I started to make my first comments about Food, some in the
Museum were keen to point out to me that the next exhibition to
open would ‘be very different indeed’. It certainly was. The George III
collection of scientific instruments, presented on white plinths and in
cases (a minimalism intended to ‘put the objects first’), bore little
similarity to Food [Figure 9.1]. The George III was not interactive or
hands-on; ‘fun’ and ‘busy’ were not appropriate adjectives, and it was
definitely directed at a more knowing, scholarly and adult audience
than was Food.2 ‘It’s Rackhams!’, quipped one curator to me; Rackhams
being an up-market department store, though not too up-market, and
perhaps one which tries to present as more up-market than it really is
(so many possible subtle value-judgements in one swiftly uttered
analogy!). It was all very different from chocolate mousse-pots, McDon-
ald’s and supermarket metaphors. That the Science Museum chose to
display a precious object-rich collection at this moment was not as
surprising to me as some had clearly expected.
On the contrary. What I had witnessed in the Museum was a general
attempt to shift the focus from the collections to the visitors. It was an
attempt to move from a connoisseurship approach (in which displays
are determined by developed expertise) to a forensic one (in which
they have to be based on evidence of what visitors are likely to want).3
But it was by no means uncontested or complete, or even fully realis-
able. As I saw when I watched the gallery planning process, for example,
there was a strong object-lobby in the Museum. In part, this derived
from curatorial object-love and the cultivated object-feel which even
infiltrated Food. But objects were recognised as what was distinctive
about the Museum, and as what made it different from other leisure
or educational pursuits and from science centres. They were part of its
248 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER

TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 9.1 A different answer: the George III collection.

USP – its Unique Selling Point – as the marketing lingo of the time put
it. Moreover, as we have seen, staff were abundantly aware that not to
display objects was itself deeply problematic in terms of public account-
ability. How could they justify the continuing expense of maintaining
what they had, never mind adding to the collections, if the great
majority of objects were destined for the storage warehouses? In
response to such concerns, the display of a historically important collec-
tion such as the George III made sense. And it did so especially in the
wake of a relatively object-poor, populist interactive exhibition like
Food. It was a return of the object. But it did not in and of itself signify
the directions which the Museum would consistently take in future
any more than did Food: this was not that kind of a time. Rather, like
Food, it was one response to a set of deep-rooted dilemmas thrown up
by the ongoing seismic activity.
There is one senior curator who, whenever I meet him, always says
to me with a grin: ‘We’re restructuring again Sharon’. He does so, I
think, to acknowledge on the one hand the relevance of structural
change. On the other, though, he is suggesting that the restructuring
which I observed and which I describe was just momentary, soon to
be superseded. He is right, of course. Constant restructuring has become
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 249

a feature of public organisations. There is always the hope that a new

managerial structure might solve ongoing problems and accommodate
the different demands and constituencies with which an organisation
must deal. But alongside the structural experimentalism, there is also
ample and ever-increasing evidence of the forensic approach. While
attempts to recuperate some lost symbolic and literal territory for objects
will be made, and while there will be the necessity of meeting new
and unexpected demands too, this seems unlikely to sweep away the
prioritising of the visitor. Although this may take new forms, there is
no going back.

Social Drama and Hot Situations

In chapter one I noted Victor Turner’s idea that ‘social dramas’ – ‘public
episodes of tensional irruption’ – can be good to speak from because,
as Turner writes for the Ndembu, they ‘expose.. the pattern of current
factional intrigue, hitherto covert and privately conducted. . . and
beneath it there becomes visible the less plastic, more durable, but
nevertheless gradually changing basic. . . social structure, made up of
relations that have a high degree of constancy and consistency’.4 Social
dramas, Turner suggests, follow a particular processual structure: breach,
crisis, redressive action and reintegration.5 In the Science Museum in
the late 1980s there was a clear sense of breach, signalled by the language
of departure, of change, of newness and the ubiquity of the prefix
‘re-’. Crisis, Turner’s analytical term for the second stage, was also
characteristic of the context insofar as there was a sense of danger and
suspense, of factional differences, and of a surfacing of deep dilemmas;
‘crisis’ was also a word locally employed and with local synonyms.
Redressive action was also much in evidence: the restructuring, the gallery
planning, the corporate plans and press statements were all part of
this. But unlike in Turner’s structure, these seemed to continue alongside
crisis, and it was far from clear that all would settle back down into
reintegration. On the contrary, restructuring, suspense and planning for
different possible futures have continued unabated.6
This phenomenon of non-stop restructuring, which is characteristic
of many organisations (certainly including universities) today, is typical
of what Michel Callon calls ‘hot situations’. These are contexts in
which attempts to ‘frame’, or ‘bracket off’, events or institutions from
one another are experienced as exceedingly difficult: ‘reintegration’
or ‘closure’ are not reached. Whatever ‘frames’ are established, there
are overflows, matters which escape the boundaries established, so
250 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

that ‘everything becomes controversial’, with the tendency for the

controversies to ‘lurch first one way, and then the other’.7 In particular,
‘facts and values. . . become entangled to such an extent that it is no
longer possible to distinguish between two successive stages: first, the
production and dissemination of information or knowledge, and
second, the decision-making process itself’.8 In other words, ideas about
matters such as the public effects and usefulness of particular knowledge
and information about consumption are entangled in their production
and dissemination: it becomes impossible to define socially something
which can serve as a ‘knowledge base’.9 No part of social life can be
bracketed off as ‘disinterested’; uncontroversial authority becomes
increasingly difficult to find. We have seen examples of this in the
case of Food, where scientists present the Team with ‘facts’ in a form
in which they want the public to receive them, and in which the Team’s
own task of ‘dissemination’ is thoroughly shaped by notions of what
the public may want and by the presence of actual as well as phantom
visitors. This all makes it very difficult in hot situations to ‘reach. . .
agreement either on the facts or on the decisions that should be
taken’.10
Such hot situations are, Callon suggests, ‘not only becoming more
commonplace, more visible and more pervasive. . .; but more import-
antly it is becoming exceedingly difficult to cool them down’. This is a
consequence of ‘the growing complexity of industrial society, a level
of sophistication due in large part to the movements of the techno-
sciences, which are causing connections and interdependencies to
proliferate’.11 Others have suggested likewise, in different language,
and with different emphases.12 So rather than returning to a relatively
stable social structure as Turner imagined, what we see instead is
relentless debate, drawing on existing ‘givens’, and perhaps with some
enduring themes, about directions and possible futures. There is a search
for visions, structures and frameworks capable of stemming the
overflows, momentarily at least.

