Tonight's lecture I'm really excited about. It's the first in a series that's going to run through the Gresham Year called What is Precious to Us. And so it makes sense to me at least that we're starting with museums and with one of the world's experts on the study of museums. Our lecturer tonight is Professor Kate Hill, Professor of History at the University of Lincoln, where she teaches modern British history and heritage, and she's a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She's got many books, including Women in Museums 1815-1914, Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge, and more recently, Museums, Modernity and Conflict Museums and Collections in and of War. She led the project Making Museum Professionals 1850 to the Present, all of which, plus chairing the Museum and Galleries History Group and co-editing the Museum History Journal, make her eminently suited to talk to us tonight about rather trivial things, finding the precious in an alternative museum history. Kate, over to you.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and to get a chance to talk to you about some of my favourite museums. Museums are in many ways value engines. They play a significant role in telling us what has value and in naturalising that value, despite or because of the fact that they remove objects from the marketplace. They often form spectacular settings, such as the British Museum here, to reinforce the point that the collections within are inherently valuable and precious. And we can see this in some interesting ways, particularly clearly with the VA, known until 1899 as the South Kensington Museum, which started out with a very frank and open attitude to the question of value. I don't know if you can see in this catalogue, but it displays the price of all the objects. And at the same time, it also had uh this this was uh immediately after the great exhibition, the very beginnings of the South Kensington Museum, its labels also had the price of every single object on it. Um, and that feels kind of wrong for museums, doesn't it? Um it feels sort of transgressive, and it's a mark, I think, of how important museums, especially national museums, are in a system of value. Their avoidance, their separateness from the market and from commercial systems of value actually works to support and maintain that very system of value. Equally, of course, they're part of an international network of rivalry, whereby the point of a national museum is to display the wealth and prestige of that nation. Objects are evidently precious because they're in the National Museum, and the nation is uh powerful because it has national uh precious objects in its museums. Uh, again, this is something you can see so clearly in the 19th century, where initially Britain and France, and then increasingly Germany and the US, among others, competed militarily and diplomatically for antiquities, classical and Egyptian antiquities. And this was very much about winners and losers defined by might and dominance. So the history of the Rosetta Stone is that the French found it and then the British beat them at the uh Battle of Alexandria in 1801 and they took the Rosetta Stone off them. And the side of the Rosetta Stone has um inscriptions captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801, presented by King George III. So, yeah, putting putting the kind of the value in the museum is something that nations did from the 19th century onwards. But we might call this the top-down vision of what has value and is precious, and it's only one part of the story. There's another view from smaller and more obscure museums, which tells quite a different story. So if national museums act to underwrite the value of the nation's possessions, smaller museums are more able to reflect a different sense of value, which we might call bottom-up. So their history tells us about a greater range of museum creators beyond the national. So museums like the VA and the British Museum had, by UK museum standards, quite large resources, but they also had a lot of oversight from parliament and all the way down. Whereas if you look at um museums run by local councils, by individuals, by charities, they have a lot less money, but they also have a lot less oversight. They can do things without people noticing so much, people at the top. I think these smaller museums also tell us much more about audiences. So I would argue in smaller museums the visitors have a more immediate relationship with the museum curators and the museum staff. It's more obvious what the audience like and dislike. They're also very dependent on donations of all sorts. So again, they've got that very close relationship with their audience. So I think that smaller and less prestigious museums reflect back more popular, multifaceted ideas about value and preciousness, more of a kind of people's vision of value, if you like. Now, of course, this division between sort of bottom down, top, bottom up, top down, uh doesn't fully work in practice. You know, both elements exist in all museums. But I think because smaller museums are um, you can see the workings more clearly in small museums, right? Um, you