I went to London's Natural History Museum the other day. In my childhood, I went there regularly with my school. Usually when we arrived we would each be given a clipboard with a blank piece of paper attached. Our teacher would put a box of crayons in the middle of the floor for us to pick from. Then we would spend the afternoon trying to draw one of the museum's stuffed Dodos or a hummingbird in the museum's hummingbird case.
Sometimes as well we would go into the museum's central hall, which had nothing in it except the cast of a skeleton of a brontosaurus. It never ceased to amaze. A creature that enormous used to roam about! The idea ignited our imaginations:
The museum now says the skeleton we loved wasn't a brontosaurus. More importantly, they have removed it from the splendid hall it stood in and suspended the skeleton of a blue whale there. I've no idea where they've put the brontosaurus. I do remember that the blue whale used to be elsewhere, with an amazing model of an actual blue whale beneath it. The model has vanished and without it, the skeleton dangling high above one's head is hard to visualise as anything much - perhaps a pterodactyl of some kind. I wonder if the removal of the matching fullscale model is less because it is considered inauthentic and more because it might impede the helter skelter rush of people that the museum encourages now.
For the once tranquil spacious rooms have been cut up and cluttered with permanent scaffolding, supporting storyboards and a bewildering clutter of screens.
I am sure the visitor numbers have sky rocketed since I was little and that this is the thing that will be produced as a defence for the vandalism the building has undergone. But the intentions of the museum's founders have been forgotten, in my opinion. Everywhere you turn, if you look behind the overlay of the modern decor, you see evidence of the early creators' love of the natural, their desire to instil in visitors a sense of wonder and admiration for creation. In its current form, I doubt many visitors leave feeling they have had a chance to learn anything much, let alone to marvel. You need quiet and the opportunity to stand still and stare in order for that sort of thing to be possible. Instead, as a visitor the other day, I felt I was being herded and hurried, mainly towards the shops the museum's administrators have stuffed into spaces carved out of airy old rooms. In those shops, you can choose between objects of varying price and quality, almost all of them made in China and unlikely to bring you much pleasure once you get them home. After cluttering up your house for a year or two, most will eventually end up in landfill.
And that is odd, as the one thing the museum is now obsessed by is "the environment", as in human made climate change:
The vandals in charge do not seem to notice how much love and care is visible everywhere you look in the original interior. Or worse, they have noticed and they want to hide the beautiful details, because the modern additions - not to mention the wares on sale in the shops - look so third-rate by comparison (I kept having to remind myself that I was in a museum, not an airport, because that was what it felt like, in atmosphere and style).
Here are some details on walls and pillars, many of them only visible if you look behind the new screens that have been put up to line the walls with visual static:
