Introduction
What is required is a National Folk Museum, dealing exclusively and exhaustively with the history of culture of the British Nation within the historic period. . . The way in which we as a people have responded to our environment, or put another way, the effect of the environment upon the development of our physique, culture and national characteristics, might be made clear.Footnote 1
In 1909, at the height of the cultural shift which saw the drawing together of Englishness and the rural idyll, the Museums Association was addressed by its President, Henry Balfour. Balfour used his speech to urge the creation of a national museum which could address the absence of native ethnography in Britain's museums. What he was advocating was an open-air folk park, arguing that a ‘most picturesque and instructive presentation is effected’ if the ‘culture and social economy of the peasantry’ is manifested in a ‘typical village setting’.Footnote 2 What Balfour envisaged was a museum consisting of vernacular buildings from the ‘country districts’, relocated, reconstructed and furnished with appropriate furniture and domestic utensils. Further to this would be collections of agricultural implements and vehicles, local flora and fauna, and the performance of folk songs, dances and games.Footnote 3 Balfour's conceptualisation of British culture was, therefore, thoroughly embedded in ideals of the rural environment and more specifically of rural England. In this paper we are centrally concerned with this conflation of Britain and England and of Britishness and Englishness. More specifically, we will explain these troubling dualisms, and the role of the rural idyll in the making and maintenance of national identity, in the context of the cultural project of creating an English/British museum.
The campaign of Balfour and other interested parties such as the Folklore Society and Royal Anthropological Institute would lead to two initial efforts to create just such as national museum. In 1929 the English Folk Museum Committee, an organisation comprised of various curators and civil servants from the Office of Works and Board of Education, made a failed attempt to create a national folk park in Regent's Park in London. Inspired by this project, the Royal Anthropological Institute formed its own British Ethnography Committee in 1949 to create a ‘Museum of English Life and Traditions’, once again without success.Footnote 4 Both projects failed due to financial and practical constraints, yet they reveal a strong belief amongst curators, ethnographers and folklorists that a national museum should focus upon the interpretation and representation of England's ‘country conditions’.Footnote 5 In principle, this meant the physical manifestation of what Mortimer Wheeler, a member of the English Folk Museum Committee, described as ‘the simplicity, directness and honesty of the older village craftsmanship’, through the collection of ‘the implements wherewith the soil have been cultivated in some cases from time immemorial’.Footnote 6 Here then, we encounter the selective nostalgic, romanticised and largely ahistorical narrative of the nation as ‘rural idyll’, with a national sense of self that is bucolic, homogenous and rooted in the ancient past. As scholars such as Robert Colls and Phillip Dodd have demonstrated, such discourses became unifying tropes to both British and English nationalisms, to the exclusion of more complex narratives of social and geographical difference.Footnote 7 Similarly, whether it be the English Folk Museum Committee, or the British Ethnography Committee, the often unthinkingly interchangeable and habitually indistinct usage of these two politically, socially and culturally loaded terminologies, is particularly revealing. It is illustrative of a persistent failure to distinguish between England and Britain, and Englishness and Britishness, which speaks to a particularly hegemonic, imperialist historiography of the nation. While this paper does not focus on the attempts to create a ‘folk park’ or a ‘Museum of English Life’, it has its origins in wider research into these projects. The primary concern here, however, is with the problematic manifestations of English national identity in a subsequent effort to establish a museum of British history.
Much has been written about the construction of Englishness and the rural idyll, and the idealisation of rural working class culture through the folk song and dance revival, but the representation and cultural power of the rural in England's museums has been largely neglected.Footnote 8 When commentators do turn to such considerations, they tend to concentrate on the emergence and practicalities of agricultural history collections during the folk revival, in institutions such as the Museum of Rural Life in Reading.Footnote 9 Little has been written about the long term implications of this ruralised vision of Englishness in the museum context. In emphasising the successful creation of such localised agricultural collections, commentators have neglected to address the failure of rural Englishness in a national museum context. This is a serious omission, not least because it helps to reveal the cultural power inherent in museums to construct and maintain specific identity formations. Museums are potentially powerful ideological instruments, conveying and reinforcing the persistent, hegemonic identity of rural England as the national identity. Nevertheless, the story of attempts to establish an English/British national museum, based on representations of old England and the South Country, is one of failure. This, we contend, is less to do with the limits of the cultural power of the rural idyll, significant as that is, and more to do with the realisation from within the museological sector of the issues surrounding the unthinking, indistinct and interchangeable habitual usage of English and British.
This was certainly the case for the project that is to be the focus of this paper. Having established that there was a tradition of proposal and failure, we turn from the early attempts at national museum making to the Museum of British History Project. First proposed by the former Conservative Member of Parliament, Kenneth Baker, in 1996, the aim was to create a centralised national museum to mark the Millennium. As with both previous attempts, however, this was to end in failure. This paper will make full use of original documentation where possible, to provide a general exploration of the proposals for the Museum of British History as well as a detailed critique of its communication and interpretation policies and principles and, finally, consideration of the reasons behind the rejection of this proposal. The sources used include the Millennium Commission records held at the National Archives in London and documents viewed by the authors at the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council. We would also like to record our thanks to Lord Baker who graciously gave us access to his copies of the original designs for the Museum of British History. Critical analysis of this material allows us to build a picture of what was proposed and why it was rejected, as well as revealing underlying historical and political perspectives and agenda from both sides of the national museum debate.Footnote 10
The documentary evidence was reinforced by interviews with Kenneth Baker and Jeremy Black, the project's chief historian. Following the protocols of the Oral History Society, and Valerie Yow in Recording Oral History, these were semi-structured interviews, which raised the desired research themes but allowed the respondents to express themselves freely. Full consideration has been given to the dialogic discourse of the oral history interview, the dynamics of the interviewer/ interviewee relationship and in particular the implications of elite oral history. As a politician and an academic, both speakers are authoritative, experienced public speakers, used to communicating their perspectives in an advocatory manner. These attributes could have a negative impact on the course of an interview, but in this instance we would suggest that they were an asset. The value of both sets of responses lies not, we would suggest, in the accuracy of the historical detail obtained, but in the analysis of their motivation in advocating a national museum.Footnote 11
In what follows we first discuss the relationship between nations, identity and museums and the role of the rural idyll in this relationship. We then dissect the implications of, and the cultural processes underpinning, the proposals for a Museum of British History. In particular we will focus on the designs for a ‘British Landscape Gallery’, as here we find proposals for exhibits which demonstrate the endurance of the ruralised reading of British national culture. Footnote 12 What this case study demonstrates is that whilst the rural idyll still has power as a fundamental component of Britain's national identity, the failure of the project, and the criticism it received, reveals the limitations of this ruralised interpretation of the nation in the face of more nuanced contemporary examinations of national museums and their function. Before, however, turning to the Museum of British History Project, we will explore the relationship between nations, identity and museums more generally, in order demonstrate how museological discourses of Britishness and Englishness have become significantly more complex and contested.