can see the kind of dialogue or negotiation over what has value and what doesn't. So I'm gonna try and illustrate this by looking at some of the lesser-known museums of the UK between about 1860 and 1960, roughly, um, to show some different aspects of that. I've got three roughly chronological case studies showing quite different ways in which ostensibly worthless things were used to create different sorts of value. It's not strictly chronological, um, it's more like the examination of some innovations which which waxed and waned across the UK and beyond, but I'm I'm gonna stick to the UK just to keep it manageable. So, nothing of intrinsic value, the East End of London's Bethnal Green Museum. So in 1872, a new museum opened in the East End of London, Bethnyl Green Museum, now Young VA. It was opened by the Prince of Wales in a blaze of publicity as a branch of uh the South Kensington Museum, the VA, and promised to bring all the same benefits of the main museum to the east end of London rather than the west. But right from the start, there was a sense that, in fact, a different sort of museum was appropriate for this location and audience. So it's actually built out of leftovers, these leftovers, the old Brompton boilers, as they were called, prefabricated structures that had been used at the VA before the permanent buildings were uh erected. Now, by this point in the 1870s, they weren't uh uh needed anymore. I think they did quite a nice job of hiding the fact that this is basically what's what's inside. And it was actually filled with leftovers as well, or collections that had no current home. So the Wallace collection and the Pitt Rivers collection were both displayed here before finding permanent homes. The permanent collections of the Bethnal Green Museum uh consisted of displays moved from South Kensington because they were no longer wanted or valued there. Um, so this is the ground floor of the original uh uh plan of the Bethnal Green Museum, and I think you can see, I hope you can see they've got the food collection and the animal products collection, um, both of which were definitely uh they're described as sweepings from the uh VA. Um, and best of all, waste products. Oh, waste products. Um, I'm afraid this slide is going to stay up for quite a long time. This is a panel that was up in the Bethnal Green Museum illustrating the value of a dead horse, uh all the different bits of it uh and and what they were worth per pound and what you would use them for. Heart and tongue are described as a mystery. Um, so these are quite unappealing displays, um, maybe less so in a 19th-century uh context. Um, but this is where we see the the phrases from my title and my subtitle, trivial things of no intrinsic value. This is what the VA described as the things that they sent to Bethnel Green. Um so there's a clear opposition there. So by implication, the South Kensington parent holds objects that it believes to be of intrinsic and universal high value. By the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly caught up in international bidding wars and rapidly rising prices for globally sought-after objects of art and design. Whereas the objects and collections that went to Bethnal Green were seen as good enough for an audience of working men and not for the nation as a whole. So there's a lot of judgments about uh social groups going on there. All in all, the Bethnal Green Museum was demonstrably low value. And yet, there is another way to look at the Bethnal Green Museum and its apparently valueless things. The main VA Museum made very few concessions at this time to what any audience wanted or needed, but this East End Museum had a particular audience in mind and specific goals that it wanted to achieve. It wanted to provide educational resources. It was assumed that working men would educate themselves with the material to offer an alternative leisure venue to the pub and to be useful, to offer exhibits and displays that directly related to people's working lives and industry. These are actually much less patronizing aims than many Victorian cultural initiatives. They might still be a bit patronizing, but actually, you know, pubs are they're not a driver of poverty to the extent that the Victorians thought they were, but it's certainly true that working class people had very few uh leisure uh venues. Um, and it is also certainly true that the working class were expert and avid self-educators given the resources. Whatever precisely the reason, the Bethnal Green Museum was massively popular, featuring huge crowds. So in 1888, 900,000 people visited it, which was a lot higher than the number that visited the main museum in South Kensington. So if you measure by numbers, the Bethnel Green Museum certainly had as much value as its South Kensington parent. So why was this? I think, as I suggested before, curators here could could experiment a little bit. They didn't have as much oversight, um, and they could therefore respond to their audiences in a way, as long as they didn't spend any money, because they didn't have any money to spend, but if they could find cheap ways of working with their audience, um they could