museum

Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester

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Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester

On Saturday, whilst Christine was working, I took myself off to the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester. I’ve been meaning to go for a while, but the recent opening of Queens Road Metrolink station nearby has made it somewhat easier to get to. Although railway engineering works, and the temporary closure of the Metrolink platforms at Victoria station, meant that it was still something of a trek taking a couple of hours each way from Sowerby Bridge. Normally, it’d take around an hour.

Anyway, the museum. It’s in the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester, to the north of the city centre, and is housed in the back of what was the Queens Road tramshed for Manchester Corportation Tramways – now used by First buses as a bus depot. It’s home to a wide variety of buses that operated in or are linked with Greater Manchester, plus a few other bits and bobs. But mostly buses – other forms of transport were not very well represented.

There are three trams, only one of which is complete (a horse tram). Of the others, one is Metrolink 1000, a half-tram mock-up of what would become the production T68 tram series. The T68s have only recently been retired from revenue service in Manchester and I imagine that a production model may enter the collection when one is preserved. The other bit of tram is the lower passenger compartment of what was originally a double decker tram, in the process of being restored.

There are also re-created transport offices, as well as an extensive collection of bus tickets, roller blinds and old signs. But, buses form the main attraction here.

On the whole I found it interesting but it’s not as good as other transport museums – particularly the excellent London Transport Museum. You definitely need to be more of a transport geek to enjoy it, and I’m sure Christine would have been bored stiff by it had I dragged her along. (I very nearly did last summer, but we ended up going bra shopping instead.)

The museum is open three days a week – Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, or all week in August. Entry is only £4 for adults, and free for accompanied under-16s, which is good value for a museum that can keep your average transport geek occupied for a couple of hours.

Photos from my visit are available on Flickr.

Armley Mills Industrial Museum

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Photo of the inside of Armley Mills Industrial Museum

Yesterday Christine and I, along with a few friends, went to the Leeds Industrial Museum at Armley Mills.

Regular readers will note that this is the third industrial museum in the area that I’ve visited recently. Last year we went to the Bradford Industrial Museum, which is open regularly. And in August this year we went to the Calderdale Industrial Museum, which is only open select weekends throughout the year. The Leeds Industrial Museum is housed at Armley Mills, towards Kirkstall, and straddling a patch of land between the River Aire and Leeds Liverpool Canal.

Our reason for visiting was for the twice-annual Leeds Steampunk Market. It had moved to Armley Mills from its usual venue of Left Bank near Burley Park. Rather than being arranged in one place in a main hall, this time the market was spread out across the museum and over the four floors, including outside. This made it seem less busy, but well over 600 people had come through the door on Saturday, and the numbers were looking similarly healthy on Sunday when we visited. A 50% discount for those who came dressed in costume may well have helped, and indeed Christine and I took advantage of this.

#steampunk

This was our third visit to the Steampunk market and we have now both amassed the basic Steampunk outfit. Sadly we didn’t take any photos this time (bar the Instagram image above) but my spray-painted gold goggles attached to a top hat made an outing. I suppose over time we’ll be able to come closer to some of the outfits that the more committed followers of the Steampunk subculture have. As usual there were some excellent costumes on show by other attendees.

As for the actual museum at Armley Mills, I managed to take a few photos (uploaded to Flickr of course) but to be honest we will need to go back and actually look at the exhibits properly next time. Especially as in some cases it was difficult to tell if something was a museum artefact or a piece of Steampunk art.

The next Steampunk market in Leeds will be at the White Cloth Gallery on November 30th and December 1st. I may be there.