Nations, identity and museums in theory
Nations and the construction of national identity
It is now difficult to deny that the nation is a modern socio-political construct, rooted in the imposition of a hegemonic identity via the appropriation and accretion of symbols, customs and practices of earlier ethnic, vernacular communities from which modern nation states have shaped their traditions, formulated their visual culture, and lent themselves political legitimacy. A greater challenge for these embryonic states was to ensure that the individual identified with, and became attached to, the nation as a socio-political ideal, for example through the creation of Benedict Anderson's imagined community and its physical corollary in the standardisation of the calendar, time and language.Footnote 13 For Raphael Samuel this sense of belonging was often engendered through a process of social conditioning which drew on shared and familiar customs, ideologies and cultural norms and was disseminated, according to Ernest Gellner, through the development of particular technologies such as print media and improved transport.Footnote 14 These technologies further enabled the repetitive use of such emblems, creating and reinforcing a sense of national unity and inculcating the individual into a homogenous society, which in turn became both a cultural norm and a part of the ‘national routine’. Here, then, is Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's ‘invention of tradition’ in which the creation of a nation's myths and symbols relies upon selected elements of the past being utilised in the present.Footnote 15 National identity, then, is not a ‘given’ but is instead based upon a ‘shared interpretation’ of the past, one that helps to confirm the ‘self-image and aspirations of the group’, and which is conditioned by specific, but fluid historical circumstances and political needs.Footnote 16 Thus, whilst it is neither feasible nor desirable to try to produce an exhaustive account of the making and maintaining of British national identity here, it is worth examining how certain elements of England's history and culture have contributed to the construction of the collective interpretations of Britishness.
The hegemony of rural England and the construction of Britishness
Krishnan Kumar has described Britain as England's ‘internal Empire’, because of the way England effectively subjugated the other countries of the British Isles and embarked upon a programme of cultural colonialism, in which a sense of Britishness was constructed and maintained through particular institutions emanating from England, or more specifically London.Footnote 17 Formal education was particularly important because it emphasised the English language, literature, arts and English perspectives of history, all of which forced other cultures to the periphery or the private realm.Footnote 18 Thus for Peter Yeandle, the decline of both Gaelic and Welsh languages can be attributed to the dominance of English in official and institutional life, particularly through the printing of history textbooks which treated England and Britain as synonymous.Footnote 19 Convergent sentiment such as this is perhaps best summarised by the constitutionalist James Bryce, who wrote in 1887: ‘An Englishman has but one patriotism because England and the United Kingdom are to him practically the same thing’.Footnote 20 Revealed here also is an assimilationist perspective on Britain and Britishness in which history is comprised of an evolutionary Whiggish narrative which privileged and placed English culture at the summit of the British state.Footnote 21 Moreover, according to Tom Nairn, the nuances of the functional distinctions between Britain as a political unit and England as a cultural entity are not always recognised in these narratives with the result that English and British identities have often been confused and ‘interchangeable’, from one national perspective at least. This is why many politicians and indeed the English themselves have often found it difficult to recognise or articulate the difference between England and Britain.Footnote 22
Central to this near-permanent elision between the two registers of identity are national landscape tropes. Critical here is the way that the imagery of Southern England has become dominant within British discourses, notwithstanding the powerful interrogation of the notion by David Matless.Footnote 23 The origins of this can be found in artistic manifestations of the countryside which contrasted the urban squalor of the Industrial Revolution with the ideal of the rural idyll. Artists such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable and poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson contributed to a new landscape tradition which focused upon rural England as a conduit for identity. They depicted the countryside as a stable, natural landscape, ‘peopled by farmers, craftsmen and labourers pursing their cyclical toil through the seasons’.Footnote 24 This was a romanticised, bucolic ideal, often stripped of any connotations of rural poverty or discontent, which is particularly significant because it created an image of Britain/England as an ancient, harmonious and politically stable country.Footnote 25 This was not even the English countryside as a whole, but a particular vision of the south east of the country that came to dominate representations of the nation.Footnote 26 Here too is encountered ‘deep England’: the ancient and ingrained Anglo-Saxon landscape, with the gentle undulating hills of the South Downs and the productive, orderly fields of Kent standing for the ‘rustic’ values of stability, stoicism and obligation of the British people.Footnote 27 Put very crudely, the history of these sentiments can be traced through a whole series of artistic movements from the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts movement. Under the influence of John Ruskin and William Morris, founding fathers of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the rural idyll collided with the burgeoning heritage and conservation movement. The impact of this was to be felt most strongly in the early decades of the twentieth century with a whole series of satellite groups developing such as the National Trust (1884) and the Ramblers Association (1935) as well as the proposals for the English Folk Museum and the Museum of English Life and Traditions.Footnote 28
As critics like Patrick Wright and David Lowenthal have argued, this trajectory ensured that the landscape of southern England became ‘freighted as legacy’, not just for the English, but for Britain as a whole.Footnote 29 England and its rural landscape were constructed as a spiritual homeland, effectively functioning as a metonym for Britain and its wider Empire and excluding from the national discourse other landscapes that were seen as less harmonious and less aesthetically pleasing. And although Welsh, Scottish, and northern English landscapes and industrial and urban spaces have often been co-opted for alternative images in popular conceptions of the nation, when it came to the unsubtle conveying of Britishness in particular, deep England and the South Country prevailed and found its way into England's museums.Footnote 30
The role of museums in the construction and maintenance of identity