do that, which which was much less the case at the main museum. So, firstly, its content was more varied than this waste product displays suggest. They had rapidly changing loan collections on very varied topics and collections of particular local interest. So in the year 1913 to 14, they had loan displays of furniture, Chinese enamels, lepidoptera, fine art, and more. By 1923, it had a loan collection of drawings and paintings from the art section of the Men's Evening Institute, and the curator said it was entering into the life of Bethnal Green. The local focus became more pronounced as well. In the same year, 1923, it acquired part of the Gardiner collection of prints, drawings, and ephemera relating to East London. You can see here a rather lovely uh map of uh Bethnal Green from the beginning of the 18th century. Again, though, the VA curators thought it was low quality but of local interest, so they were happy to relegate it to Bethnal Green. It also quickly came to contain the germs of what became the uh Museum of Childhood collection in 1974, despite again the main museum's lack of interest in and disdain for toys and games and dolls. Curators said they couldn't see any value in toys and games and dolls except to send them to Bethnal Green. So a number of donors, mostly women, as we can see with with this uh uh this doll acquired in the in 1925. The most important donor was Queen Mary, which really helped, I think, to establish uh this this collection. Um the uh the the gabled doll's house is is one that she gave as a whole. The other one, the furnishings are her collection, and she had someone, a handyman at Buckingham Palace, knock up the house for her. Um so donors, women donors started giving miniature and toy objects, and the Bethnal Green curator encouraged it despite uh a lack of enthusiasm from the VA. And by 1974, when it became the Museum of Childhood, it had the largest collection of childhood-related items in the UK. Secondly, it knew its audience and it catered to it. It was open every day except Christmas Day and Good Friday, and it stayed open till 10 pm, three days a week, and more in summer. It had a huge number of unaccompanied child visitors in the interwar period. Uh, one observer in um 1921 suggested that 90% of all its visitors were unaccompanied child uh visitors. Uh, someone else said it was 70%, so I think we can probably cast some doubt on the 90% figure, but certainly there were a lot of unaccompanied uh children uh visiting there. And it did quite a lot in a low-key kind of way to engage this group. So obviously the Toys and Dolls collection uh are part of this, uh, but the museum also provided activities in the holidays and at weekends, it resolved to tell a story with uh the technical displays and provide enhanced facilities for school groups and teachers. I like this quote from The Times from 1928, uh, where it talks about the curator um uh seeing the children as raw material that he could kind of impose the museum habit on, but we don't need to worry about them being um too highbrow because they like dolls' houses, models of ships, railway engines, and birds in that order. Great. So, despite originating as a collection of low-value and trivial cast-offs, the Bethnal Green Museum provided value to its audience, who valued indoor space as a minimum, and exhibits of interest to children, opening times that worked with their lives, and varied collections focusing on the area they lived in. The value of the local and ordinary and of museums as part of daily life comes through the Bethnal Green Museum really strongly. Now, in these days of physical and virtual travel and of restricted child independence, much of the value of a museum on your doorstep might have disappeared. But the idea of responsiveness to your audience has very much not disappeared but has become a key part of museum work. So, living nature in museums. I'm going to stay in the east end of London here and I'm going to introduce you to Tom the Borough Toad. He's a marvellous creature. And he lived at the nature study branch of Stepney Borough Museum in the first decade of the 20th century as a living specimen. He was alive, he lived in a sort of tank type thing there. He lived alongside Sally the Borough Newt, who I do not have a picture of, and a host of other live creatures, in contrast to the usual museum habit of displaying dead ones. A few museums today continue this practice, including notably Manchester Museum, whose vivarium contains some magnificent creatures, but it's not a very widespread habit these days compared to the first half of the 20th century. The Nature Study Museum was located in the disused mortuary chapel of St. George and East Church in Chadwell, East London, off Cable Street. It's long got well, it's long gone as a museum. The building is still there in a bit of a state, and you can just see Nature Study Museum on that plaque above the door. And it went all in on living creatures as exhibits. It had a bad-tempered monkey, it had a hedgehog, it had a beehive, it had an anthill, it was almost entirely kind of living creatures, but mostly very local creatures, unlike these kind of exotic uh things