Can’t think what’s prompted the NMM to give the Queen’s House a spruce up, but hey, I’m not complaining. Stephen tells me that a few stones need lifting and replacing but this is really just a general spit-and-polish before the Big Year of Olympic-Jubileeness.

The guy Stephen spoke to told him that after this it won’t need any work doing for twenty years, which is probably a good thing since post 2012 I can’t see anything being done to anything for somewhat longer than that.

When they’ve finished there, they’re moving onto the NMM building itself. I wonder if they could be persuaded to move their scaff and paint pots to the Trafalgar Tavern? It’s looking particularly flaky just now, though I daresay the weeds growing out of the gutter could be argued as being a ‘green roof.’

Following on from the questions about the exterior of the new Sammy Ofer Wing at the National Maritime Museum yesterday, Jenny’s sent me over some images of the building itself.

Of course it’s been half-seeable all the time, viewed through, appropriately enough, portholes in the hoardings, but we’ve all been waiting with bated breath to see just how hideous and inappropriate it’s going to be.

Actually, I don’t know about you guys but I’ve been rather pleasantly surprised. For once the architect’s drawings made a new construction look worse than it really is.  In fact, embarrassing as it is to admit, I can’t help rather liking this wing – it’s sleek and elegant and although it is in a different style to the rest of the museum, that doesn’t bother me. We’re in the 21st Century now and I think it works.

I went to look at it in that tiny window of time between the hoardings being replaced by fencing and the park being closed off for the test events and I find myself quite excited.

In some respects the shape of the main extension building reminds me a little of the tellytubby Sainsburys over on the Peninsuala, though that’s probably the gentle curve and the greenery around it. I shall be interested to see how the little rows of trees behind it fare, though presumably the ground staff are better at watering than I am. I like what I assume will be the modern haha at the main entrance.

In fact the only bit that looks a bit odd are the two glass shafts sticking out of the main extension (they’re the square boxes in the top picture). I had assumed they were lifts but Jenny tells me they’re actually light wells going deep underground to the special exhibition gallery – and, well,  everyone knows how interested I am in anything underground.

Which brings us to the thorny question of what’s actually going inside this aforesaid pretty damn nice space.  As regular readers of this blog will know I am not a fan of the present museum trend of highlighting just a few ‘special’ objects that ‘tell a story’ and leave acres of empty space all over the place when I know they’ve got incredible objects mouldering away in their stores.

More and more museums are succumbing to this dumbing-down (in fact the only museum I know of that still truly clings to the ‘old’ style of delightfully dusty cases stuffed full of objects, the provenance, date and purpose of which remain an intriguing mystery, is the wonderful Petrie Museum, though the Cuming Museum in Southwark makes a venerable fist at pleasing my passion for fascinating clutter – I could (and do) spend hours in there.) The NMM was one of the first in the move towards emptiness, and I am at best ambivalent about their current displays.

I know I am in a minority here, of course. I seem to have got myself into a late-Victorian timewarp, fantasising about H.G.Wells turning up in his Time Machine and whisking me off to view Messers Pitt-Rivers and Petrie’s private collections rather than admitting that the world has moved on, and like the 21st Century building I’ve just praised to its rooftops, museum displays have also changed.

But when I read that the new Voyagers Gallery will house ‘over 200 objects from across the museum’s collections’ I can’t help twitching just a bit.  That may sound a lot, but when you consider the thousands of things they have, I fear two hundred may be rattling around a bit, albeit in the most elegant fashion imaginable.  I also fear that having a ‘greatest hits’ gallery close to the main entrance (and the park and the gift shop) will discourage people from stepping in further; from visiting the galleries where you might have to think a bit.

I guess we’ll just have to wait until July to find out. The one thing that has truly excited me from the start about this project though, is the new archive space, library and reading room, and that sounds  impressive indeed.

They’ll be able to keep more stuff on site, so it will be easier for readers to access. There will be specific reading areas – some quiet, some for group work.  Longer opening hours, including one late-night and…squeeeee! A giant table specially for looking at massive maps. Fantastic.

I was wrong about the way the museum looks. Hands up, I admit it, I’m blushing. I’d like to be able to blush about what the building contains too. But for that I’ll have to wait until July.

And judging from these early pics from Stephen, not nearly as intrusive as I’d feared. Much depends on how they landscape the bit outside – the greener the better in my humble opinion, preferably with at least as much grass as it used to have, even if it can’t be where it was before (I doubt we’ll ever see the tranquility around William IV there used to be). But it could have been a hell of a lot worse. The question now remains – will they bother to put anything inside it, other than a gift shop and a cafe – or just leave it as empty as the rest of the museum?

I’ve been contacted by several people about this – and when I looked into it, it is, frankly, a bit poor.

