I've just paid a visit to the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. It's part of the university; housed formerly in a prefab wooden hut, it has now moved to a very impressive new gallery attached to a former hall of residence opposite the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Redlands Road.
The museum in its previous incarnation placed a lot of emphasis on its educational aspect. Displays were well laid out and informatively labelled. But I found the new venue, with its much more spacious feel (there's a high ceiling and plenty of natural light through wall-high windows) made me feel a lot more emotional. I had a real feeling of involvement and complicity with the country-dwellers whose machinery, tools and possessions were on display. This could have been due to the introductory video, which does a good job of highlighting the 'technology' that is on display. Equally it could have been that, with more air and space around them, the materials, construction and purpose of the implements were brought into a much clearer light. For example, the rough quality of woodmens' tools - axes, jacks, dogs, pulleys - belied their fitness for purpose and the skill and knowledge with which they were used. And in the new museum this all shone through.
I do feel that 'English rural life' is not really what you will see here. This is a museum, albeit an unfinished one, whose exhibits are overwhelmingly about work: manufacture of tools, farming, and transporting goods. There is little to hint at what a child's experiences would be, growing up in the countryside and perhaps learning skills that would see them through adult life or rejecting them for the promise of the city or the army. And little about the home and its furnishings.
The rich photographic archive, a treasure in its own right, pins everything to a historical period that goes back no further than the 1830s, but the collection of artifacts goes back much further than this. It would be good to see some discussion in the gallery about the distinction between the 'modern' photographic record and older kinds of historical evidence. And it would be nice to have this linked to an acknowledgement that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of very rapid technical and social change, something belied by these images of everlasting moments.