that you get uh elsewhere. These were things that you could literally find in your garden, like the hedgehog. Um, even the monkey came from a ship in the nearby London docks. So, again, it's a very cheap collection. Um, most of it is basically free. And yet, it had an enormous impact, being described as a fairy house at the time. And I love the quote, the toad makes a snap at us. That's from an essay that some child had to write when they went back to school after the school visit to the museum. And I think many of us can relate to that. Uh, and I love the picture of the the school kids in the museum about 1910. Um and even more alive things here. Uh, you can see the beehive, you can see uh tanks with local pond life. Again, local pond life only is what we've got there in that um in those tanks there. Now, one of the reasons I'm so interested in these living specimens is because they really challenge the idea of the museum object, which is supposed to be permanent. That's one of the things you want from a museum object. You put it in a museum and it stays there and it stays the same. And that, of course, is partly where its value comes from. Once an object's in the collection, it's preserved, it's taken out of time, and it's supposed to stay the same. But you can't keep living things alive forever or even for very long in some cases. And that means there's real challenges in treating them as museum objects. Can you catalogue them? Can you label them? Obviously, the tanks are labelled, but that's not quite the same, is it? Tom has a name, we know he was called Tom, but did he have a museum number? Um, the Manchester Vivarium creatures do. They all have um reference numbers that you can find them in the in the catalogue, but I don't believe Tom did uh at all. Certainly the bees and ants didn't. Uh so you know you've got to draw the line somewhere. And as the idea of living displays spread around other small museums in the period, this issue of ephemerality of highly temporary exhibits became even more acute. Um, this is Horsville Art Museum in Manchester, um, which is uh no longer extant. Um, it's the birdroom, and you can see it has a large aviary right in the middle. There's very few images of it, I'm afraid. It also has plants down the side, possibly a nature table in the in the middle of the wall there. Um, and I the plants look to be both planted and cut. Tollcross House Museum in Glasgow, another museum which is no longer in existence, had again aquaria, vivaria, aviaries, all with local animals such as sticklebacks rather than anything more expensive. And these museums and more increasingly contained wildflower displays, which are the most impermanent of them all. These are cut wildflowers. I know they're technically actually not alive. Uh they're dying, I would say, cut flowers. That's the thing. They're dying, but they're not dead. And they are very, very impermanent collections. Um Huge displays like this one at Hazelmere need replacing weekly. And you can see that this is a fairly sizable display. There's a lot of labour involved in replacing all of these cut flowers every single week throughout the summer. Some museums did March to October, so that's a real commitment in terms of labour. Now the wildflower displays are really hard to find in the records because they're not catalogued, they're very ephemeral. But newspapers occasionally refer to them if you search through those. And I think from these kind of hints and traces, we can say that many, if not most, local and municipal museums had some wildflower displays at some point between 1880 and 1960, including quite large museum services such as Glasgow's, here pictured in 1949. They are, as I say, very, very labour intensive. So what happened was that they were generally crowdsourced. There might be a volunteer committee whose job it was to collect wildflowers every week. They might draw on the local botanical society to supply them. They might get schoolchildren to do it, which is the best solution of all, isn't it? Lots of them. I fear they must have impacted quite badly on local flora, actually. You know, there's this just all the flowers being picked all the time. We'll never be able to know for sure, but but they are there. Now, if you think of earlier Victorian museums, they look like this, full of dead things, dead nature. Most museums in the 19th century focused on natural history. Most of their curators came from a natural science background and were often skilled and sometimes professional taxidermists themselves. But as we get into the 20th century, people are much less keen on looking at case after case of more or less competent taxidermy. And it's at this point that you start to get characterizations of museums as dead and dusty in cultural forms, like novels and things like that. Newspapers have loads of references in the first half of the 20th century to the awfulness of dusty museums filled with poor little butterflies stuck in a glass case with pins, dusty bones, the comparing of anything that was really felt to be dead and worthless to a museum specimen. So increasingly commentators argued that nature should be appreciated in the wild with