It includes bosses and corbels from St Martin’s church on Coney Street.

They reminded me that often the story behind exhibits is as interesting as the objects themselves. Maybe the ‘how they came to be here’ adds extra poignancy or a deeper sense of connection to our multi-layered history.

The wooden carvings, dating from the 15th century, were taken down during work on the church roof in the 19th century. I don’t know why they weren’t reinstalled, and whether they were immediately donated to the museum, or rescued by a local antiquarian, but it’s fortunate they weren’t put back. The church was badly damaged by bombing during the Baedeker raid in 1942. They wouldn’t have survived the fires.

Now here they are, conveniently at eye level, so we can appreciate them perhaps more than our ancestors did. Complete with original painted decoration.

Also on display just outside that room is a silk cap worn by a woman more than a thousand years ago. It was discovered during the Coppergate excavations. Once green, apparently, it looks brown now, and the silk is worn away in places. Such a delicate thing, and its survival is again remarkable. It is displayed not flat, but as if around an invisible head, making me imagine that head, and the thoughts she had, and the world she knew. More brutal and difficult than mine, and with few possibilities for anything beyond day-to-day working, surviving, childbearing.

Jewelled exhibits crafted from valuable metals may attract the most attention. But just as valuable, in my eyes, are these objects, carved from wood, woven from silk.

Links

An earlier visit to the museum, after its refurbishment: Changes – Yorkshire Museum

More information on the current exhibition: 1212 – the Making of the City – Yorkshire Museum’s website

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This was my take on the Castle Museum, when I was about 8 years old:
“When I went to the castle Museum there were lots of nice things there and I liked the old fashioned streets with the shops in and the little machines that you put one pence in and little figures did different things.”

One pence?! I think they’ve cleverly adapted those old machines since, to take account of inflation.

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August 2010

The Yorkshire Museum in the Museum Gardens opened on 1 August 2010 after a major refurbishment, and I visited a week or so later. Like the nearby library, the newly-refurbished museum seems lighter and brighter, and more ‘open’ – literally and figuratively. It is obviously designed to be more welcoming and engaging for younger people in particular, and a lot of effort has gone into opening up its assembled treasures to those who might not be excited at the thought of looking at Roman relics. Here, near the entrance, a young visitor is watching a video of a man in historic costume explaining part of the history of York.

I don’t think forty-somethings are the target audience for this kind of thing. I wandered off to look at the general reorganisation of the museum, to look down in the basement at the bits of the old abbey (a favourite bit from a previous visit) and to look for a particularly memorable and startling relic – some Roman hair.

It was rather a quick visit, as it was the school holidays and therefore rather busy. As it’s free to we Yorkies with a York Card, I’ll pop in again I think after the holidays.

These carvings are displayed in the basement area. The figure above left is from St William’s Shrine, of 1330. The expression seems appropriate as I think I was pulling this kind of face while trying hard to concentrate on various exhibits. I’m not very good at concentrating if it’s noisy, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the other photo shows, except that it’s in the medieval section.

When I visited here before it was modernised I thought this section was the most memorable. It seemed to me to have lost some of the atmosphere I remembered, perhaps it’s just that it’s less gloomy, so therefore seems less authentically ‘medieval’.

A lot of effort has gone into explaining how the exhibits in this section relate to the abbey buildings alongside.

This sculpture (detail shown left) is a statue of an apostle, dating form around 1200. His fingers have been broken over the intervening centuries, but he and several other impressive carved figures have survived, and greet you as you enter this section of the museum.

Museums can be overwhelming if you’re trying to take everything in on one visit. But there are usually one or two things which make their mark, and stand out from the vast number of exhibits you pass and look at and try to fully appreciate. I was particularly taken with this carved wooden figure, which once was part of the interior of one of my favourite York churches, St Martin le Grand on Coney Street. It’s a boss from the 15th century roof, and retains some of the paintwork which was so much a feature of medieval churches – generally lost now. Our Victorian ancestors were keen on restoring churches, and the 19th century restoration of the church resulted in the removal of some of the roof bosses, including this one.

Our Victorian ancestors also understood the value of historical artefacts, and the bosses were acquired by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, founders of this museum. Apart from a wish to preserve historical remains, to rescue them at that time, they couldn’t have forseen what they were rescuing them from a hundred years or so later. St Martin le Grand was bombed in the Second World War, and its fittings were destroyed by fire, including the bosses still in situ.

There’s a whole five hundred years of history effectively summed up in this one exhibit.

Also memorable is the reading room upstairs with its comfortable chairs and fine old volumes in glass cases, and display panels explaining the history of the museum and its founders. This fabulous huge old weighty tome has a botanical theme. It’s open at a page on the Periwinkle plant. Under the heading ‘The place’ it reads: ‘They growe in most of our London gardens & they love a moist and shadowie place: the branches remaine alwaies greene.’ Then under another heading – ‘The time': ‘The flowers of them do flourish in March, April and May, and oftentimes later.’ This plant is still well-known and widely-grown now, but unfortunately our 21st century gardening books no longer contain such charming turns of phrase as ‘the flowers of them do flourish’.

Just as the library refurbishment highlighted architectural features which had been forgotten or obscured by rather ‘functional’ decorative treatment in the 20th century, so the redecoration here in the museum brings architectural details to prominence. These exuberant Corinthian columns were presumably here before, but I didn’t notice them on a previous visit. The details have been beautifully accentuated with paintwork. I don’t envy the people who had to paint these intricate leafy bits.

More information

Yorkshire Museum website

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29 June 2009

When museums are free to enter, and the museums in one’s hometown are recognised as nationally important, it seems like looking a gift horse in the mouth not to go and visit them every now and then. So it seemed like time to pop into the National Railway Museum, to see a new exhibit – an ‘iron horse’ called Duchess of Hamilton.