David Harvey argues that the construction and representation of identity through the use of the past is an ‘omnipresent’ of the human condition.Footnote 31 The roots of the museum are, however, found in the private and personal collections, and signifiers of hegemonic dominance, that are the Wunderkammer and the Princely Gallery. Under the ideals of the Enlightenment, as typified by the Louvre, these were later translated into the great national collections, as found in the British Museum. And it is in these great public museums where the human condition is most celebrated and where the modern museum was born. However, much of the literature on the subject agrees that this process was at its zenith in the public museums of the modern period. The popular conceptualisation of a museum is that of an institution for the collection, preservation and display of items of scientific, cultural, or artistic significance for the benefit of public education. It can be argued that many of these principles particularly originate in the rationalist, evidence based thinking of the modern era.Footnote 32 As Pyrs Gruffudd and Eric Hobsbawm have noted, nationalism seeks to utilise the cultural and political power of a ‘rich ethno-history’ in order to construct a narrative and tradition stretching back in time in order to legitimate the present regime.Footnote 33 Many nationalist governments therefore saw the potential for museums to display the evidence of this constructed sense of national self because these institutions, through their collections and ways of presenting the past, could translate ‘abstract concepts into tangible and quantifiable material evidence’.Footnote 34 It follows, therefore, that the conservation and commemoration of the past is ‘implicitly political’, with national museums as physical articulations of a ‘complex of disciplinary and power relations’.Footnote 35 The nation becomes preserved, polished and presented for public consumption. In this politics of representation, cultural power lies with and is maintained through those who decide what is deemed to be worthy of collection and representation in a national museum. Inevitably, therefore, critiquing the role of the museum involves addressing issues of cultural hegemony and influence.
Museums always rely on a process of ‘selection and exclusion’ in terms of what they choose to display, and in the stories, themes and concepts they represent. One of the consequences of modernity was an increasing deference to the integrity and competence of the ‘professional’ and the concept of the ‘authority’ of curators and historians to maintain the ‘official’ version of the past. This reflected a society in which ‘art and scholarship were a closed circle’. Footnote 36 As Pierre Bourdieu notes, social stratification was in many ways reinforced not just by the economic resources of different classes but by their access to education. He argues therefore that museological judgements about the aesthetic or evidentiary ‘worth’ of artefacts are rooted in elitist ideas of taste and accumulated knowledge.Footnote 37 In order to do this, museums are premised upon what John Urry calls the ‘aura of the authentic historical artefact’ in which the exhibitory regime is based upon objects that are given an authority through their fame, value, craftsmanship and ‘authenticity’.Footnote 38 Objects are thus imbued with meaning through the ‘exhibitory complex’, the modes of organisation, presentation and contextualisation employed by museums to communicate a comprehensible narrative of the complex past.Footnote 39 Gruffudd suggests such exhibitions reveal much about the ‘contemporary anxieties, and contemporary desires’ of the society they represent.Footnote 40 In particular they represent a desire to utilise museums as ‘vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting’ the contemporary authority of the nation's elite. Footnote 41
Despite their claims to the contrary then, modern public museums were not representative of the nation as a whole, but were rather, as Gans describes them, an ‘elite controlled cultural production’ with ‘a monopoly on public and visual culture’.Footnote 42 The public's role in these museums was not to question, or contribute to the discourse. Rather they were passive consumers who were ‘invited’ to ‘show gratitude and admiration’ for the privilege of visiting and encouraged to identify with this idea of the national culture.Footnote 43 What they received in return was a selective articulation of the past that was designed to inculcate the individual into the culture, ideas, values and meanings of the shared national identity. Thus, the power of museums came from their ability to reinforce the idea that the nation is a ‘knowable’ entity, one that can be collected, documented, and represented under one roof.Footnote 44 This was reinforced by the way that museums utilised interpretative techniques. Interpretation, the process through which museums and heritage sites communicate with their audience, can involve a variety of media from the simple transformation of information through a label, to the facilitation of a more nuanced debate through a guided walk. It is, however, generally shaped by the places or contexts in which it is situated, the audiences it is attempting to reach, and the desired outcomes of its producers.Footnote 45 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these elitist national museums were inclined to make the ‘assumption that the viewers were educated in a certain manner, with a uniform understanding of how . . . objects should be interpreted’.Footnote 46 Consequently, exhibits commonly took the form of objects enclosed in glass cases, organised using scientific and hierarchical principles with the minimal use of descriptive labelling.
The gradual movement of museums from the academic to the public sphere during the twentieth century may have been one factor in this changing approach to interpretation. This coincided with increasing challenges from social history, post-colonial politics and postmodern theories of meaning to the hegemonic discourses of history and concepts of reality. The authority of museums to manifest such cultural bias has been further subverted by the desire to represent cultural diversity and recognise non-elite discourses and heteroglossic interpretations of the past.Footnote 47 One of the consequences has been an acceptance that museums have to embrace a more diverse range of interpretation techniques to cater for a broader audience that comes with its own set of experiences and preconceptions. Such has been the extent of this rethinking that it is possible to identify ‘a dramatic paradigm shift in the way museum professionals, and some members of the public, regard museums’. No longer, it would seem, can the line hold. There has been a general movement away from ‘the museum as an ivory tower of exclusivity and towards the construction of a more socially responsive cultural institution’.Footnote 48
One of the triggers for this change was Freeman Tilden's influential work for the National Park Service in America, and his seminal Interpreting Heritage (1957). Tilden counsels against positivist interpretation and the pedagogical transmission of facts, and promotes techniques which create a provocative, thinking process, through which visitors are encouraged to make their own meanings.Footnote 49 As Veverka points out however, this is not about museums and heritage sites abrogating their educational responsibilities, but rather about the realisation that communication is a constructivist, dialogic process.Footnote 50 Thus in the period since Tilden published his work, institutions have put significantly more thought and effort into taking this approach through interpretation planning and have developed ever more sophisticated ways to communicate with audiences. Exhibitions are therefore likely to include not just taxonomic glass case displays, but also a diverse range of experiential, interactive and stimulating interpretative media that enable visitors to engage actively with the message of the museum.Footnote 51
Examination of national museums has, therefore, shifted to focus on the inherent tensions between, on the one hand, museums as institutions designed physically to enshrine a particular idea of the nation and, on the other hand, a broader understanding of the fluid nature of collective and personal identities.Footnote 52 There are additional concerns over reliance on the rural idyll trope as signifier of England and of an Englishness that is all too easily conflated into Britishness. These developments inevitably raise questions about the nature of national museums, who controls them and the interpretation of the national culture they wish to impose. It is in this context that this paper will proceed to consider the development of a proposed British National Museum, and, most critically, the implications of its failure.