Framing, Containing and Transparency

Callon borrows the term ‘framing’ from Goffmann to describe attempts
to demarcate distinct contexts, arenas or sets of interactions.13 Framing
is concerned with setting the scene so that certain connections will be
made rather than others; it is about trying to direct flow and prevent
overflow. This is what television producers in Silverstone’s study of
television science mean when they talk about ‘framing’ too: they hope
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 251

in the first five minutes of the programme to establish a frame within

which the rest of the programme will be understood – they hope to set
the terms within which viewers will view.14
Framing can be relatively routine and taken-for-granted by social
actors, as it is for the most part in Goffmann’s account, or it can be a
more explicit and contested matter as it is to some extent for the
television producers. Making an exhibition, like making any other
cultural product, is likely to involve a degree of explicit framing. What
seems characteristic of the hot situation which I observed, however,
was the incessant attempt to formalise framing, to make it explicit,
clear and rule-governed. This was in many ways an unsurprising and
even logical response to the sense of dangerous overflow, proliferation
and multiple possible connections. Image management, mission
statements, aims and objectives, corporate plans, and rigorous concept-
ual frameworks were all part of the struggle to define, to frame, in an
increasingly warm climate.
One problem, however, was that the more rigorous or rigid the frame
was made, the more seemed to slip outside it – or more that was impor-
tant could not be accommodated. Take the Rethink, in which the Food
Team revised their plans into a ‘rigorous conceptual framework’,
consisting of a neatly organised nesting-hierarchy of explicit messages.
Some of the things they had especially wanted to include could no
longer fit. In itself, given the way the exhibition was proliferating, this
was no bad thing. But what was lost was not only ‘quirkiness’ – as the
Foodies generally phrased it – but also the interrogation of silences, of
the unsaid or unrecognised. Frameworks became their own self-
justification. As long as everything could be justified in the terms set
out, and in terms of the aims and objectives neatly listed, then the job
was being properly done.
Or take what would be the closest analogy to the first five minutes
of a television programme: visitors’ first impressions of a gallery. Here,
the Team’s ideas were so focused upon their own orienting messages,
and upon the task of just getting the job done, that they did not fully
explore how the arrangement of exhibits at the entrance would visually
frame the exhibition. They did not do so partly because of a panicky
sense of there being so little time (the timetable exerted its own framing
effect), but also because the verbally-defined messages that had been
devised excised attention to both possible non-verbal messages and to
other ways in which visitors might read the gallery (beyond the targeted
messages). But the Sainsbury’s shop, the Sainsbury’s checkout, the
Sainsbury’s packaging and the name of the gallery make a very clear
252 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

statement to visitors: that this is a gallery created by a supermarket

retailer. Certainly, there were all kinds of pragmatic and even aesthetic
reasons, some of which were undoubtedly beyond the Team’s control,
why it turned out like this. But the point here is that the very rigorous
thinking about what was included and why, was unfortunately – and
in many respects understandably – not accompanied by equally rigorous
attention to what was excluded and to much beyond the verbally-
defined ‘messages’. We might note here too that the large number of
panels in the finished exhibition, that so surprised the Team members
themselves, was largely a consequence of the language-based way in
which ‘messages’ came to be conceptualised.
Also involved in this kind of framing was an attempt to make explicit
or ‘transparent’, something deemed vital for ‘accountability’. So, for
example, Mr Suthers told the Team that one important reason for being
explicit about the messages that the gallery intended to convey was
that these could be used for evaluating visitor response to the gallery
later. Now, subjecting givens to question and trying to think about
why particular selections are being made is surely worthwhile. Anthrop-
ology, which entails a lot of this, generally assumes that by under-
standing process and being aware of what we take for granted we will
be better able to do otherwise should we so wish. However, the mana-
gerialist take on making visible and explicit was not generally quite in
this spirit. Rather than highlight alternatives, or make us aware of the
relative nature of particular selections, it tended to be used as a means
of constraining and legitimising. Success, or ‘effectiveness’ (the preferred
term of the language of the time) was to be judged in the terms defined
by the frameworks which had been set up partly with the job of
evaluating this in mind. Defining a ‘target audience’, for example,
became in part a way of defending an exhibition against criticism from
others who were excluded from the frame. What tended to ensue, then,
was a drive to create tight webs of self-circulating interconnections in
which ‘excess’ and the potential for questioning the legitimacy of the
framework itself were edited out. In itself, this process of trying to create
internal consistency within a cultural frame is not unusual or necessarily
problematic in itself. Michael Polanyi, for example, has highlighted
circular forms of reasoning which serve to uphold the system and pro-
tect basic assumptions from scrutiny in a range of examples including
ones from Azande witchcraft, the history of chemistry and political
ideologies.15 What is characteristic of the case here, however, is that
the creation of such structures is going on before our very eyes (as it
were) with a high degree of self-consciousness, clinical precision and a
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 253

rhetoric of transparency and visibility. Moreover, it produces (neverthe-

less? consequently?) internal contradictions or ‘irrationalities’.16
Not only was this evident in the making of the exhibition and the
gallery planning, but it was also characteristic of overall managerial
restructuring in the Science Museum and other organisations at the
time. In a manner fully analogous with the nested-hierarchy of the
exhibition ‘messages’, many organisations were busy concocting job
specifications which would make sure that anything defined as ‘redund-
ant’ to the overall mission statement or objectives identified would be
made just that. Yet this had the paradoxical effect that some of the
needs of the officially revered sovereign consumer could no longer be
met. Thus, as the Museums and Galleries Commission reported with
regard to the national museums as a whole (chapter two), and as some
Science Museum staff observed, individual visitor enquiries could often
not be dealt with and various educationally important programmes,
such as outreach (where museums make contacts with schools), had
to be reduced or curtailed. ‘Effectiveness’ might be increased and targets
met, but only within a framework that had specified sufficiently tightly
what effectiveness and targets were to be.