full colour and movement. And in this context, the interest in living things, I think, becomes much more comprehensible. However, much their collection and display might have been equally destructive as the shooting game approach to the museum. Aliveness became a much more precious quality in the 20th century, and deadness fell in value. And again, this is driven by visitors, often against opposition from curators. Curators who were, as I've said, good at taxidermy felt that you just need more taxidermy, you need more dust-free cases, you need more systematic displays, this kind of thing. The president of the Museums Association said in 1890, this is one of my favourite quotes by a museum worker of all time. If museums appeal to idle curiosity, they are failures. You should you should learn to deal with boredom. Curators didn't win, though, on that point. Visitors weren't going to come to study natural history, which was exclusively about classification and dead animals. Now, this particularly this section where my case study museums have all vanished, and you don't really get much in the way of displays of wildflowers in museums in the 21st century. So, in a way, you might say, well, did this have any effect? And I do think that dusty cases, dusty specimens of taxidermy have retreated in museums. Natural history display in museums is much more varied, more interesting, and more alive, dare we say it, than before. Now, this is not to sort of diss the museum that looks like this. I am partial to a case of Victorian taxidermy, but there is no doubt that a whole museum entirely full of such displays with an exclusive focus on classification, they're very hard work and they do seem to sell the natural world short. They don't feel like actual nature. Whereas dioramas and theme displays, museum storytelling, all offer the kind of liveliness over the sense of deadness, which not only is not valued but can repel the visitor. Now we are going to leave the east end of London and we're going to go somewhere completely different. In 1938, two small new museums opened. The Highland Folk Museum, originally sited on Iona off the west coast of Scotland, and Craig Neish Open Air Museum on the Isle of Man. So both in what might be considered, depending on your perspective, quite remote corners of the British Isles, containing objects of little to no commercial value, which had in some cases actively been salvaged from derelict houses and rubbish heaps. They also pioneered a new way to display reconstruction. Now, reconstruction had been used before in room settings, initially for decorative art objects and increasingly for what we might start to call social history. So this is a precursor on the Isle of Man to Craig Neche. This is in the main museum in Douglas, which is a very kind of generic late Victorian museum. But what they did is they built a cottage interior inside it about 1930, in what they called then the Lower Folk Gallery. But these two new museums went much further than that. The Craig Neesch Museum, which is the bottom white one here with a boat outside it, was initially just that one building, which is Harry Kelly's Cottage, a single cottage which was given to the Museum Trust in Douglas by Harry Kelly's heirs after his death. And they remodeled the inside to give it a more traditional look before opening it to the public. Over the next couple of decades, interrupted by the Second World War, during which period the South of Man was the site of a very large internment camp, which actually cut the museum off from Douglas for part of the time. They started to acquire other cottages and buildings in the village of Craigniche. So they ended up by about the middle of the 1950s with a museum that looks like this. As you can see, that some of the buildings are labelled and those are museum buildings, but some of the buildings are not labelled, and those are just an ordinary private residences. So it's a kind of patchwork of bits of museum in amongst an ordinary village. The Highland Folk Museum, which has staffed out in that beautiful, beautiful building on Iona, which is a disused chapel. I think that's the most beautiful setting for a museum ever, quickly left uh uh Iona, and again, uh Iona wasn't fully accessible during the Second World War, so it was just as well that they got away from that. Um, and on the mainland, it turned not just to using existing old buildings as at Craigniche, but to constructing buildings in a traditional way with traditional craftsmen, traditional materials and techniques. So, in this postcard uh for the Highland Folk Museum from I think the 1950s, we can see the Lewis Cottage and the Invernessia Cottage, which, as I say, they're not buildings in situ, they're not buildings that were actually moved uh from Lewis uh or Invernesscia. They are built from scratch by craftsmen from those areas with the uh materials from those areas, and you can see they've got um uh traditionally reconstructed interiors as well. Now, this is very popular and it's spread around the country. Um places couldn't always do open-air museums. Uh, so Cambridge and County Folk Museum, which opened in the same year as the other