The Rothschild Room...

and some thoughts on Natural History Museum's.

Hands up, this blog is going to be a little self-indulgent but I wanted to share it with you because I think it’s a fantastic example of what natural history museums should be doing, and that’s explaining their history, the history of their collections and the history of those involved in acquiring those collections.

The Rothschild Room at the Natural History Museum at Tring was re-opened last year after a period of closure allowing for refurbishment and I have to admit to being a huge fan. What I love about the room is how it has taken the history of the museum and its founder, Walter Rothschild, and explained to the public that history, and the context in which its natural history collections were assembled throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

Panorama of the Rothschild Room at Tring Museum © Elle Larsson

By showcasing key stories, specimens and individuals in a highly accessible way, you leave the museum feeling like you’ve learnt a lot more than you might have just by looking at specimens; because as a passive observer and at a very basic level, that is all you are really doing when you visit a natural history museum. They are odd testimonials to a bygone era whose original public purpose has largely been usurped by television documentaries, zoological parks and the internet.

Interactive Map showing Rothschild Collectors
 © Elle Larsson

The Rothschild room contains a display that tells you about the key people – Rothschild, his curators and family, as well as important collectors, who you can find out more information about on an interactive map. There are photo displays that show family photos and those of the animals Rothschild used to keep, as well as touchscreens which allow you to look at some of the books produced by those at Tring and that have since been digitised. It also includes taxidermy specimens to explain some of Rothschild’s favourite species, artefacts on loan from other collections and in the middle of the room there is a replica giant tortoise, similar to the one Rothschild is famously photographed sitting on. It’s been completed to a really high standard and implements many of the more successful modern exhibition techniques. It was really refreshing to see the first time and remains so, hence me choosing to blog about it.

Rothschild Room incorporates specimens and history
© Elle Larsson

I think what really stood out for me though is that this isn’t an approach that many museums have adopted, particularly the larger natural history museums. I understand that their purpose is to showcase biodiversity and that the important scientific work that natural history museums continue to do is going on behind the scenes, and, showcasing that, as the Natural History Museum at South Kensington have done in building the cocoon which allows the public to see into the scientific laboratories is a good thing and only adds to visitor experience and understanding. They are hugely important and the work being done by them is hugely significant. I just think there is scope in the public galleries to offer a stronger narrative, one that perhaps merges science with history, drawing on the extensive historic collections these museums possess and doesn’t just present a display case of zebras for someone to look at. As it stands we might learn the Latin name for the species or be able to view them in their taxonomic groups but what about the process of how and why they ended up there in the first place? It might be an uncomfortable truth to confront but I think it is an important one, especially in light of current concerns over conservation.

Digitised family photo albums © Elle Larsson

I readily admit to having a personal interest in this and the more I conduct my PhD research the more I realise the people who are working on natural history collections also have interest in where these specimens originally came from and how they ended up being in a museum collection – so why is this not translating into display? There are spectacular stories to be told and yet they’re not and I think that’s a real shame. It could dramatically change the way in which people engage with natural history museums and that is worth exploring in my opinion. There are some exceptions where this is beginning to be done to a degree. The Horniman Museum and Gardens for example has an introduction to their natural history gallery where they “set the scene” and answer some of the key questions or draw attention to key debates - the fur and feather trade for example and the history of its founder Frederick John Horniman and how he acquired his collection. So I suppose change is on the horizon. Perhaps I just need to exercise some patience and hope that in time, more museums choose to adopt a similar approach to that undertaken by the Tring Museum in their redesign of the Rothschild Room - it is fantastic and well worth a visit!

One of Rothschild's favourites - take a pic next time you're there!
© Elle Larsson

Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, London - Circa 1881

Richard Fallon, PhD Researcher at the University of Leicester and Centre for Arts and Humanities Research, Natural History Museum, London.

I spend a lot of my time trying to recapture the ways in which Britons around the turn of the century learnt about prehistoric animals, in particular dinosaurs, and so it’s very useful to know what visitors back then were actually looking at in their museums. Luckily, visitors to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in South Kensington, which opened in 1881, were able to purchase guidebooks that show us the exact layout of the old galleries.

As a Victorian, you would have seen nothing like this.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_History_Museum_%2836%29.jpg 

Anyone who’s been to the NHM lately might reasonably expect that Victorians and Edwardians turned left at the entrance and entered the big west Dino Gallery, just as we do today. But if you had done that back then, you’d have actually entered one of the world’s largest collections of stuffed birds. In fact, the entire west side of the building was dedicated to modern skeletons and taxidermy.

How about the east gallery? Now it’s the gift-shop, but back then it was actually the Gallery of Fossil Mammalia, lined all the way down with austere cabinets and with a proud central row of the Museum’s most complete mounted fossils: the famous Mastodon, a mammoth skull, the Irish deer—just to name the most prominent items. The shady pavilion at the far end brought visitors to South America, whose iconic Megatherium loomed menacingly over them. Around the edges of the pavilion lurked the fossil birds, such as the various moas and the priceless Archæopteryx macrura.

The sensational femur of Atlantosaurus.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Atlantosaurus_femur.jpg 

You’ve probably deduced by now that dinosaurs were far from the main attraction of the Museum in 1881, or 1891 and 1901, for that matter. Their home was the eastern Gallery of Fossil Reptilia, a bit of a corridor and one of the few areas of the museum that has changed very little since 1881. The walls were still lined with those prize saurians, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, but the various fragments of dinosaur that were on display were hardly complete enough to articulate and mount. Instead, they languished in cabinets and waist-high table-cases. The impressively massive thigh-bone of the American Atlantosaurus, of which a cast arrived a few years after the Museum’s opening, constituted one of the very best relics on show.

As one commentator observed, visitors often ‘pass hastily by the cases of bones, teeth, and skeletons’, preferring instead ‘the more attractive collection of stuffed birds on the other side’. How times have changed.

Composite photo of the worldly remains of Cetiosaurus leedsi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cetiosauriscus.jpg

In the subsequent decades, the dusty cases of the Gallery of Fossil Reptilia were swept to the walls and the corridor was gradually filled with more striking mounted, suspended, and articulated fossils of the sort museumgoers expect today. It was still a slow process. You have to feel a little sorry for Cetiosaurus leedsi, the dilapidated but very British dinosaur that arrived in 1903, only to be outshone by the world-famous cast of Diplodocus carnegii that was placed in the Museum two years later. The Diplodocus was so big that it had to be placed in the west side, with the modern reptiles, and it was quickly joined by casts of Triceratops and a relocated Iguanodon. The age of the dinosaur museum was beginning.

The Natural History Museum’s original collections are so scattered that you can quite easily come across something unexpected when wandering around there today. The cautious and systematic Victorian arrangement has been thoroughly jumbled, but it’s still interesting to think about the ghost of the old plan as you look around. I’ll tell you one thing, though: there are a heck of a lot fewer stuffed birds on show there today.