Enterprise, Consumer and Author Sovereignty

Many, perhaps all, staff in the Museum were well aware of this account-
ability fiction (which is, surely, familiar to others working in different
areas of public service). Yet they also knew that to appear as a ‘failing’
institution could be dangerous: appearing ‘effective’ was vital for assur-
ing a continued flow of funds. In the tautological neo-Darwinian
language of enterprise of the time, those who failed somehow deserved
to fail and the fittest survived. ‘Competition’ was one of the watchwords
and public, perhaps especially national, institutions (especially those
with any kind of scholarly aspirations) were regarded by the Thatcherite
government as in particular need of being subjected to its supposed
invigorations. It was clear that one function of performance indicators,
if such could be devised, would be to compare institutions with one
another, in order to rank them and identify some as ‘ineffective’. The
latter designation was cast by the government as a matter of the indi-
vidual responsibility of the organisation – it was being mismanaged or
showing insufficient enterprise. That it might need more funding or
staff to do its job better was a line of argument likely to cast by the
government as ‘whingeing’ (unjustified complaining) by the formerly
‘molly-coddled’ (protected from ‘facing reality’). Museum staff continued
254 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

to make such arguments, and sometimes (as in the example of the

Trustees’ protest, chapter two) they won victories of sorts. But, because
of the ways the alternatives were presented to them and because of
the harsh consequences into which these were built, they did not have
limitless choice any more than did ‘sovereign consumers’.
Museums did not, however, simply put into effect what was being
asked of them, partly because this was scarcely feasible and the routes
to achieve it were far from clear. Attempts by Museum staff to, variously,
construct elaborate performance indicators which would include (rather
than excise) matters such as scholarship and enlightenment, or even
the introduction of charging as a means of trying to extricate themselves
from government control, were in many respects admirable examples
of trying to use dominant rhetoric and structures in order to strengthen
rather than weaken their own hand. Even though such – in some
respects daredevil – strategies risked backfiring, they also enabled some
of those involved to try to bring about real and worthwhile change in
museums. The desire to make things better, to make museums more
open and responsive to the public, was the laudable ambition of many
museum directors and staff.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the same kind of entrepreneurial rhetoric
was used in relation to both organisations and individuals. Both were
conceptualised as essentially autonomous agents whose fates were
determined by their own self-made choices. This was in many respects
a ‘strong’ framing of entities: the vision was one of autochthonous
units, resistant to inflows, whose directions would be determined by
the selective links that they chose to make. The nation was another
entity often articulated in this way. That a political programme, based
on a vision of strong framing, became ascendant at a ‘hot’ time when
stability and boundaries seemed to be, or were talked about as, waning,
and fluidity and flow as increasing was not, perhaps, surprising. But
just as with accountability and transparency, there was something
fictive about this vision of sovereign entities. Excised from this talk of
choice and independence was much that affected the choices on offer
and individuals’ and organisations’ capacities to make them, not least
the panoply of mechanisms introduced for defining and monitoring
effectiveness and performance.
As we have seen, the Food for Thought exhibition in many respects
played to and represented the individual as sovereign choice-maker. It
could also be read as entailing some of the same fictions and excisions
of the enterprise perspective. The framework within which choice was
being offered was not itself made explicit and thus limits already built
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 255

into the choices on offer were hard to see (as, for example, in the
exclusion of primary production from the exhibition). Visitors were
cast as having more agency in relation to certain matters than they
surely did (as in the food poisoning case); and, despite the talk of
difference, there was a tendency towards sameness in terms of the rather
homogeneous way that the visitor was in fact imagined and in the
final appearance of the exhibition. In relation to the latter, there was
both less of a sense of variety between the different areas of the
exhibition and of difference from other exhibitions than the Team had
hoped – both consequences in part, I suggest, of shared cultural
assumptions. The verbal-messages and panels issue was partly involved
here; but so too were ambitions to speak to a generalised visitor, and
the elision of fun and interactivity with citizenship.
What is clear from going behind the scenes is that the Foodies were
operating with admirable and widely shared motives. What was
involved was a kind of ‘convergence effect’ of framing, in which the
Team’s vision of a democratising, empowering exhibition for ‘ordinary
people’, which they articulated to their gender and structural position
within the Museum, overlapped with a different political rhetoric. In
a sense, they found themselves framed: their visions and work were
set in a context which gave it inflections that they had not anticipated.
Yet, this was not something which anybody intentionally or uninten-
tionally did to them, and neither were they simply structured into it.
They did have an authorial voice and they did have agency, but these
were not absolute. Rather, different political ambitions and perspectives
were capable of sharing the same language: ‘public understanding of
science’, ‘participation’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘accountability’. As with
shared symbols in other contexts, such as those discussed by Turner
and mentioned earlier, the different possible political inflections rarely
emerged.17 Moreover, in the context of exhibition-making these
connotations were often embedded in non-verbal matters – the layout
of the exhibition, particular ways of organising, the mix of exhibits
and their particular juxtaposition. The Foodies might interpret these
one way – for example, that non-linearity was a good thing as it allowed
visitors to ‘make up their own minds’ – but they were legible in other
ways too. Without critical awareness of this, and without ‘redressive
action’, the Foodies were liable to finding themselves and the fruit of
their labours framed, sometimes at least, in ways which they would
never have intended to inscribe. This is, I suggest, a much more
common experience than is widely recognised. Moreover, Food for
Thought, which was at the time in many respects an experimental
256 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

exhibition, was, as I said at the outset, a learning experience for all

involved (me included). I did not see the dilemmas at the time – and I
was not desperately negotiating with companies and other organisa-
tions and working against a deadline to get the gallery finished. One
reason for writing this book, even now, is to use this benefit of hindsight
and time to reflect in order to try to raise questions which most of us,
in the helter-skelter of trying to get things done, rarely have the
opportunity to address.
What is also clear, then, is that there is no sovereign author: the
agency to shape the outcome of the exhibition is distributed among
multiple actors – non-human as well as human, conceptual as well as
material. Nevertheless, it is not equally distributed. The fact that none
of those involved is autonomous or overridingly powerful – not even
those sometimes credited with so being (the Team, the Director, the
government, the budget. . . .) – does not completely absolve responsi-
bility for the final product. Responsibility might be distributed too,
but it is not dissolved. Authorship, in the sense now of those who are
formally credited with agency, is also an acceptance, and even an
assertion, of responsibility.

Science and Citizenship

Food for Thought was in many respects a very successful exhibition.
To dwell on its political ambiguities, silences and inflections is,
therefore, perhaps, an academic exercise which has little relevance for
the important business of ‘the public understanding of science’. Visitors
did not report major dissatisfactions with the exhibition and many
said they especially liked the hands-on dimension and found it
preferable to more traditional styles of museum display. The exhibition
also seemed able to challenge the expectations of some visitors about
science: they saw that it could be a matter of the everyday, that it could
be familiar and approachable.
The ultimate ambition of public understanding of science pro-
grammes is often expressed in terms of enabling the public to participate
more fully as citizens (see chapter two above). In order to do so, it is
regarded as vital that the public has a better understanding of science
because it is assuming an ever-greater importance in the contemporary
world. So ‘making science accessible’ is seen as the route to providing
‘understanding’ and this, in turn, as a way of enabling the public to
make rational choices. Although ‘making accessible’ might mean
various things, it is often equated with making science ‘fun’, ‘enjoyable’
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 257

and ‘user-friendly’: cartoons are often talked about as especially good

at ‘getting messages across’, and hands-on interactives tend to be
thought of as toys. (Museum staff sometimes talk about Launch Pad as
a play-pen; and Museum visitors often talk of interactives as things to
‘play with’.) In Food, making science ‘accessible’ was also seen as about
making it ‘familiar’ and embedding it in the safe worlds of everyday
life and domesticity. All of this has a place. Yet, science is not necessarily
accessible in any of these ways: it can be difficult, complicated, risky
and rather unfriendly. Understanding this is part of the understanding
of science too. If citizens are to be able to evaluate science and make
informed choices they need to be able to understand its potential
benefits and risks; they need to notice its presence in their everyday
lives and its distant and global effects which may be far less visible to
them.
In the making of Food we saw that differences on matters of ‘fact’
were very rarely at the basis of the controversial matters with which
the Team struggled, and that these could not, therefore, be dealt with
by ‘getting the facts right’. Moreover, it was also clear that there were
differences among scientists and that they did not necessarily speak
with the socially good and disinterested voice that is often assumed
within the public understanding of science perspective. It was far from
clear, then, that members of the public would be able to make clear
decisions if they were better aware of what scientists were saying.
Neither would understanding scientific technicalities necessarily equip
them to make choices about controversial matters involving science.
Very often, the important matters that might affect public views were
not about ‘science itself’, as it has come to be defined, but about the
contexts in which it was embedded. In other words, they concerned
social and environmental matters, such as consequences in particular
locales and the likely interests of the parties involved. As we saw, visitors
did sometimes seem to be predisposed to judge and think about science
in these ways. As I suggested, then, it is to providing more sophisticated
means for them to do this, and information on where to go to for the
sources to make such evaluations, that public understanding of science
programmes might also be directed.
One of the reasons why visitors to Food for Thought – an exhibition
about a potentially highly political and controversial topic – do not
ask very probing questions about either the subject-matter or the exhibi-
tion’s representation is that their framings of their activity converge
with those by the Team. Visitors find themselves ‘busy’ in the exhibi-
tion; they have fun, they are engaged in something about leisure, they
258 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

recognise the familiar, and (as in their ‘street-wise’ approach to sponsor-

ship) they position themselves as sophisticated sovereign consumers.
Yet it is precisely this that leads them not to question deeply. The
exhibition does not for the most part shake them out of their presuppo-
sitions into new perspectives and questions. Such an exhibition might,
of course, be less fun and less enjoyable, though let us not assume that
it would. But it is visitor ‘satisfaction’ and ‘enjoyment’ that have become
overriding and sometimes exclusive indicators of what counts as
success, and possibly the easiest routes to providing these do not entail
raising provocative or taxing questions. This is by no means confined
to this exhibition or to museums. Readers working in universities, for
example, may find their own parallels. To give just one: in some
university departments the quantified result of a question like, ‘How
enjoyable did you find the module overall?’ is taken as a cumulative
index of the success of a course, and, correlatively, in the equivalent of
the entanglement of curatorial identities with those of exhibitions, of
those teaching it. We, surely, with our relatively selected and ‘captive’
audiences, have even less of an excuse than do museums.

Enjoyment matters, of course. The point here is just that we shouldn’t

reduce everything to it or allow it to obscure other important things
or its connections with other matters (such as learning, politics and
objects). Museums and exhibitions are complex institutions which
cannot be reduced to single functions. They are not simply fun-factories;
neither are they only shrines to hallowed objects, three-dimensional
text-books or citizenship training courses. And they are not super-
markets or department stores either.
Museums, and perhaps especially national museums, are invested
with all kinds of public ambitions and hopes. They are expected to
represent the nation and its achievements, to tell ‘us’ who ‘we’ are, to
identify and conserve significant items of material culture for posterity,
to engage in scholarly work on the collections, and to bring education
and enlightenment to as wide a population as possible. They are also
expected to provide a good day out, to let us see those specific objects
which we want – for one reason or another – to see, to let us know
whether something we have found is important or not, to be suitable
places to celebrate a birthday or to pick up a gift for a friend. It’s an
important job. And it’s a tall order
There have, over the years, been all kinds of predictions of the demise
of the museum. It will be superseded, some have suggested, by elec-
tronic and virtual technologies – a technophiliac’s dream as Charles
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 259

Saumerez Smith has put it.18 Television is, perhaps, better able to convey
a sense of context, movement and drama: so why get off the settee?
Or, rather than going bodily to museums, we could visit them on-line.
In the case of science museums, there have also been anxieties about
science centres – hands-on interactive centres which, unhampered by
‘objects’, are sometimes thought better at explaining science and
making it accessible than are museums.19 Theme parks have caused
qualms too: are these not just so exciting that nobody ever again will
want to visit poor old museums? Or perhaps museum visiting will
simply be overtaken by the growing national pastime of shopping.
It is in response to these perceived threats that museums have
introduced audio-visual and computerised technologies, interactives,
animated rides, ace caffs, gift shops and mail-order catalogues. That
museums are alert to cultural trends, that they look for new ideas and
borrow from them, seems to me to be one of their strengths. But at
the same time, they shouldn’t – and for the most part they don’t – try
to be those other places, just as they shouldn’t see their role in the
singular. Museums shouldn’t forget the great collections of objects that
they have accumulated over the years, neither should they forget their
public cultural status. Museums are invested with a rather unique and
special complex of cultural authority, property and expertise. Perhaps
more than anything, they need to protect this against attempts to cut
this down to more limited and culturally impoverished size.
Over the past decade the Science Museum has produced many new
exhibitions and an impressive programme of innovative and often
reflexive and interactive projects to engage the public. These have
included conducting research on public views about various aspects of
science, setting up public-information ‘hot-lines’, holding consensus
conferences in which citizens come together with scientists to discuss
controversial issues, hosting artists in residence, showing art-work on
scientific subjects and allowing artistic and politicised interventions
in existing displays, building a major new wing of the Museum
dedicated to medicine, creating a new ground-floor gallery – The
Making of the Modern World – to show thousands of historically
important objects from the collections, mounting temporary exhibi-
tions on controversial subjects and exhibitions in which the comments
of the public become part of the exhibitions themselves, showing
objects and the construction of galleries on-line, and even holding
sleep-overs.20 Some of these show the continuing dedication to objects,
collections and scholarship. Others seem to signal an even more
intimate relationship with the visitor and even greater opportunities
260 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