two, is in an old inn building, but it has um again created a um uh a hearthside setting within the building there. Um so it's it's very popular amongst museums that have uh rural folk collections, um, but it's also popular um with other museums with more urban collections. We start to get uh museum displays like this. This is Lark Hill Place, uh, which is a kind of um a street setting from Salford Museum, um, which uh goes in in the 1940s, I believe. So the collections and the display methods of these museums are quite different from what has gone before. And what they represent, I think, is a revolution maybe in what is valued in museums. Because the value here comes from memory, memory of the everyday domestic past. Now, memory is sensory and embodied, um, sensory traces relating to home, even if not our own, can act as extremely powerful prompts for emotional responses. These are museums where people have feelings and memories, and this is very um different from uh existing museums. So there are a number of ways in which these new museums um feel different. But first of all, you have to go inside what is quite a small space, as we can see here. That's a really low doorway. That's a really low doorway, and the ceiling's pretty low inside as well. They're often well, they're lit differently from from normal museums, from normal museums. Obviously, the aim in normal museums is to have clarity, to have clear, bright, consistent lighting. Whereas these museums have very inconsistent lighting, they're quite dim inside, and where they have light, it's daylight, and it's quite um quite directional, as you can see from these photographs. I think the way light and shadow, I mean it's been photographed for the like light and shadow, but you don't have to try too hard to get these lighting effects in these museums. Some of them, of course, had fires burning in the half place where it was a real one. So you've also got a very distinctive temperature environment in these buildings compared to uh a glass case museum. And they're only open in the summer. I I can't help thinking this one, Harry Kelly's Cottage, it was probably horrible in the winter. It's it's right on the south of the man, it's very exposed. Um, they tried to get the caretaker to live in a neighbouring cottage, and he wouldn't because it was just too damp. Very, very damp. But if it's only open from May to October, you don't really have too much of that problem. Um, and you just get the kind of the nice bits of having an open fire and no other heating. The surfaces of the old things assembled clearly indicated their oldness, the sort of loving way in which the table there is photographed. Um, I think really sort of highlights the kind of old surface, invites you to touch, and you definitely could touch. So we've got a real valuing of that. There's also um a very distinctive soundscape at these museums. Again, if you think of a glass case museum, they're quite hushed, there isn't too much sound, just the sort of murmur of people thinking great thoughts. Um, but these ones had animals. Um, so they also had distinct smells, but I I won't talk too much about that. Um, but also the craft demonstrations. So there's a lot of clacking uh from uh endless spinning wheels. They all have spinning wheels, quite a lot of them have looms as well, and quite a lot of them have um have animals. These are these are baby goats, but the um fully sized goats were quite again quite quite quite aggressive, apparently. And you've also got animals and craft together. So the blacksmith um at Craigniche, um again, they demonstrated uh uh uh smithy crafts and shoeing horses and things like that, which is very noisy, very hot. Um, you've also got the sound and the smell of the horses themselves, so it's all a you know, there's a sensory overload here, really. And this hit in really powerful ways when museums had, as I've suggested, hitherto tried to suppress visitors' emotions and visitors' sensory experiences in favour of in favor of a detached and rational form of looking where you don't engage the other senses and you're not distracted by different shadowy corners and things like that. And people found it a really different experience. Um, some of these quotes I think are amazing. The fact that it was a personal and intimate atmosphere at this these museums, you know, the British Museum does not have a personal and intimate atmosphere, um, which isn't, you know, it's a different type of experience. But um, you know, the the spinning wheel is like a friend, um and the memories are really dwelt on here, even if the actual sensory cues are not quite right. So just looking at the hearth area will get people smelling the smell of a turf fire, even if there isn't one burning there, and they will be sort of tasting the sup of steaming broth, which isn't there either. So again and again we find descriptions of the experience of visiting museums like this as being magical, spiritual, transporting people. It's it's kind of a spiritual revelation for some people. Someone describes it as like um uh being on the road to Damascus and having a kind of uh revelation. So, what this tells us is that in the 20th