Assorted notes on London

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The Thames, from Blackfriars
  • Normally we take a rolling case with us to London. This time we packed lightly and ensured that all of our clothes fitted into a rucksack (for me) and a shoulder bag (for Christine). This meant that we could use lockers and cloakrooms in the various museums that we visited, which were free or cost considerably less than the Left Luggage facilities at stations.
  • For a nice view of the River Thames, go to Blackfriars station. It has recently been rebuilt, and now spans the Thames with entrances on both the north and south banks, however more importantly big glass windows have been provided. The photo taken above was taken from Platform 1, looking east, and frames Tower Bridge really well.
  • We saw a pair of urban foxes. They didn’t make any of these noises. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an urban fox but I hadn’t been so close to one before.
  • On our second night in London we stayed at the Pullman Hotel on Euston Road – roughly halfway between St Pancras and Euston stations. It’s not a hotel we’d normally be able to afford but it was definitely worth staying at (certainly better than our Friday night hotel). You also get brilliant views of London from the upper floors, and you don’t need to have a room there to use the lifts.
  • We had a mosey out to the Thames Barrier, which as of 2005 is much easier to get to thanks to the Docklands Light Railway. Alight at Pontoon Dock, and then have a nice stroll through Thames Barrier Park which is in itself quite a nice place.
  • The Museum of London is well worth visiting. It’s free and offers an interesting history of the city, from early settlers to the present day. There’s even a small collection of items from last year’s Olympic Games. We didn’t have chance to visit the Museum of London Docklands this time though.
  • The Wellcome Collection looked interesting but most of it is closed until the spring, so we didn’t spend much time there. The bookshop is excellent though.
  • The British Library also has an exhibition of interesting texts in its archives, including two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, which will be 800 years old in a couple of years’ time. There’s enough there to kill time for an hour or so.

Calderdale Industrial Museum

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Calderdale Industrial Museum

A few weeks ago Christine and I went to the Calderdale Industrial Museum in Halifax. The museum opened in 1985, but sadly closed only a few years later and has been mothballed ever since. A group of volunteers called CIMA are working to get the museum open again, and the 10th August was one of their regular open days where visitors could have a look around. I’ve uploaded the photos of my visit to Flickr.

Not all of the museum is accessible; the volunteers have been working for a couple of years but some parts are still out of bounds. However, there are three floors of exhibits, which include stationary engines like the one pictured, weaving machines and histories of some of the major companies that were founded in Halifax. These include Percy Shaw’s catseyes company, Mackintosh – maker of Quality Street and now a part of Nestlé, and the Halifax Bank.

A lot of the windows are still boarded up and not all of the light bulbs had been replaced, so the museum is quite dark. The paintwork on the walls needs some attention as well, as shown in some of my photos.

It was my first visit, but Christine had been as a child, back when the museum was open properly in the 1980s. I think she was disappointed at how the museum had been left to rot for so long. The volunteers have done well but will have their work cut out to get the museum back to where it was when it was closed, never mind taking it forward. I also got the feeling that the local council, which still owns the museum, isn’t being 100% co-operative.

There are also question marks hanging over the museum’s future. It backs on to The Piece Hall, which in January will under-go a 15-month modernisation, and it is next to the proposed site for Halifax’s new central library. The plans may see the museum building being cut down somewhat, although the artists’ impressions do at least show it so hopefully it’ll still be around in future.

There are two more open days planned for 2013, on the 14th and 15th September as part of the national Heritage Open Days events. If you’re in the area I would definitely recommend a visit – it’s easy to get to as it’s just around the corner from Halifax station. Entry is free, but I’m sure CIMA would be delighted if you were able to donate some money to help them get the museum open again more often.

Save the National Media Museum

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National Media Museum
Photo by National Media Museum, CC licensed.

It’s not often that I ask you, dear readers of this blog, to sign a petition. But please can you take a few seconds of your time to sign a petition to Save the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The museum, along with the National Railway Museum in York, and the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, are threatened with closure. Their parent company, Science Museum Group, cannot afford to run all three in addition to the Science Museum in London, due to cuts in funding from central government. It is therefore said that one of these will have to go.

I really, really hope that none of them close. As a child, I loved going to visit them and have also been recently as an adult, and enjoyed them all. Putting the museums against each other in a fight for survival is therefore not helpful.

But, I’m particularly keen for the National Media Museum to stay open. It’s the one big visitor attraction in Bradford city centre, with a strong reputation. Closing it would be an absolute disaster for a city which has fallen on hard times over recent years. Racial tension fuelled riots in the summer of 2001. In 2003, demolition work started on a new shopping centre, to be built by Westfield, but ten years on and there’s just a big hole in the ground. Meanwhile the recession has caused many of Bradford’s other shops to close, leaving even bigger gaps in the city centre.

Last year’s opening of the City Park, with its excellent mirror pool and fountains (a magnet for kids on hot sunny afternoons), was a big step in the right direction and shows that the city does have positive momentum. And, hopefully, work will start on our long-awaited shopping centre this year. But all the good work could be undone if the National Media Museum closes. Because people will stop coming to Bradford, and then more local shops and business will go under. It’s a horrible thing to even contemplate.