for visitor activity. They also suggest changing configurations of the

visitor, including more citizenly engagements, and the willingness to
ask probing questions about the nature of science and science museums.
Looking now from outside, rather than from behind the scenes, I am
encouraged by the scope and variety of these developments. And from
my time behind the scenes, I know that they will be the outcome of
negotiations and struggles between extremely able and dedicated
museum staff, and between museum staff and the multiple other actors
involved in the production of public culture.
As I finish this book, the Science Museum announces that it will
abolish admission charges. This feels like a seductive closure. But
although it can serve as such for my narrative, it is not so either
analytically or historically. This story has not been about the effects of
admission charges (charges were but one, logical and significant but
nevertheless optional, element of a bigger movement), and the abolition
of charges will not jettison the Museum back to how things were in
pre-admission days. We will, perhaps, see a new chapter in the life of
the Museum but many of the dilemmas with which museum staff
struggle – how much space to give to objects, how to understand
visitors, who and what to involve in exhibition-making – will continue,
and whatever happens next will also have to work with or against the
changes we saw here. One of my own most lasting impressions from
behind the scenes is of the dynamism, passion and commitment of
many Museum staff. This may make them ‘stubborn buggers’ and lead
to ‘factional warfare’ as I was warned at the beginning. But it also creates
an energy in the place and makes it sufficiently complex and diverse
to resist attempts to frame it too narrowly. This excess is its magic.

Notes
1. Latour 1987: 2. Geertz, comparing the analysis of the Balinese cock-fight
with reading Macbeth, provides an insightful discussion of this business of
‘saying something of something’ as he puts it (1973: 448).
2. The exhibition also sought to discuss ideas about scientific knowledge as
process, and indeed did so in self-conscious juxtaposition with its own
presentation of science as objects. See Arnold 1996 for a discussion.
3. See Gibbons et.al.1994.
 Behind and Beyond the Scenes 261

4. Turner 1974: 38-9.

5. Turner 1974: 33.
6. See, for example, Shelton (forthcoming).
7. Callon 1998: 260, 261.
8. Callon 1998: 260.
9. Callon 1998: 260. Callon discusses BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalytis –
‘mad-cow disease’) in an extended example.
10. Callon 1998: 261.
11. Callon 1998: 262, 261.
12. See, for example, Beck 1992, Castells 1996, Held, McGrew, Goldblatt
and Perraton 1999.
13. Callon draws on Goffman (1971) in order to examine economists’
attempts to define particular economic arenas. Both Callon (1998 and 1999)
and Latour (1999) have recently highlighted the importance of ‘framing’ as a
way of correcting what they see as a misunderstanding of actor network theory.
The latter was never meant to imply that movement through networks was
unmediated and instantaneous (Latour blames the world-wide web for this
‘double-click’ misapprehension). What was intended, rather, was to highlight
the ‘transformations’ or ‘deformations’ involved in movements through
networks: as Callon pointed out in an early paper (1986), translation entails
treason. Attention should, therefore, be paid to the attempts to route and limit
the movements of actors. See also Barry 2001.
14. Silverstone 1985: 108.
15. Polanyi 1982 (orig. 1958). Thomas Kuhn (1962) has also famously argued
likewise. Geertz (2000: ch.7) provides an interesting anthropological evaluation
of Kuhn’s work.
16. Polanyi notes this phenomenon – though in other terms. ‘Irrationalities’
is used by Max Weber in his account of rationalization (1978) which bears
strong parallels with the argument here.
17. It has been argued that one reason for the success of Thatcherism is
that it was capable of colonising language in this way and thus appealing to,
or becoming a means of expression of, a broader range of subjects than might
have been its ‘natural’ constituency. See Hall 1980 and Stevenson 1995: ch.1.
18. Saumerez Smith 2000.
19. Contributions to Farmelo and Carding 1997 and Lindqvist 2000 provide
discussion of this.
20. For discussion of some of these see Cossons 2000, Gammon and Mazda
2000; Joss and Durant 1995, and the Science Museum web-site: http://
sciencemuseum.org.uk
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 Appendix: V isitor Study
Visitor
Questionnaire

Introduction
Hello, I am from Brunel University and we are doing a study about going
to museums. Could I please ask you some questions?

A. The Exhibition
1. I am interested in the exhibition that you have just seen. Could
you describe where you went and what you saw?
2. What did you think of the exhibition? Please feel free to say
whatever you want.
What did you like/like best?
Was there anything you disliked?
3. Do you think that there was an overall theme?
Do you think that there is a story to it?
4. What sort of people do you think this exhibition is designed for?
Does that include you?
5. Who do you think wrote this exhibition?
What do you think the people who made this exhibition want you
to go away with?
Did you notice that the gallery is sponsored? Who by?
Do you think that makes any difference?
6. Does this strike you as a scientific exhibition?
Were you surprised to see it in the Science Museum?
7. Is this the sort of exhibition you like?
What sorts do you like?
8. Did the experience of visiting the exhibition change your views
about the effects of science and technology on the food you eat?
In what way?

263
264 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum

9. Is there anything you still want to know about food that you could
not find out about in the exhibition?

B. The Visit
1. Where have you come from today? Is that where you live? How
long did it take you?
2. What prompted your visit today? Did you come especially to see
this exhibition?
What did you come to see? Did you know anything about this
exhibition before you came?
Are you particularly interested in the subject of this exhibition?
Have you been to the Science Museum before? How often?
Have you seen or do you plan to see any other exhibitions while
you are here?
3. Do you visit museums often? When was the last time? Where was
that to?
Which museums did you visit in 1989?
4. What other sorts of things do you like to do in your free time?