The Museum of British History Project: a case study of failure
The decline of Britain and educating the people: motivations for a national museum
For the Conservative politician John Redwood, the 1990s were a time of ‘crisis’ for Britain as a socio-political entity.Footnote 53 Greater integration with the European Union following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, combined with the increasing power of devolutionary movements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, were seriously calling into question the continued existence of Britain as a unified sovereign state. The 1997 General Election can be seen as a microcosm of this national soul searching with the question of devolution coming to the fore. On the Conservative side, it was held that devolution was leading to a further dilution of the British state and, as Margaret Thatcher argued, represented a ‘negation of our shared history and an abdication of our joint future’. Footnote 54 Conversely, Tony Blair shaped his leadership of the Labour Party in opposition to what he saw as the Conservative's regressive isolationism and nostalgic attachment to the ‘pre-modern institutions of the British State’.Footnote 55
Another manifestation of uncertainty was the emergence of the Museum of British History Project under the direction of former Conservative Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker. Lord Baker had been passionate about history from a young age, citing the inspirational role of his own history teacher P. D. Whitting, who introduced Baker to the Historical Association and encouraged him to read their pamphlets and attend lectures.Footnote 56 Baker came to believe that:
We're all creatures of the past in one way or another and we all carry bits of the past stuck on little badges everywhere affecting us one way or another. And I thought that was essential to have the understanding.Footnote 57
Baker therefore attempted to create a more consistent history curriculum as part of his education reforms in 1988, emphasising the need to produce a narrative of British history. However, he subsequently regarded these reforms as something of a failure because history became a voluntary subject after age fourteen, allowing many pupils to miss out on what he felt were the ‘valuable lessons about British history’.Footnote 58 The solution to this came to Baker following a visit to the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico in 1995. He was inspired by the educational potential of a national history museum, and became determined to create a similar institution for Britain ‘which would actually tell the whole history which every pupil in the country, I mean the whole country, would go to twice while they're at school, both at primary and secondary’.Footnote 59
Baker suggested when interviewed that he was aware from the outset that direct funding from the public purse would not be available for the project. He therefore raised money through corporate and private donations, allowing him to establish a diverse steering group of cross party politicians and businessmen in February 1996. The steering group then turned to the Millennium Commission for development capital. Footnote 60 Established in 1993, the principal aim of the Commission was to distribute National Lottery funding for ‘projects with popular support which make a lasting good as we approach the third millennium’.Footnote 61 Equally significant, and indicative of his South Country perspective, was Baker's consistent assertion that the museum ‘had to be in London’, because of its positions as the social, cultural and transport hub of the nation.Footnote 62 Thus in February 1996 the committee entered into discussions about the availability of the site of St Bartholomew's hospital in London, which was due to close under National Health Service restructuring.Footnote 63 The steering group then commissioned architectural plans for a new museum on the site, which were submitted to the Millennium Commission in November 1996. Content for the museum (it would be incorrect to call it a collection) was to be decided by a diverse group primarily comprised of academics with Professor Jeremy Black, the project's lead historian, creating the interpretation schema.Footnote 64 It is interesting to note that no museum or interpretation professional appears to have occupied any significant role and it is appropriate to consider the interpretation schema in some detail, given its significance in the project's ultimate failure and the foregrounding of the rural idyll and the South Country.
Interpretation design at the Museum of British History Project
The underlying principle of Professor Black's interpretation vision was that by building understanding of, and a link to, past generations, national museums reveal the impact in the present of the socio-cultural work undertaken in the past. When interviewed, Black suggested that national museums serve a social function to create ‘trust between the generations in a civic polis’, demonstrating the effects of the past in shaping the present and building a comprehension of past generations. Footnote 65 Black describes this process as ‘humane scepticism’, to help the visitor realise that: ‘developments are not inevitable, that there are differing ways in which history can occur, and that there are differing narratives of history, and to allow a full understanding of that, as it were, as part of the democratic citizenry’.Footnote 66 Black could therefore be seen as having identified the capacity of a national museum to reinvigorate and reinforce what Kenny terms ‘the shrinkage of the imagined community’.Footnote 67
Whilst some of this accords with Kenneth Baker's views on the link between national museums and history education, there were clear divergences and Black's embracing of a multiplicity of histories did not fully extend to the interpretation schema. Baker was firm in his view that a national museum disseminating a historical master narrative of democratic progress could contribute to the visitors’ understanding of the nation. As he argued: ‘when democracy is under challenge and threat, as it is in many ways, and weakened, it is very important to go back to the birth pangs of democracy in our own country’.Footnote 68 He felt that by constructing a history focusing on ‘how we've gained our liberties and freedoms. . . . . .some going back to Magna Carta’, it could instil within the visitors a sense of citizenship and belonging. Footnote 69
Aiming to tell the ‘complex and riveting story’ of British history, and construct a ‘comprehensive picture’ of the nation, the Museum of British History Project defined its projected institution as a ‘narrative museum’.Footnote 70 The design and interpretation plan submitted to the Millennium Commission was the material manifestation of this approach, with displays centred around ‘five core themes: The British People, Politics and Monarchy, Language and Culture, The British Landscape, Invention, Science and Technology’.Footnote 71 The nature of these displays, however, reflected the absence of a collections and conservation policy. Furthermore, in a fascinating echo of the imperial strand at the core of the project, ‘artefacts’ and what were significantly denominated ‘icons’ would be borrowed from other museums and private collections, with seemingly no consideration given to whether these institutions would be happy to lend what often would have been the centrepieces of their permanent collections.Footnote 72 The Museum of British History would have been all about the superficiality of the display. Museum as simulacrum.
