It is a great privilege to have been appointed Honorary Curator for Kent County Cricket Club. I’ve been working with the Kent Cricket Heritage Trust for the past couple of years and now join the Club itself to direct the caring and sharing of their museum and archive collections. Our vision is a collections experience at the Canterbury ground, but in the meantime there is plenty of collections management to keep me and the team busy. I will continue to vary my work with freelance projects.
My main freelance job last year was researching and writing the content plan for the redevelopment at Gretna Green Museum. Working for designers Mather, it was a completely new subject for me! But it was fascinating separating the myth from the much more interesting reality, and I got to discover Fleet, Border and runaway marriages alongside historic misbehaviour and enterprise.
Poole Museum has some great buildings and collections and it’s been really interesting visiting, listening and writing a feasibility study for their future, along with colleagues Stephen Greenberg and Kara Dickinson from Metaphor Design. Scaplen’s Court and the Town Cellars are grade 1 listed, and you can see the harbour from the top floor of the warehouse building. The pottery is great, of course, but the wreck remains are the big stars. This can be one of the south’s best museums.
top left to bottom right: Poole Museum warehouse building and atrium; View to harbour across Town Cellars; Scaplen’s Court: Anthony Caro’s `Sea Music’; C18 Swash wreck rudder; 1950s Poole dish; the Sea Planes at Poole.
My article `Letting stuff live’ has been published on the well-regarded and heavily-visited website The Museum of Marco Polo.
It’s a provocative think piece on what we are actually doing with stuff in museums – my answer is not enough. Marco Polo introduces it
`Caroline Ellis speaks up for objects, asking whether we should let them lead fuller lives in museums – and acknowledge the rich lives they led before they came to us.’
The Museum of Marco Polo is curated by writer Rachel Morris of designers Metaphor and is recommended for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
http://www.momarcopolo.com/letting-stuff-livecaroline-ellis/
It’s great to be back with the Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery team. Plans for the new hub of museum, library, adult ed, tourism and community services are coming together quickly and I’m working with museum designers Metaphor. Tunbridge Wells’ excellent collections are going to populate the whole building, and I’m researching and writing lots of content on those collections for the project. Metaphor are turning the often surprising stories of Tunbridge Wells into a fresh and exciting way of enjoying all that stuff.
Many congratulations to friends and colleagues at the Silverstone Heritage Project, the BRDC Archive and Mather Design on their Stage 2 HLF pass. Plans are now moving quickly towards the Spring 2019 opening date for the Centre, not just building and fitting out, but gathering in those private collections that are such an important part of British racing heritage. More details at http://www.silverstone.co.uk/about/silverstone-heritage-experience/
Mather are designing the new 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sport Museum in Doha and I’ve been helping with the content development. That’s meant researching the story of different sports from all around the world, some familiar and loved (probably a bit too much cricket in there), others less known. Camel racing, anyone?
My latest research work at Silverstone has unearthed the story of Luffield Priory, the abbey complex on the site. It’s a fascinating tale of medieval life – and monastic misbehaviour – largely lost under the plough and the JCB but coming to life from the records and the digs. And I took an excursion into circus history to track down the elephant who visited the circuit in the 1950s!
I’m enjoying more work on the Silverstone Heritage Project, this time researching and writing up just about everything that’s happened at the circuit. It’s involved revisiting many years of watching sports with the F1 story, but new ground for me with motorcycles and production cars. This great picture is of Sheila Van Damme with her Sunbeam at Silverstone in about 1955. Her racing team partner was Stirling Moss.
(well, I found it quite exciting…..)
Caroline Ellis 