century, people valued an intimate and enchanting experience at a museum highly. We've already seen that orderly specimens with rows and rows of properly arranged specimens were starting to leave people a little bit cold and they're starting to vote with their feet. Curators didn't really know how to respond to this, um, apart from to maybe put a kitchen in. Everybody put a kitchen in. Um, but there are some signs that uh cultural elites felt that this was kind of too popular a trend. So the very popularity of these um types of living history museums was held against them. Elite cultural commentators think they're fake and tacky. This is a rather marvellous charter for Ramblers by C. E. M. Jode, which has this frontis piece. Um really um quite a biting satire against the kind of ye oldy cottage with a thatch with the lady spinning outside it. Um he talks about yeah, the thatch cottage, the old lady spinning, grandfather clocks, kitchen dressers, these kind of things add up to him to an extremely fake Ursatz kind of experience. And also, quite prominently in the illustration, right in the top corner, you can see the car park. And I think that's one of the things, you know, these are these are kind of trippers, day trippers, and um, everybody hated day trippers. Everybody who was anybody hated day trippers. But I think it is it's just popularity in some ways, and this is also shown by this amazing photograph of the opening day of York Castle Museum in 1938. York Castle Museum, if you don't know it, despite being in the old castle at York, it is a social history museum which featured from the start cottage rooms and street reconstructions, urban street reconstructions like Lark Hill Place. And on its opening day, as you can see, there was a huge cue. Um, and it was actually singled out at the time and since for not being scholarly or systematic enough in its collecting. And you can't help thinking actually, this is this is just because it was about the most popular museum outside London in the country at the time. Now, the 20th century uh was the century of cinema, and I think we can maybe um make some links here. Audiences at films had swiftly found they could experience magical transportation to any number of alternative places, periods, uh, and milieu. Film is very realistic, uh, it's intimate, what can be intimate, and it accustoms the viewer to a sort of visual spectacle. Film is the medium of 20th century modernity, but from the start it dwelt on the past as much as the future. You know, for every sci-fi there was a historical uh drama, and actually, the technological developments of modernity, particularly the motor car, this is Isabel Grant of the Highland Folk Museum. She had a car from quite early in the 1920s and she drove around Scotland collecting stuff, and there are unidentifiable objects in her car that she has been collecting there. Um, the motor car went alongside and fed the desire to be transported into the world of the everyday past. So many of these folk and social history museum collectors were early adopters of the car and loved the car. So, um, to conclude, it is true still that we value museums in different ways and in changing ways. So, most of the things I've been talking about today have at the very least dropped in value. And you've picked up that many of my case studies are museums which have closed. Those that are still extant have changed significantly. So the Bethnal Green Museum, now a young VA, it draws on those early donations of toys and dolls, but it focuses now on the creativity of young people. The Highland Folk Museum still exists, it's great. Go and visit it. Um, it still has reconstructions of ordinary people's homes, but it displays much less of the 18th and 19th century social history which it started with. Quite a lot of the original collection collected by this woman is in storage. But that's absolutely fine. Despite their assertions of permanence and of eternally valued objects and collections, museums are products of their time and always have been. They change constantly, even the ones that seem literally set in stone. And they need to, because their visitors change. Ultimately, what museum history tells us is that visitors and what's precious to them determines museums rather than museums determining what is valuable and precious. Now, for sure, not all visitors are equal. Um, 19th century museums with their collections of dead animals, those come largely from a civic elite, 19th century civic elite who treated their museums as a giant display case for their own bird collections or whatever. But even then, a much wider selection of the public than we might think helped to shape museums. It's particularly clear to see, I think, at small museums. You can see how indivisible they are from their visitors and how clearly they reveal the cultural histories of their period. They tell us about the popularity of the local, of living nature, of imagining time travel in the 20th century through the way those concepts were imprinted into museums. Museums look after the things that we value, and so they remind us that things are only precious because people think they are. Thank you.