The interpretative strategy of the Museum of British History Project makes this superficiality explicit by stressing the use of ‘presentation’ to communicate meaning.Footnote 73 This visual narrative approach, likened by Michael Belcher to a ‘three dimensional essay or book’, offers a chronological progression that helps the audience make sense of events.Footnote 74 The Museum of British History would therefore have relied upon chronology and periodisation ‘to place in sequence’ the ‘personalities, the great events, inventions and cultural depths of Britain's heritage’. This narrative would have been organised through the use of timelines, infographics, animated displays and thematic storylines, housed in a ‘walk through linear gallery’ including a ‘circular drum’ which would ‘act as a fulcrum for the curving galleries that radiate around it’.Footnote 75
Museums are often compared to performance spaces where the visitor enacts a predetermined route which gives them a sense of ‘progress’.Footnote 76 This is particularly evident within the Museum of British History Project design, which stressed the benefit of having the ‘building and display developed together and totally interlinked’.Footnote 77 The emphasis within narrative exhibitions on the communication of meaning through diverse, flexible and inclusive interpretative media, rather than the slavish interpretation of authentic historical artefacts, has led some theorists to suggest that they challenge traditional ideas of museological discernment. However, as the circulation pattern from the Museum of British History Project demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case. Even without artefacts guiding the interpretation, many narrative museums are still shaped by a preordained, closed message, and retain their hierarchical organisation.Footnote 78 Thus a narrative museum often remains intensely didactic and often fails to take advantage of the physicality of the space, because the museum simply shifts the emphasis from the object to the text, essentially becoming ‘what amounts to a book written on the wall’.Footnote 79 The Millennium Commission's response to the Museum of British History funding bid reinforces this view by suggesting that the absence of permanent collections and a conservation policy meant that it would not be a museum ‘in the strictest definition of the word, a “pageant” or “Panorama” would be a more accurate description’.Footnote 80 As such, the Museum of British History could be considered thoroughly postmodern and yet closer examination of the designs for the ‘British Landscape Gallery’ reveals a modernist, hegemonic and didactic narrative of British history. There are dissonances then, between the proposed interpretative techniques of the project and the nature of the museum, the medium and the message, which require exploration.
The British Landscape Gallery: a critical analysis
Like many representations of the nation which heighten the relationship between the mythologizing of the past and the politically conditioned conceptualisation of space, the British Landscape Gallery design is a manifestation of Britishness based around traditional markers of national identity that are conterminous with Britain as a territory.Footnote 81 More particularly, it is a design which historicises the idealised spiritual homeland of the British, the English countryside. In the ‘circular drum’ which would have acted as a starting point and hub for this gallery, the narrative would have focused upon delineating the nation in terms of its territorial demarcations and natural formations. This would have taken the form of:
A 5m diameter centrepiece [showing] the British Isles and the surrounding sea, [and] indicating depths, fishing grounds and oil exploration. An additional eight smaller models were designed to reveal cliff forms, erosion, tidal bores, fishing grounds, North Sea Rigs, the Thames Barrier and the effects of the Gulf Stream.Footnote 82
A further major area was a ‘natural zone’ to include a ‘hypostyle hall showing the geology and layering of the country's landscape from pre-history to the present day’, and a ‘greenhouse. . . heavily planted, with birds and inhabited ponds containing fish and aquatic plants’.Footnote 83 Here, therefore, is a manifestation of the nation typical of traditional museology in that it sees the land through the lens of scientific and rational epistemologies such as geology, physical geography, archaeology and, of course, history. This focus on the ‘evolution of our landscape’, especially when bound to a progressional nexus, powerfully suggests that the character of the nation is a natural consequence of the (predominantly rural) landscape and the way it has been managed through ‘conservation, Parliamentary enclosure, agriculture and the development of land.’Footnote 84 This suggestion is further reinforced by the nature of the exhibit on ‘man-made’ (sic) environments. Footnote 85 As illustrated in the list in Table 1, this would have been dedicated to tracing the development of the British landscape through parks, gardens and country estates. It is striking to note that, whether through agricultural revolution or landscape design, these examples are all manifestations of what Peter Mandler described as England's ‘greatest contribution to Western Civilization’, the taming and ordering of the wilderness.Footnote 86 In particular, the Museum of British History Project utilises many examples of the English landscape park, a form of landscape which, particularly through the auspices of the National Trust, has become elevated and ingrained in the national consciousness as an artful and idealised recreation of the idyllic English countryside.Footnote 87
Table 1. Lists of landscapes contained within the Museum of British History Project design
What we are presented with here and what the museum's visitors would have been faced with, is a profound statement of power and control almost wholly bound up with the rural. Here hegemonic dominance is represented by, captured in and bound up with simulacra of some of the most powerful and most vocal of the South Country landscape. Only when fully inculcated would the visitor pass to further rooms dedicated to: ‘showing the influence of the churches and monasteries on our landscape and secondly the influence of the great engineers and the history of transportation; Telford, Brunel and Stephenson’.Footnote 88 Beyond question, in its interpretation plans the Museum of British History Project represented a deeply hegemonic, ruralised and Anglocentric, master narrative reading of the British landscape.