C. Science
1. Now I have a question about your interest in various issues. For
each of the following I would like you to tell me whether you are
very interested, moderately interested or not at all interested:
New medical discoveries
New inventions and technologies
New scientific discoveries
Science fiction
2. Do you read any magazines about what is going on in science and
technology? [If yes] Which do you read? Any others?
3. Turning to some television programmes [ask for each listed below]
– do you watch [programme name] regularly, occasionally or never:
TV News
Sky at Night
Horizon
Tomorrow’s World
QED
Know How
4th Dimension
Other science programmes (please specify)
 Appendix 265

4. I have here a list of statements. For each I would like you to tell me
how much you agree or disagree with it:
Scientists can be trusted to make the right decisions
Science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier and
more comfortable
If scientific knowledge is explained clearly, most people will be able
to understand it
Ordinary people are not told enough about what scientists do
All of today’s scientific theories will be accepted in a hundred years
time
It is not important for me to know about science in my daily life

D. Yourself/Yourselves
Now I would like to ask you a few questions about yourself/yourselves
(to help us to analyse our study)
1. Can I ask how old you are?
2. What is your occupation? (If unemployed or retired please note
previous job if applicable)
3. When did you leave school? Have you done any studying since
then?
4. Have you passed any exams or got a qualification in a science
subject? [If yes] Which?

Note: For a full analysis of this see Macdonald 1993

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 Index

accountability, 32, 34, 252–4 alcohol, 184–5

see also audit analytical approach, 64, 67, 88n5
ace caff, 35, 36 architecture, 25–6, 29–30, 164
activity, 162, 186, 219–20, 238–40, art market, 96
241–2n7 astronomy gallery, 127–8, 137
actor network theory, 7, 19–20n8, Atkinson, K., 16, 245
89n20, 94, 261n13 audience, 8, 47, 80, 118, 220
admission charges research, 9, 219–20, 241n6
abolishment of, 19n1, 260 see also visitor research
and Food gallery, 119, 209–10 substitution
at British Museum, 56n63 see visitor substitution
at independent museums, 38, 41 target, 17, 119, 157, 158, 252
introduction of, 3, 34, 35, 41–2 see also visitors
see also finance, money, plural Audio-visuals, 152
funding policy audit, 10, 54n30
advertising, 35, 238, 239–40 see also accountability
the Science Museum, 46, 57n71 authenticity, 88n11, 95, 168, 185,
see also ace caff, marketing 188, 213
advisory panel, 133–5, 168 authorial puzzle, 8, 93–5, 131
age, 61, 172–3 see also authorship
agency, 8, 87, 94, 212–13, 219, 255 authority, 37, 95, 148, 158
and choice, 166 authorship, 8, 87, 94–5, 128n2, 148,
see also choice 255–6
of non-humans, 7, 107–8 in Food gallery, 110–11
see also actor network theory in Science Museum, 109–11, 206–7
of visitors, 163 and sponsorship, 235–9
see also visitors see also agency, authorial puzzle,
see also authorship naming
agriculture, 120
new gallery, 115–16 Bal, M., 86

285
286 Index

Bauman, Z., 47 citizenship, 55n42, 115, 186, 189n1,

Beer, S., 188 240, 241n6
Bell report, 27, 28 and science, 256–8
Bennett, T., 29, 67 see also democracy
bodies, 115, 225, 226 class, 29
body ideals, 173–4 dominance, 30
Bow report, 56n65 of visitors, 119, 129n13
Britain Cole, Henry, 24
as an ‘old country’, 38 collections, 29, 40, 43–4, 63–5, 73–9,
as an industrial nation, 50 259
see also Britishness, nation, and Food gallery, 113
national status and persons, 64–5, 109
British diet and visitors, 247
see diet see also curator, curatorship,
British Food and Farming Year, objects
118–19 Collections Management, 4, 43–4
British Museum, 34, 41, 52n2, 56n63 colour scheme, 213
visitors, 161, 190n5 commercial scientists
Britishness, 171–5 see scientists
budget, 34, 69, 123–4, 129n5 Committee on the Public
see also cost of gallery, finance, Understanding of Science, 57n76
money commodity fetishism, 181
Bywaters, Jane, 98–9, 113, passim common sense, 232, 234–5
communication model, 6
Callon, M., 249, 250 Conn, S., 27, 28, 29, 31
careers, 64, 97, 109, 203 connoisseurship, 247
Carter, Ann, 102–3, passim Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 26
charging Construction and Building Services
see admission charges (CABS), 151–2
Children’s gallery, 67 consultancy, 12, 45, 46–7, 148, 169
choice, 122, 162–6, 175, 209, consumer
229–32, 254 active, 36–7, 162, 240
and citizenship, 186–9 and food poisoning
see also citizen, citizenship see food poisoning
and democracy, 162 as citizen, 44, 55n42
see also democracy choice
consumer, 141, 181, 187 see choice
see also consumer privileging of, 9, 44, 115, 152
citizen, 29, 49, 55n42, 71, 187, sovereignty, 157, 254
190–1n14 see also consumption, visitors
see also consumer as citizen consumption, 55n42, 115, 186
 Index 287

foregrounding of, 120, 176, 180 decoding, 8, 20n12, 93, 158, 189n2,
of food, 120, 167 219
see also food see also encoding
research, 240 deficit model, 49
see also consumer democracy, 40, 69, 186–8, 219
controversial matters, 122 and choice, 162–4
see also controversy see also citizenship
controversy, 134, 177, 250, 259 Derrida, J., 95
see also controversial matters design, 139–41
corporate identities, 114 designers, 15, 110, 112–13
corporate plans, 54n31, 251 on Food for Thought, 105–6, 125,
Cossons, Neil, 13, 40–3, 52, 56n60, 139–41, 212–13
144, 207 Deutsches Museum, 26
cost diet, 140, 166, 171–5, 183
of exhibition-making, 95–6 dioramas, 29
of Food gallery, 95–6, 124, Director of Science Museum, 13, 27,
128–9n5 33–4, 40–3, 116
see also budget, finance, money and authorship, 206–7
creativity, 115, 153, 155, 206–7 and Gallery Plan, 60, 82–4
crisis, 31, 37, 249 and Rethink, 143–7
cultural accounts, 220–2 staff perceptions of, 147, 206–7
culture producers, 7–8 see also Cossons, Follett, Lyons,
curatorial control, 126, 213 Weston
see also editorial control Disneyfication, 3, 40, 69
curator-interpreters, 113
curators East Hall, 26, 45, 57n70
and exhibition-production, 43–4, editorial control, 148, 150, 158
78–9, 109–10 see also curatorial control
and galleries, 205 education, 30, 224–5
changing role of, 7–9 Education section, 61, 152–3
identity as, 60, 64–5, 113, 137–8 encoding, 8, 20n12, 93, 158, 189n1
see also professional identity see also decoding
see also curator-interpreters, enterprise, 41, 186–9, 253–4
curatorship enterprise culture
curatorship, 67, 79, 137–8 see enterprise
see also expertise, interpretation, Esteve-Coll, E., 35
professional identity ethnic
customer diets, 173–4, 183
see consumer difference, 174
minorities, 37, 158, 182–3
de-acquisition, 65 see also race
288 Index