So please, sign the petition. And if you’re free tomorrow (Saturday), why not visit the museum? There’ll be a mass ‘visit’ of the museum at around 12pm. It’s free to get in, and it’ll show the powers that be that this museum is important, not just to Bradford but for the country as a whole. It is, after all, part of our national collection.

Visiting Harrogate

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Harrogate Royal Pump Rooms Museum

Today Christine and I took advantage of the fact that we both had annual leave and went on a day trip to Harrogate. Unfortunately it was rather cold, wet and very windy, so it wasn’t the most enjoyable visit.

We visited the Royal Pump Room Museum, which is built above two of Harrogate’s famous wells and charts the history of the town. It’s a nice little museum in an interesting building, which takes around an hour to get around. Oddly there’s also a small exhibition of Egyptian artefacts there as well.

No visit to Harrogate would be complete without a visit to Betty’s. Admittedly Betty’s isn’t unique to Harrogate; there’s two in York, one in Ilkley one in Northallerton and a second tea room and tea house at RHS Harlow Carr, but unlike the team rooms in York the queue for lunch isn’t usually snaking out of the door and around the block. In fact, we could pretty much walk straight in when we visited at midday today, although it was, of course, a Monday in February – not exactly peak tourist season.

I like Harrogate because it has character, and many of its Edwardian and Victorian buildings have been well-preserved. We don’t go there very often, as it takes a good two hours to get there by train from Sowerby Bridge, but it’s a nice day out.

Some of the photos that I took are already on Flickr. I also uploaded several from our last visit in May 2010, as apparently I didn’t upload those at the time. Which makes me wonder what else I haven’t uploaded to Flickr over the years.

People’s History Museum

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People's History Museum

Today we took the time to visit the People’s History Museum in Manchester. I actually hadn’t heard of it until yesterday, when we were looking for something to do as a couple having spent all of yesterday playing games (me, World of Warcraft; Christine, Guild Wars) and not really spending much quality time together.

The museum has been around since 1990, and was originally called the National Museum of Labour History. Indeed, there is a large focus on the history of workers’ rights, the rise of trade unions and the foundations of the Parliamentary Labour Party. That being said, it covers a wide range of subjects, especially the history of democracy in the UK. And Manchester is an ideal place for it, as it was the scene of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, and the historic home of the Co-operative movement is nearby in Rochdale.

It sits in two buildings: the first is a modern extension, opened in 2010 and housing the main body of the museum. The other is the older Pump House building which was one of the three pump houses for Manchester’s Hydraulic Power system, for which there is an exhibition at MOSI about it. The Pump House holds the two temporary exhibition spaces, and when we visited there was a photography exhibition about the Oldham Road, and a special exhibition about the Temperance movement – again, a political ideology with strong northern roots. Pleasingly, the museum’s café stocks a range of temperance drinks, albeit alongside beer.

I found it really interesting, although it does have a rather left-wing political agenda. To me that’s not a bad thing but I could imagine some Tories feeling uncomfortable there. I actually learned a surprising amount of things that I wish I’d been taught at school, about this country’s history.

The museum is free to enter (donations welcomed) and is open most days of the year, although I’d advise against visiting next week as one of the permanent galleries is closed to rotate some of the exhibits. For once, I’ve already uploaded the photos to Flickr, as well as others that I took elsewhere in Manchester today.

Creswell Crags

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DSCF0264.JPG
Photo by branestawm2002, released under a Creative Commons License. My own photos will follow later…

Last weekend Christine and I visited Creswell Crags on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It is a limestone gorge with various caves along the sides, in which evidence for occupation by human ancestors during the ice age has been found. They are also the only caves in the UK to have cave art on the walls, which was only formally discovered in 2003.

The gorge itself was a beauty spot in Victorian times, and various archaeological excavations have taken place since then. Many of the finds are now in a museum and visitor centre, to the north of the site, which we also visited, and this organises tours of two of the more interesting caves. The caves are normally closed to the public, so it is only by going on the tours that you can see the cave art, which are simple animal depictions carved into the rocky walls of the caves. There’s possible evidence that these were painted at one time, like in other caves in continental Europe (I visited Lascaux, or rather the mock-up at Lascaux II, back in the 1990s), but nowadays just the carvings are visible.

It’s a very interesting site, and the museum explains how the area was in different periods in time – before the last ice age, there would have been hippos in the water and hyenas hunting. The museum was opened in 2009 and is an interesting piece of architecture in itself, and has the ubiquitous café and gift shop.