The Museum of British History Project design further reinforced this narrative through its proposed use of replicated spaces and symbolic depictions which embodied a thoroughly heritagised discourse of the nation. The central hub of ‘The British Landscape’ gallery would portray the ‘iconography’ of the British landscape by utilising interpretative panels evoking ‘standing stones’ to symbolise the timelessness of the landscape and the longevity of British peoples’ control over that territory. On their front, these standing stones would have ‘relief maps of Britain’ showing the chronology of land development. On the reverse of the standing stones would have been illustrations of ‘iconography through the centuries’.Footnote 89 As indicated in table 1, this was an assemblage of heritage sites ranging from prehistoric monuments (again) to eighteenth-century country parks. Linking these images to and through the standing stones would create emblematic connections between them, reframing them in an artificial grand narrative which, for instance, completely ignores the nuances of definitions of Britain and the British. For example, is Britain the pre-historic tribal identity of ancient Britain, or the modern imperialistic construct? These and other similar distinctions are significant because what the Museum of British History Project would have told the visitor was that all these landscapes are connected as part of a continuous landscape tradition that speaks of deep England.Footnote 90 As with the ‘man-made’ exhibition, these are not sites which reflect in any way the everyday lived experiences or common environments of ordinary people, but are instead extraordinary sites of supposed historical significance. These psychic terrains would be evoked to demonstrate the timelessness of the British, but specifically the English, elite, their longevity, their impact on the landscape and their unique culture.Footnote 91
Moreover, the same gallery would have contained the starkest elision of Britain and England and of Britishness and Englishness. In the British Landscape Gallery there were to be virtually no references to the landscapes of Scotland or Wales, apart from where they directly intersected with a wider English narrative. The central hub, for example, directly linked the Isle of Lewis and its standing stones to England's prehistoric landscapes at Avebury and Stonehenge. More subtly, but no less profoundly, two landscapes on the list, Offa's Dyke and Hadrian's Wall, are border demarcations that have helped to separate England both physically and psychologically from Wales and Scotland respectively. These are of course landscapes that manifest elite militarised control over essentially rural space and reinforce the internal imperialistic undertones at the heart of the project. Arguably, even the urban environment would have been co-opted to demonstrate England's cultural and political dominance over Britain. Edinburgh New Town was to be utilised in the ‘History of Settlement’ display to demonstrate urban planning. The seventeenth-century New Town development marked a high point in the Georgian architectural style that developed in England and was disseminated across its colonies to replace vernacular styles. The New Town was therefore used to symbolise Scotland's commitment and loyalty to the Crown and the Union, as evidenced by street names with Royal connections such as George Street and Charlotte Square.Footnote 92 The inclusion of this landscape in a British national museum came loaded with political and cultural meaning.
Drawing on the ‘John Bull school of English historiography’, the British Landscape Gallery would have been the epitome of Laurajane Smith's Authorised Heritage Discourse, in which selected sites become transformed into symbols of national heritage through the interpretative auspices of institutions of hegemonic dominance such as English Heritage, the National Trust and national museums.Footnote 93 In making use of sites already solidified and ingrained in the national narrative through their repetitive use by museums, heritage organisations, text books and other media, the Museum of British History Project was clearly conceptualised to continue that hegemonic position. The interpretative ethos of the Museum of British History Project was to utilise a gamut of multidisciplinary interpretative methodologies including sound recordings, computer images, pictures, costumed interpreters and other simulacra to transmit the authorised heritage discourse to its audience.Footnote 94 Ultimately then, what the Museum of British History Project intended to do in the British Landscape Gallery was draw on, and perpetuate, a very particular sense of England and Englishness, founded in the South Country myth but disguised as British national identity. In so doing the project took advantage of the fact that landscapes, as ‘exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony’, have the power to ‘picture the nation’.Footnote 95 Further, this narrow reading of rural England, promulgated by the Museum of British History Project, was mobilised in support of constructions of a national sense of self that is imbricated within a particular hegemonic, centralist reading of Britishness based around the nation as a homogenous, consistent and harmonious entity. However such hegemonic, centralised readings of Britishness are precisely why the project was ultimately rejected, not once, but twice. As this reveals the limits of the cultural power of the South Country at a very particular moment in time, it is appropriate that the last substantive section of this paper should consider this failure.
New Labour, the rejection of past and the limitations of the rural
In January 1997 the Millennium Commission submitted its assessment of the Museum of British History Project. This recognised the project's potential as an ‘innovative educative resource’ but declined to fund it.Footnote 96 In part, this was due to the impracticality of the scheme. The Museum of British History Project steering committee had not secured the St Bartholomew's site, and there were concerns over the projected running costs and estimated timescale, which would not see the museum open until 2001. But beyond these practical issues there was a sense that the project simply did not fit the remit of the Millennium Commission to ‘fund projects across a wide range of locations, some off the tourist trail, to give the whole of the United Kingdom the opportunity to share in the bounty’.Footnote 97 This meant an emphasis on projects that engaged with and benefited local communities, non-traditional audiences and environmental and urban regeneration projects. When measured against such criteria, the Museum of British History Project was adjudged to be ‘less distinctive than other applications received’.Footnote 98
Having been rejected by the Millennium Commission, Baker then proposed a national history exhibition for the Millennium Dome but was unequivocally told by Lord Faulkner, the minister in charge of the project, that there would be ‘no history under the Dome’.Footnote 99 Baker's view of this was that it was a reflection of ‘his master's voice’ in that ‘when Blair won in ‘97, he wasn't remotely interested in history, not remotely. . . to him history began on May 19th 1997, it was the beginning of a new dawn and a new age’.Footnote 100 Certainly the ethos of the Millennium Commission, and the direction taken by the Millennium Dome closely mirror Prime Minister Tony Blair's attitudes to Britishness captured in his book New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, which sought to depict Britain as progressive country, no longer rooted in the past.Footnote 101 Heritage and history were intrinsic to the ‘backward looking’ Conservative ideology that the ‘forward looking’ Labour Government wished to undo. The subsequent rebranding of the Department of National Heritage as the Department for Culture Media and Sport in July 1997 represented a deliberate attempt to create a new civic identity and political discourse shaped around ‘modern’ creative industries.Footnote 102 This strategy began with the implementation of a report from the cross party think-tank Demos, published in January 1997, the focus of which was on renewing identity and rebranding Britain. Entitled Britain TM, the report was critical of the country's image as a ‘theme park world’, stuck in the past and dominated by outmoded images of heritage and pageantry.Footnote 103 Importantly for the prospects of the Museum of British History Project, the Demos report concluded that the future of Britain's culture lay in commodifiable and exportable ‘contemporary’ and ‘creative’ industries such as music and fashion, and not in heritage and museums.Footnote 104 This is ironic considering criticism from scholars such as Robert Hewison and David Lowenthal about the manner in which the heritage ‘industry’ has manipulated and commodified Britain's past for its present needs.Footnote 105