ethnographic research, 6–8, 13–15, food

20n11 and n13 and public understanding of
evaluation, 46 science, 116
formative, 158, 170, 187 as exhibition topic, 115–22
evolutionary dispays, 27, 164 poisoning, 134, 150, 170, 177–80,
evolutionary narratives, 30, 176 225
exhibitions processing, 120, 148, 176–7, 181,
and collections, 43–4 228
orientation of, 43–4, 45 production, 120, 122, 134, 140,
production of, 109–10 176
experience, 39, 137 forensic approach, 247, 149
expertise, 9, 40, 51, 114, 129n10, Foucault, M., 29, 94
246 Fox, R., 89n19
curatorial, 64, 113 framing, 6, 19n6, 212, 249–55, 257,
see also curator, curatorship 261n13
in Museum, 112 by visitors, 220, 228, 241
professional, 69, 84 fun, 121, 136–7, 162, 186, 188, 229,
see also professional identity 257
see also experts, scientists
experts, 32, 40, 123, 239 Gable, E., 7
see also expertise, scientists gender, 61, 88n9, 158, 207, 255
and team structure, 63, 108–9,
factory, 176–7 111–12
see also food processing representation of, 88n9, 172
facts, 150, 156n4, 178–9, 184–6, 250, see also women
257 George III exhibition, 247, 248
see also factual accuracy, Giddens, A., 85
objectivity Goffmann, E., 250, 251
factual accuracy, 133, 150, 159, Gramsci, A., 29
185–6, 257 Great Exhibition of 1851, 24, 25, 26,
see also facts, objectivity 52n2, 63
familiarity, 7, 121, 169, 172, 176
family, 223 Handler, R. 7
feasibility study, 117–24, 152 hands-on, 29, 39, 95, 229–30
finance see also interactive exhibits,
of Food gallery, 123–4 interactivity
of museums, 32–3, 88–9n12 health, 115–16, 118, 140, 227–8
see also budget, money, plural Heelas, P., 186
funding policy heritage boom, 38–9, 41, 56n53
flexibility, 63, 84–5, 114 history
Follett, D., 28 and narrative, 226–7, 130
 Index 289

and science, 146, 147 knowledge, 11, 47, 188, 234, 250
of Science Museum, 24–8 division into domains, 64
Hoskins, J., 16 production of, 94
hot situations, 249–50
Hudson, K., 161 labelling, 67
labels, 28, 46, 53n15
image management, 34, 54n36, 251 Latour, B., 246
see also impression management Launch Pad, 29, 39, 152, 153, 154,
impression management, 4, 209 161
see also image management see also Interactives Group
industrial collaboration, 123 Lave, J., 223
see also scientists – commercial, legislators, 47
sponsorship Lewenstein, B., 48
industrial revolution, 26, 68, 73, 74 life-cycle, 224
Information Age, 14, 28, 97, 111, lists, 222–3, 239–40, 243n16
183 Lyons, Henry, 28, 29, 47
institutional regression, 148
interactive exhibits, 29, 95, 138, 142, McDonaldization, 191n18
162, 229 McDonald’s, 92, 211, 226
see also hands-on, interactivity machines, 135, 233
Interactives Group, 152 Macnaghten, P., 47
see also Launch Pad Mamet, D., 5
interactivity, 166 management, 35
see also hands-on, interactive consultancy, 12
exhibits managerial restructuring, 42–3, 110,
international comparisons, 26 115, 247–8, 253
see also international competition, managerial structure, 110
national competition, national Marcus, G., 16
status marketing, 7, 34, 39
international competition, 52n4 department, 44, 46
see also international comparisons, see also advertising
national competition, national Martin, E., 85
status Marquand, D., 188
interpretation, 46–7, 73, 79, 112–14, materiality, 30, 153
138 Mayfield, Heather, 100–1, passim
department of, 46 media
see also curator-interpreter concern over food, 116–17, 122,
inverted commas, 21n16 178–9, 209–10
Ironbridge Gorge Museum, 15, 41 exhibition, 138, 159, 227–8, 229
interest in museums, 31–2, 40, 209
Jorvik, 15, 68, 74, 88n11 mixed, 162
290 Index

museums as, 19n6, 81 Industry, 13, 15, 34, 54n32

reviews national status
see reviews of science, 48, 74
see also television of Science Museum, 13, 74, 171
messages, 143–6, 170, 175, 186, 219, see also international comparisons,
251–3 international competition,
and medium, 81 national
Metcalfe, Jan, 99, passim competition
mission statements, 44, 251 Natural History Museum, 15, 24, 27
money, 36, 56n64, 81, 155, 212 changes, 34, 35, 43–4, 51, 73
see also budget, cost of gallery, exhibition styles, 78, 119
finance, sponsorship history of, 52n2
Morris, P., 187 visitor research, 46, 57n72
Mossman, Sue, 101–2, passim Needham, Cathy, 102, passim
multi-museum, 59, 84–6 Nestlé, 124–6, 150
muscling-in, 148, 152, 170 nostalgia, 224, 226
museology, 37, 164, 219 nutrition, 121, 122, 134
Museums and Galleries Commission,
31, 33, 40, 56n54, 253 object-based epistemology, 29
Museums Journal, 37, 55n44, 96 object-feel, 64
object-love, 65, 129n9, 138, 144, 247
naming see also objects
of galleries, 109–10, 125, 236 objectivity, 71, 81, 133, 150, 168
of individuals, 13 see also facts, factual accuracy
narrative, 16, 79, 230, 246 objects, 73–9, 137–8, 247–8, 259
evolutionary and materiality, 30, 153–4
see evolutionary narratives definitions of, 65
health, 226–8 in Astronomy gallery, 128
historical, 226–7 in Food gallery, 121, 135–8
nation, 119 in storage, 73
see also Britain pasteurised, 177, 190n11
national competition, 26, 52n4 see also collections, object-based
see also international comparisons, epistemology, object-feel, object-
international competition, love
national status opening of gallery, 197, 201–3
diet
see diet panels, 136
exhibitionism, 26 performance indicators, 10, 32,
National Heritage Act of 1983, 54n30, 253–4
54n31 personhood, 54n29, 186–7
National Museum of Science and physicality
 Index 291