It’s all down to that bloomin’ Sammy Ofer wing the NMM are building. So desperate are they to make sure it’s all ready for the Olympics in 2012 that they announced that from the 5th January, they would close the Caird research library. Completely. For five months.

Now, at first sight that doesn’t seem so bad. A little library with a few crusty naval books and some old papers? What’s the big deal? And come on – the things need to be moved at some point, or they’ll get all dusty.

But the NMM is a repository for extremely rare documents and books that scholars can’t get anywhere else, and closing it all to public access just so they can get it all done on time seems a bit draconian to me. One feature I read darkly implied that the speed of the project was also due to the “the wishes of the major donor.”

There are several ongoing projects that have been badly hit by the closure – and if you’re an individual researcher hoping to make use of the facilities, forget it. The NMM, after a huge amount of pressure, have since agreed to keep the place open for two days a week for a little while longer before the work, but even when the place does re-open, it will have drastically reduced opening hours and only then by appointment only.

Is this really what being a museum is all about? Pandering to the lowest common denominator with top-hit crowd-pleaser displays for those too lazy to visit properly, cheap exhibitions (that Beside the Seaside show was plain poor), and a bunch of cafes and shops, at the expense of library and research facilities?

While the NMM was being renovated last time, they managed to put on the stunning Queen Elizabeth exhibition – in a tent, if memory serves. This time, everything’s just hunkering down while they rub their hands over the improved retail space. Anyone wanting to use the library will just have to whistle. I’m guessing new brooms at work here.

OK – I admit it – in 2012, there will be some more storage facilities (presumably for all the stuff considered too boring to actually go on display) and the library will be back. But by that time, it’s just possible a dangerous precedent will have been set – of limited opening hours, and limited access.

I’ve been reading about this from two different sources – the Greenwich Industrial History Society Blog and the Nelson and His World Forum Check them out for more details.

National Maritime Museum

I didn’t know this was on until a leaflet fell out of my copy of Time Out. This keeps happening. It drives me nuts that I have to find out about a local exhibition through a London-wide advertising strategy, when I walk past the place virtually every day.

Admittedly once I knew about it and had already decided to go, there was a poster for the show just outside the entrance – but most locals don’t make a habit of walking right up to the entrance of the museum. I know they have a limited budget – and they need to direct most of it at tourists, but it’s our museum too and a poster outside the gates where people actually pass wouldn’t break the bank, surely? (If there is one, I haven’t seen it…)

Beside the Seaside is an exhibition of photographs in the little exhibition area that used to house the Titanic stuff. It doesn’t quite deliver what it promises, but is still worth a visit, if only to see just how similar to each other British resorts looked around the turn of the last century.

The bulk of the pictures come from the Frith collection – when the company ceased trading in 1971, a large number of negatives found their way to the museum and this is an attempt to show a small fraction of them.

It’s billed as “snapshots of British coastal life, 1880 – 1950,” which I took rather literally – that it would actually be ‘snapshots,’ probably by amateurs, of holidays and fishing, piers and seaside rock, spread over that whole period.

Instead, it tends to be landscapes and portraits, almost certainly by professionals, mainly, it would seem, taken around the Edwardian period. And there’s no denying it’s interesting with some of the shots stunning indeed.

The pictures are grouped in geographical areas, usually one photo per resort/coastal town, and do really tell a tale of another world – grizzled fishermen mending their lobster pots, grizzled women, probably much younger than they look, gutting fish, ladies in long black skirts and crisp white blouses, gigantic hats perched on their heads, taking the sea air in groups, their nannies following at an appropriate distance with perambulators.

There is much to enjoy. I particularly liked the dapper gent in blazer and straw boater, drinking-in the exotic air at Torquay, surrounded by palm trees and cacti. And I definitely have to take a trip to Gravesend now, to find out what happened to that gigantic white castle of a building on the promenade.

There’s some fuzzy footage of newsreels and a couple of train posters – presumably to keep to the promise of the period reaching to the 1950s – and a case containing some Punch and Judy puppets for no other reason than, it seems, they were worried the pictures alone wouldn’t be enough of a draw.

But I don’t get the feeling that hearts were particularly in this exhibition. For a subject that should be uplifting and joyful – everyone loves the seaside, don’t they? – to me it has a curiously downbeat feel. It is neither a wholly photographic piece, nor a proper ‘exhibit.’ Was cash tight? I find that hard to believe – the NMM has to be one of the richest museums we’ve got. It is a temporary exhibition, of course, but it has the feel of a temporary exhibition. That it’s just filling in while they’re waiting for the main attraction.

And what is the main attraction? Don’t ask me. You’ll just have to wait for a leaflet to fall out of Time Out…