After the rejection of the proposal to put a national museum in the Millennium Dome in June 1997, Kenneth Baker effectively wound down the Museum of British History Project because: ‘I was getting nowhere, I couldn't see a way forward’.Footnote 106 At the very least, this suggests that the power of deep England and the South Country to make and maintain a sense of English/British national identity was turned aside. It is not without irony, therefore, that the revival of this project should have been under the auspices of a Labour government. In December 2007, against a backdrop of doubts and uncertainties about the nature of Britishness in a multicultural society and with the Conservative supporting newspaper the Daily Telegraph running a ‘Call Yourself British’ campaign, Kenneth Baker approached the Prime Minister with a proposal to revive the Museum of British History Project with the same contents and interpretation policies but in a different location, although still in London.Footnote 107 Remarkably, Prime Minister Brown publicly endorsed the need for a national museum, stating that: ‘We will focus not just on how a museum could relate the narrative of British history, but how it could celebrate the great British values on which our culture, politics and society have been shaped’.Footnote 108
Brown consequently commissioned the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, the non-departmental body which advised the government on policy for this sector, to run a consultation process on the project during 2008. This involved a series of seminars and interviews with ‘museum professionals, historians, educationalists and others’.Footnote 109 In October 2008, Roy Clare, chairman of the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, delivered the results of this process in a paper entitled Towards a Museum of British History. This perfectly reflected the museum culture shift noted earlier, certain aspects of which the Museum of British History Project had blithely ignored in each of its iterations, and which can be summarised as the new museology.Footnote 110 Despite suggesting that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of those consulted did not support a new national museum, the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council report agreed that the ‘full potential of the UK's collection is not being realised’.Footnote 111 Yet the report concluded that a narrative-driven, London centric institution, drawing on outmoded historiographical traditions and reinforcing hegemonic tropes of national identity, was not how this should be achieved. The view was taken that:
A single location could not present the complex and diverse history of our country in an innovative and thought-provoking way that does justice to the many possible cultural components; nor could it attract and engage people locally and elicit responses from communities in ways that promote broader cultural understanding and foster identity.Footnote 112
This led to a proposal to establish a Museum Centre for British History which would coordinate national events and exhibitions within existing institutions and promote local museums as a more effective way to encourage engagement with the national collections.Footnote 113 Underpinned by digital resources, the Centre would adopt a federal structure that would involve all public collections and coordinate research, scholarship, skills and themes across the United Kingdom. This essentially small-scale organisation would act to disperse visitors across the museum sector, functioning as a ‘gateway for visitors’ by supporting the national curriculum, producing themed programmes and events and developing commercial and marketing partnerships. The report insisted that through this approach and a dispersed funding model which would invest in a diverse range of museums across Britain, the Museum Centre for British History would achieve the desired outcome of ‘presenting and illuminating all aspects of British history’.Footnote 114 Ultimately, whilst the report acknowledged that the dispersed model required funding and coordination on a national level to achieve its aim, the Centre had to promote ‘local and community’ initiatives. Therefore, the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council report rejected the need for any physical monolithic museum, and specifically the Museum of British History Project. Their conclusion on the Museum of British History Project was that: ‘We are not convinced this is the most effective way to reach wide, non-traditional audiences, nor does it make the most of existing investment in museums, libraries, archives and heritage sites across the UK’.Footnote 115
Baker's response was unequivocal: ‘This is a huge opportunity missed and a damp squib. UK museums tell part of the history but no institution pulls it all together. We now have the option of a British history Nintendo website.’Footnote 116 Ultimately however, with the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council unwilling to support the foundation of a national museum, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport unconvinced by their recommendations for an online facility, the project ‘ran into the sand’ as Baker put it.Footnote 117 It has never been revived. Central to this final miring of the project was the opposition, emerging in part from the new museology, of politicians, historians and curators to the imposition of a single master narrative. Those who were critical of national museums principally based their opposition on the belief that these were exercises in historical exceptionalism. As such, national museums were understood to utilise their control over the images and artefacts within their exhibition spaces to demonstrate why the nation has been singled out for greatness by destiny. As expressed by Simon Tait in the Independent newspaper, and commenting on the Museum of British History Project specifically, national museums as a genre represented a ‘drum and trumpet, Westminster and Whitehall view of history’. Footnote 118 Tristram Hunt, the then historian and now politician, was another who asserted that
State-sanctioned museums of national narratives are dubious projects. Far more successful in our civil society is our pluralism of museums. Because of the richness of our history, it would be very difficult to create a single narrative story in a single museum. If you go down this road of national museums pursuing a political agenda and directors being appointed by the minister of culture, you invalidate the autonomy of our cultural and heritage sector.Footnote 119
Intriguingly, in February 2016, Hunt utilised his regular column in the Guardian newspaper to assert that ‘Labour must embrace Englishness – and be proud of it’.Footnote 120 Perhaps life remains in the old master narrative after all.
Further opposition centred around, firstly, the fact that the Museum of British History Project would have no permanent collection but that it would cherry-pick the most important parts of other collections. Strong voices against the London base were also heard. Alec Coles, director of the Tyne and Wear Museums, was particularly disapproving, stating that: ‘The last thing we need is another building that perpetuates the idea that Britishness only happens in London’.Footnote 121 Underlying all this was the belief that the Museum of British History was fundamentally and philosophically unable to deliver a sufficiently nuanced view of the past for a postmodern and polyvocal age. In an article in the Independent newspaper in August 1997, for instance, Rupert Cornwall commented that ‘[History's] essence is argument; one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. If it truly seeks to distinguish itself, the Baker museum must acknowledge that Britain's record, like that of every other country, is not pristine white but a tapestry of greys’.Footnote 122 This is a philosophy which he appears to have shared with Jeremy Black.
