Field Trip to Abbey Pumping Station
[Foreword: A little bit of my settlement in the UK]
It’s been a month and a few days since I safely arrived in Leicester for my master degree of Museum Studies. Leicester is a beautiful place with much more cultural diversity than I’d thought. I’ve been to London a couple of times to attend the volunteer interview and induction at Kenwood House, and I’ve also made the trip to Birmingham after I turned in my first assignment of pre-sessional course.
This would be the first field trip organized by the department of museum studies. Everyone was a bit curious when seeing the notice of field trip on our blackboard announcements (blackboard is the online learning system where profs posted instructions on assignment, learning materials, etc.). We were going to Abbey Pumping Station, a regional museum about 30 minutes drive north of Leicester.
It was 14 Oct, a cloudy and chilly Wednesday afternoon. Most of the 21–22 museum studies students attended and along with Prof. Bunning, we rode a coach to get to the Abbey Pumping Station.
What I find the most interesting thing during my visit in the Station was the sets built to demonstrate a certain aspect of life of the residents in the past.
I have always been fascinated with sets and scenes in museums and films, as they are (usually) designed and built in details to make believe. Before I came to museum studies, I used to work in film production, especially for making props and building sets for movies. It is a nice deja-vu to see how filmmaking and museums share a common method in story-telling.
Above is a picture of a set, demonstrating how the pumps would look like in a domestic place. Reading from the sign, I thought it was a person’s garage back in the 19th century.
These two pictures are from the same set called “Wash Day!” It said on the sign that this was a set imitating a backyard of a woman named Mrs Simpson who lived in 1933. From the pictures we could see the many buckets and linen Mrs Simpson was supposed to clean, a black machine called “Mechanical Dolly”, and the Dolly Tub (a peg) that was used to better wash and stir the clothes. There are also strings with clothes pinned and hung to let dry.
The backyard of Mrs Simpson is my favorite set because I feel related to the story the set was trying to tell. Emotionally, the set reminded me of stories that my mum told me, about how her mother would toil away to do the laundry manually. The power of assembling historical objects in a constructive way is much stronger than simply displaying them in glass caskets.
The two sets prompted me to think about how museums convey stories to their visitors. Abbey Pumping Station is a local museum that documents the regional history of pumping, pipes, and public hygiene. I noticed that most of the displayed objects are clearly labeled, explained, of which the language was written in a simple and plain way. There were also a couple of interactive facilities, such as flushing the poop, which was, according to the staff, a very popular activity among kids. These curatorial choices indicate that this is a family and children-friendly museum. This could be the reason why the curators, instead of putting objects in a display platforms, chose to build scenes that give solid ideas of how the past looked like, for vivid sets could help children better remember the takeaway information.
I look forward to my future course that would talk about how museums space is designed to accommodate different audience. And I am sure to visit the National Space Centre that is next to the Abbey Pumping Station some time.
Edited on 1 Nov 2021:
I stumbled across a video talking about props used in storytelling in museums and exhibitions, and I’d been trying to find it again and put it in this article. Here’s the video that I found relative to the reflection I had in Abbey Pumping Station.
The youtube channel is called Museum Interpretation and Heritage Storytelling. Jane K. Nielsen, the lecturer, is an alumni of Museum Studies MA in University of Leicester.