see materiality race, 172

Pickstone, J., 64 see also ethnic
place, 224 Rayner report, 53n26
plural funding policy, 41 readability program, 158, 168,
see also finance 190n10
Polanyi, M., 252 renaissance of museum, 38
policy-making, 47 reorganisation of gallery, 132, 134–5
political correctness, 175 requisition, 14, 21n17
political legibility, 120–2, 132, 159, restructuring
182, 185–8, 255 see managerial restructuring
politics of signatures, 95, 110, 206, Rethink, 132, 143–8, 175, 212, 251
208 Retreat, 132, 139–41
polling culture, 47 reviewers, 159, 197
popular culture, 37 reviews, 205, 207–11
popularization, 41 Rogoff, I., 64
postmodernity, 57n73 Rose, N., 186, 188
Prime Minister, 48, 50 Royal Society, 48–9, 57n75
processing
see food processing Sainsbury, David, 124, 125, 201, 208
professionalization, 50, 71, 114 Sainsbury’s
professional identity, 65–6, 77–9, and alcohol, 184
148, 153, 205 as author, 208–9, 234–9
see also curatorial identity in Food gallery, 213
progress, 36, 67, 69, 81, 85, 164 reconstruction, 167, 185, 196,
proliferation phase, 135–8 213–14, 226, 234
Property Services Agency, 31 relations with, 124–6, 133, 198–9
public, 32, 37, 44, 71, 76, 189n1 Saumerez Smith, C., 259
phantom, 157, 189n1 sausage machine, 107, 154
relations, 10 scholarship, 35, 40, 56n60, 259
see also citizens, consumers, science, 134–5, 232–5, 255–8
visitors and citizenship
Public Services Division, 4–5, 43–4, see citizenship
91, 97, 114, 152 and visitors, 70–4, 76, 94
public understanding of science, centres, 39, 138, 153, 162, 259
48–51, 57n76, 157, 256–7 cf. history, 146, 147, 234
and food, 115–6 changing nature of, 27, 28, 81–2
and mission statement, 44 disappearance of, 4, 19n3
Economic and Social Science national, 48–9, 73–4
Research Council programme, transmission of, 6–7, 134–5
11, 19n3 and 5, 57n76 see also public understanding of
and museum research, 4–5 science
292 Index

types of, 82, 134 sponsorship, 41, 66, 128n5, 208,

visitors’ views of, 232–5 210, 214
Science Museum of Food, 115, 117, 124–6
and space of nuclear power gallery, 88n8
see space visitor perceptions of, 235–9
building, 25–6 status
fundamentals, 147–8 and Museum staff, 13, 61, 65–6
history of, 24–8 see also careers
impressions of, 9–12 national
national status of see national
see national status stewards
see also National Museum of see warders
Science and Industry Strathern, M., 187
scientific literacy, 49, 219 supermarket logic, 158, 180, 188
scientific uncertainty, 232 supermarkets, 142–3
scientists, 7, 134, 233 Suthers, Mr, 4–5, 13, 65, 84, 114,
commercial, 133, 135, 150, 158 168
see also advisory panel, experts
senses, 68, 137, 163 taxonomists, 51
shop taxonomy, 63, 64, 68
fitting, 151 team structure, 108–12
museum, 45 technical assistance, 132
museum as, 45, 57n69, 85 see also industrial collaboration
shoppers, 163, 186 technology
shopping, 142, 259 and science
psychology of, 101, 142–3 see science
Silverstone, R., 6, 220, 250 pure, 180
social drama, 6, 249 television, 6, 19n6, 189n2, 241n7,
social responsibility, 184–5 250, 259
South Kensington, 23–4, 31, 51 see also media
space tense, 16, 21n21
and collections, 65–7 territory, 65, 66
and interactives, 142 see also space
in Food gallery, 138–43, 153, 164 text
of Science Museum, 10, 77–9, 86 disappearing, 242n8
see also architecture exhibition, 158, 167
sponsor bias, 185, 210 in cultural studies, 9
sponsors ‘messy’, 16
names on galleries, 110 multi-level, 28, 163, 167
relationships with, 133, 143, Thatcher, M. 31, 48, 50, 56n63
196 see also Prime Minister
 Index 293

Thatcherism, 41, 53n26, 261n17 substitution, 86, 109, 167–8, 172,

time, 155, 175, 251 182
and ethnography, 8 types, 217
timetable, 127 see also audience, consumer,
tourism, 38 public, visitors
tourist sites, 224 visitor research, 9, 46–7, 80, 241n3
tourists, 23 at Natural History Museum
tradition, 97 see Natural History Museum
transparency, 71, 190n9, 252, 253, in Food gallery, 15–16, 169–71,
254 219–2
Trustees, 33–4, 50, 54n31,n32 and see also audience research,
n34, 83–4, 124 evaluation
party, 129n7 visitors, 8–9, 157–89, 257–8
Turner, V. 6, 202, 249, 250, 255 and exhibitions, 60–8 passim
typological modes, 27 and science, 70–4
as consumers, 36–7, 157
universities as deviants, 160
and museums, 10–12, 258 cf. collections, 4
role in science, 27 disruption from, 39
Urry, J., 47, 223 ideal, 159
in Food gallery, 220–41
V&A 24–5, 34–7 passim, 43, 52n2, ‘ordinary’, 28, 29, 47
53n25, 57n69 prioritizing of, 35, 249
vandalism, 160–1, 230 to Science Museum, 9
van Gennep, A. 201 virtual, 157, 171, 181
van Maanen, J. 109 visions of, 28–30, 79–82, 140
visitor see also audience, consumer,
as child, 181–2 public, visitor
circulation visual punctuation, 141
see visitor flow
empowerment, 164, 219 warders, 10, 46
see also democracy Weston, Margaret, 40, 43, 116
flow, 140, 141 Wilson, David, 41
hi-jacking women
see substitution representation of, 88n9, 117, 158.
imagined 182–3
see virtual visitors team of, 108–9, 112
movements, 217–19, 221, 229, see also gender
231–2 Woolgar, S., 157, 160
numbers, 32, 34 woolly hats, 110, 129n9, 159
response, 252 world exhibitions, 52n4