It’s worth a visit – you can wander around the gorge itself for free, but the tours inside the caves and the museum cost money – up to £13 for adults to do both tours, although this is valid for a year for any repeat visits. There’s a picnic area if it’s a nice day, and the gorge is very pretty.

Being a tourist

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Helmsley Castle

I spent the weekend being a tourist, twice in my home town of York. York is a city that, since I no longer live there, I have actually come to appreciate more. Whilst growing up there you took the historic buildings for granted, and the hordes of guided tours just got in your way. But now I see the city in a very different light.

On Friday afternoon, we spent a bit of time at the National Railway Museum – one of my favourite museums as a child, but my last visit was in 2007 (although I blogged about it last year). The main attraction is the return of Mallard, which spent many years in the main hall at the museum but was recently sent to the Shildon Locomotion Museum in County Durham; however, it’s in York on a brief visit and presently takes pride of place on the main turntable. The museum is undergoing a lot of renovation at present, which includes a new entrance hall, so there are fewer attractions than normal – the station hall in particular was rather sparse, which was a shame.

On Saturday, we eschewed York and headed up to the small market town of Helmsley, on the edge of the North York Moors National Park. In particular, we visited Helmsley Castle, parts of which date from the 12th century but has been mostly ruined since the British Civil War in the 1600s. It’s now looked after by English Heritage, and for a little under a fiver each for adults you can spend a couple of hours wandering around. There’s also a museum section, which shows some of the finds that have been excavated as well as information about the castle’s history and how it would have looked over various key periods in its history.

Finally on Sunday we went back into York city centre, partly for some sightseeing but mostly for shopping, for which York is very good. Whilst there aren’t many large branches of chain stores (with the exception of a large Marks & Spencer, split across two sites), there are plenty of smaller shops and thankfully most don’t sell tourist tat. There’s now a sausage shop on The Shambles, and we also called in at Betty’s for some of their fondant cakes which change regularly. We were hoping to go to the Jorvik Viking Centre – again, despite living in York I haven’t visited this in nearly 20 years – but it’s rather expensive unless you make a day of it and go to the other museums (DIG, Barley Hall and Micklegate Bar Museum) – a £16 ticket lets you into all four.

In a way, it’s refreshing to be a tourist in your home town. You can take time to go to the places that you walk past every day, and maybe discover things that you never knew existed. At the same time, you have the advantage of knowing your way around and knowing the best places to eat, or what to avoid. Whilst not every town is set up for tourism, if yours is, give it a try. You can even do it in places like Bradford.

National Railway Museum

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Swag

I’ve been sent a package by the PA to the National Railway Museum’s Director of Fun, Sam Pointon. While it may not seem odd for a museum which is popular with families to have a director of fun, Sam is only 7 years old, and he’s been there for a year now.

Sam, or rather his PA, has asked me to write about my experiences with the museum and tell you about some of the events that are being held this summer, so here goes.

Like Sam, when I was his age, I was also very keen on trains – having a father who worked for British Rail helped as it meant lots of free rail journeys. I also grew up in York, home of the National Railway Museum and was a regular visitor. At one time, my mum took me almost every Sunday, even when there wasn’t free entry like there is now. My earliest memories were of its ‘Great Rail Exhibition’ in the former York Goods Station, as at the time the main hall was receiving a new roof. Now both the main hall and goods station are used for the museum and open to the public. Further expansions have added a workshop where you can see classic trains being overhauled and restored, as well as access to some of the museum’s archives.

Mallard

Moving out of York in 2002 has meant that my visits have been sadly less frequent. My most recent visit was in 2007 which included a trip on The Yorkshire Wheel, a London Eye-style big wheel which was unfortunately only a temporary attraction and is now elsewhere. As well as seeing classic trains from both the UK and overseas (there’s a driving car from Japan’s Bullet Train, for example), there’s plenty of information about the history of Britain’s railways, and various interesting artefacts.

This summer, a sand sculpture is being built from 20 tonnes of sand by the same people who created a sand sculpture of Charles Darwin in Centenary Square in Bradford last summer. There’s also a major 1930s exhibition, linked in to the recently restored streamlined steam engine the Duchess of Hamilton, which you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

The National Railway Museum is a really great museum and you can easily spend a day there. There’s plenty to do, whether you’re a young child or a grown-up child like me. Best of all, it’s free, and only a few minutes walk from York station. You should go and visit it sometime.