I’ve been to M Shed a couple of times before, it’s a free museum situated in the heart of the former Bristol dockyards which is already a strong start. It appears to be in quite a state at the moment, probably around half of the interactive exhibits are out of order and it all feels a little beleaguered. There is something quite dispiriting about a button that promises excitement and then delivers only silence, although admittedly that is also a fair summary of much of adult life.
It’s also one of the most interestingly curated museums that I’ve seen, with some erratic descriptions of items and an odd flow with no clear narrative as if numerous museum concepts have been asked to share a space and they’re trying to be very polite about it. The slightly annoying element for me was often trying to find where they had put the description of an item, it was too often in small white writing on glass nowhere near the actual exhibit. I won’t linger on this point, but I suspect some of the signage was developed by someone with excellent eyesight and a dangerous level of confidence in reflective surfaces.
I fear that this is one of those museums which has been underfunded and I wonder whether they’d be better shuffling the exhibits here into one of the other city museums and looking to repurpose this back into the Bristol Industrial Museum that once stood here. It felt to me that the museum has tried to put various themes into the exhibits over the years that now don’t flow together and there are great chunks of Bristol’s social history missing or underplayed. There are also empty spaces in the museum where more history could be told, but that might be again due to underfunding which I suppose is a monument itself to austerity.
Entertaining as some exhibits were, and helpful as the staff members were, I’m not entirely sure that I discovered much during my visit in a way that I’d normally expect from a museum. However, there are nice views over the river from the viewpoint on the first floor and the Banksy artwork was an appropriate and interesting exhibit. And I can’t complain much, despite hinting at that here, since there’s no admission charge and also no pressure to make visitors give a donation and that is genuinely appreciated.
Anyway, I’ll now witter on about some of the exhibits, so that’ll be exciting for everyone. Well, something like that. I appreciate this may not be the sort of promise that makes people cancel other plans, but my two loyal blog readers know by now that this is the level of jeopardy on offer.