Madam, – James MacCarthy-Morrogh (May 17th), having visited the reopened Natural History Museum, bemoans the absence of “modern interactive technologies” and other characteristics of leading museums worldwide. He has, perhaps, missed the point.
As a visitor since my childhood, and a visitor with my children, to me it is the very fact that it is not a modern museum that makes it attractive. It is an institution dedicated to a bygone age where museums were stocked by the mass slaughter of wild animals and where the wielder of the gun got almost as much recognition as the beast slain. It is full of decaying exhibits displayed with a style set in the 19th century and influenced by the 18th. It is a monument to taxidermy and pickling, butterfly pinning and crab splaying. It is so old-fashioned it is the most modern of institutions, an ironically self-referential museum dedicated to how museums used to be, made interesting if seen as a fully interactive, three-dimensional model of a Victorian museum in which visitors can imagine what it was like to explore natural history 100, and more, years ago. It is, therefore, a museum dedicated to the history of natural history museums. What more could we hope for? – Yours, etc,