And very beautiful she is. Though just like last time I visited here, I’m surprised by how much I appreciate what I see when I get here. When this visit was suggested, I wasn’t excited as I might have been if we were going on a trip to look at a church with a Norman doorway, or some old ruin. It’s probably years of conditioning still there, suggesting that trains are a man’s thing, and that somehow I won’t understand what I’m looking at. But there are many different ways of course of appreciating this museum and its displays. There’s a lot of colour, and its all very shiny. Indeed I found myself wondering who cleans it all, all this gleaming paintwork and metal. (That probably is a typically female response, isn’t it.)

I could feel the commitment and the effort and the talent, in the way this particular exhibition had been arranged around this locomotive, putting it in its context, so it’s multi-layered, if you want the other layers. You could just look at the size of the thing and its handsome paintwork, and that would be impressive enough. Or you can read the information on display and look at the photographs and get a broader picture. And, because they’re good at this sort of thing here, there’s a car right alongside the loco, and it’s all tied together under the title ‘Streamlined – Styling An Era’. It’s classy, and it’s curvy.

Indeed the whole place exudes passion and commitment, even after all these years. Because of course these old locomotives inspire passion and awe and obsessive interest. You can feel the love. It seeps out of the place like bits of oil obviously seep from these well-tended steam engines, captured by carefully-placed trays, filled with what appears to be cat litter.

Time to move on though, as I need to record another survivor from the 1930s.

Leaving the museum, we take a detour across the station, over the Queen St bridge. On Blossom Street, our Odeon, boarded up for some years, has reopened. It was built in the 1930s, like the Duchess of Hamilton. The rounded bit on the right there is I guess another example of the 1930s’ streamlining and curviness. Which we perhaps now appreciate, with the passing of the years. In my well-read Hutchinson and Palliser guide to York, published in 1980, I found the following:

‘The Odeon (1937) by Harry Weedon was always the best of York cinemas. In mellowed brick, its cubical design with rounded corners and little spurs will be more admired in a year or two. How long will it be before it is "listed"?’

It wasn’t long – the Odeon became a Grade II listed building in 1981. Many years later, in 2009, it’s rather cheering that it hasn’t just been preserved as a good example of a 1930s cinema exterior, while being turned into a bingo hall or a carpet warehouse, but has actually reopened and can continue to be used for its original intended purpose.

Links

York Press – New Reel cinema in Blossom Street, York attracts 5,000 customers – June 2009

. . . . .

Page compiled June 2009. Last updated: January 2012.

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9 July 2007

The weather has been so terrible this summer that outdoor wanderings have been difficult to accomplish. It seemed a good idea then to investigate some of York’s indoor attractions. This seemed an even better idea when I realised that so many of them are free. No excuse then. All aboard for the first stop – the National Railway Museum.

I know that this one on the left is Mallard, that it’s famous, and that it’s very blue and sleek and beautiful. This one on the right is recognisably of more modern times, with that iconic logo.

It’s brilliant here, they’ve got old trains, new trains, and all kinds of trains [*see footnote] I won’t be able to tell you anything much factual about.

I’ve always tended to glaze over a little when faced with train facts. This page is just a vague appreciation of a fine museum. And lots of photos of the various bits and pieces.

I remember this place opening – or rather, being taken here by my Dad quite soon after it opened in the 1970s. I’ve been at least once since, but that was years ago. I’m not sure why I’ve left it so long before revisiting. Probably because I thought I had to pay to get in.

I remember, at times in the past, finding museums sometimes quite tedious and tiring. Sometimes there’s too much information to take in, in one visit, and if you’ve paid lots of money to get in, you feel like you have to get your money’s worth, and so end up trying to read all the information boards, and feel like you have to learn something. Similarly, memories of school visits, and having to have an educational experience, did leave me with a residual slightly negative feeling about museums. On this occasion I decided to read hardly anything, and had a far better time.

More than one visit would no doubt be necessary, to do the place justice – and to read and absorb all the information. It is, as the museum’s own website states, the largest railway museum in the world. And a truly impressive place, with something for everyone.

I’ve mentioned many times elsewhere that I’m descended from generations of railwaymen, so despite being not that interested in the technical stuff, I am drawn to all things railway-related, and read books on railway-related things when researching family history. When looking at older steam locomotives I knew that these would be the kind of trains that my great-grandfather worked on and around, the kind of trains that brought him here to York.

While I was admiring the paintwork and shining metal bits, in a girly kind of way, my companion was trying to explain to me something significant regarding the wheel arrangements of the different locomotives before us. I think this was because, some time back, when reading those railway-related books in my family history research, I’d expressed a vague interest – well, confusion – when faced with the captions on photos of trains, which included mysterious numbers separated by hyphens. But however much the 0-4-2 and 0-4-0 business was pointed out – and he did, persistently – I couldn’t really see it. It didn’t matter. I managed to run off and lose him, behind a big train of some kind.

I looked it up later, this thing about wheel arrangements. And though my interest in the subject extends no further, and I still feel limited to a general aesthetic appreciation of locomotives, rather than a technical one, I now feel equipped to deal with it should I be harrassed again by my companion demanding I examine train wheels. Apparently I just need to say "Ah yes, the Whyte Notation. Used for classifying steam locomotives by wheel arrangement. Devised by Frederick Methvan Whyte, and came into use in the early 20th century. I find the UIC classification is a more versatile system, don’t you?" That should do it.

Footnote

Yes, I know, they’re locos, not ‘trains’ …

Links

National Railway Museum website

Whyte notation – on Wikipedia

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