Once again, the Museum of British History Project was confronted by opposition from within the new museology but it also fell foul of an equally dramatic shift in approaches to communication and interpretation.Footnote 123 Central to this has been a shift from ‘positivist’ to ‘constructivist’ approaches to interpretation and communication, with the emergence of a view of heritage, and indeed landscape, as a cognitive and mnemonic assemblage, in which every individual has their own experience or interpretation. What this new approach has wrought is perhaps best summarised by Anderson:
The traditional communication ideology of the museum has been to see the museum as the holder of knowledge and truth with a responsibility to exercise one-way communication to the public. In the reinvented museum, communication between museum and public is exemplified by a mutually respectful relationship; the ideology of two-way communication with the public creates a more responsive interchange of ideas.Footnote 124
It is not difficult to position the schema developed by the Museum of British History Project on the positivist/constructivist interpretation spectrum. Indeed, museums which function solely as didactic storehouses of ‘culture’, reminiscent of the Museum of British History proposal, stand further accused of failing to encourage the participation of social groups not normally engaged with ideas of heritage.Footnote 125 In their paradigm shift, museum leaders no longer perceive people as passive consumers, but rather as individuals with unique perspectives and a capacity to make their own choices about the construction of heritage.
Thus, by the 1990s when Kenneth Baker was trying to persuade the museum sector that a didactic Museum of British History was exactly what it needed, the heritage landscape had changed significantly, moving away from rigid ideas of national heritage in order to embrace a diverse range of sites and artefacts to embrace a multiplicity of periods and social classes. This process was partly driven by governments, local authorities and civic groups utilising localised heritage to regenerate the regions economically and socially, however it was also an ideological expression of heritage as diverse and inclusive. In this discourse, perhaps the antithesis of the Authorised Heritage Discourse, any form of centralisation or imposition of national narratives ‘degrades cultural complexity’ and ‘reduces places to stage sets, someone's idea of the past, tourist destinations, one dimensional and unsatisfying’.Footnote 126 It is clear that the Museum of British History Project faced both a political and a cultural movement away from national museums and hegemonic readings of Britishness and towards an increasingly diverse and regionalised heritage sector.Footnote 127 This raises the question of where this failure to establish a Museum of British History leaves the relationship between national identity and museums. It is to this critical question that we turn by way of conclusion.
Conclusion
Unquestionably, national museums had the power, drawing on national myths, stories, icons and landscapes, to make and maintain a sense of national identity. In terms of an English national museum, in all three failed attempts, the landscape which lay at the heart of the project was the rural landscape of the mythologised South Country. Even if we take Prime Minister John Major's famous aphorism ‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds’ as proof of the continuing strength of the rural idyll in British national life, we must now have to question whether it retains its former resonance.Footnote 128 This does not mean that the Authorised Heritage Discourse has lost its power to animate and materialise hegemonic dominance, but the recurrent failure to establish the Museum of British History clearly indicates the manner in which hegemonic discourses have shifted. Put simply, the creation of a national museum in London at the end of the twentieth century was an unlikely prospect. The political will was not present in 1997 and, notwithstanding the backing of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, at no time did the new museology waver in its opposition to this new museum built on nationalistic and homogenising principles, an old master narrative, old ideas of communication and interpretation and visions of an old England.
Shortly before Kenneth Baker visited the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico in 1995, John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth published one of the most important books of the early critical heritage studies.Footnote 129 In Dissonant Heritage, the authors were the first to assert that all heritage disinherits; that the same heritage can mean different things to different people and thus engender nationalist conflicts; that heritage carries within it disjuncture, fracture and discord. To say that the Museum of British History Project's muddling (to put it generously) of England and Britain did not help Kenneth Baker's cause is certainly no exaggeration and is itself an example of dissonance. Here too the project came up against opposition based firmly in the new museology. Thus, in their criticism of the continued conflation of Englishness and Britishness the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council asserted that ‘any new project would need to be sensitive to the range of meanings implied by such terms as English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, British, the British Isles and the United Kingdom’.Footnote 130 Intriguingly, this argument for the drawing of clear distinctions between these politically loaded terms in museum narratives was in direct contrast with the museological ethos to avoid such proscriptive definitions. Here, then, is a further layering of dissonance and, in a perfect reflection of the polyvocal and polysemic nature of heritage, other layers of the dissonance onion peel can be removed. Beyond question the principles which underlay the Museum of British History Project were those of the modernist, rational and elitist mind set of the modern museum which perfectly reflects its nationalist perspective. And yet, because it did not seek a permanent collection and consequently eschewed a conservation policy, the project adopted the techniques of the postmodern museum in its interpretation policies: interactives and simulacra. Moreover, there are at least two different levels of dissonance discernible within the project. The first is between postmodern interpretation techniques, embracing some of the principles of constructivism, and the modernist, didactic museum. The second is in the challenge to the nature of the museum, with no permanent collection and no conservation policy. A further dissonance derives from the exclusionary claims to national identity.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the attempts of the museum community to circumvent the tensions caused by these dissonances focused on the multiple layers of Britain national identities as a geographically bound culture contained within, but distinct from, the expansive and inclusive notion of Britishness.Footnote 131 What emerged then, was a version of national culture which embraced the plurality of postmodernity and perceived the nation as a fluid social, political and historical construct, and the nation's heritage as a cultural mosaic, all parts of which were endowed with equal validity and a role in constructing the nation.Footnote 132 In the heritage and museum context therefore, Britishness, and indeed Englishness, have developed into indistinct, if not fluid, identities, because they have become increasingly diverse. As Michael Kenny argues, there is: ‘No such thing as Englishness. Rather, there are different contending versions of what it means to be English’.Footnote 133 In the Museum of British History Project, the refusal to even recognise this possibility and the dogmatic insistence on England and Englishness as indissolubly Britain and Britishness were to be the rocks upon which the project would founder. The Museum of British History Project might not reveal the power of David Matless’ other constructions of landscape and Englishness but it undoubtedly demonstrates the limits to the cultural power of the rural idyll.
