Hat Works – Stockport
Hat Works, Stockport - from factory floor to fedoras and fascinators
Where did you get that hat? Lest you thought such a question a mere millinery musing, a visit to Stockport’s Hat Works museum adds a historical and industrial depth to the answer. You may well leave showing even greater admiration for your friend’s fascinating fascinator, or the homburg on your head.
In the late 19th century there were more than 30 hat manufacturers based in Stockport which, in 1885, together employed more than 8000 people. This had grown ten-fold since just 1860 – though millinery manufacture in the town dates from much earlier, the 17th century, perhaps even before that. Housed in one such former factory (active from 1895 until the end of the Second World War) the museum traces the history of hat making, beginning with a mock up of a bow garret – where felt was prepared – and moving onto a factory floor full of mighty machines that give a hint of the scale and scope of the industry in its heyday. Some of these come from a hat block workshop which closed in 1976, ceasing operations only when its 91-year-old proprietor died: the workshop is recreated as was. Other exhibits lead you through the process of hat making – blocking, proofing, dyeing, packaging – right up to the quaint counter of the hat shop.
The industry has entirely left town now. When hat-makers Christy’s moved to Bury in 1997, it marked the closure of not only Stockport’s last hat factory, but the last fur felt hat factory in the country (they now import the felt hoods). 400 years of British industrial history thus came to an end. But lest you be struck by melancholy, display cabinets upstairs cheerfully celebrate headwear in all its variety, from the elegant to the extravagant, including a matador’s hat, a bishop’s mitre, fascinators, fedoras, an England rugby cap (yes, you get a real cap), even a Chinese bridal crown covered with kingfisher feathers, coral and pearls – while temporary exhibitions explore different facets of the industry today. Albeit sadly no longer in Stockport, hat making is still very much alive and well it seems – and to prove the point, I left the museum shop the proud owner of a fine new panama.
Cartoon Museum – Bloomsbury, London
The Cartoon Museum, London - celebrating the art of British satire from the 18th century to the present
The grand colonnades and corridors of the British Museum may treat this island’s story with appropriate gravitas and seriousness, but just around the corner a far more unassuming museum instead sheds a wry smile on our history’s twists and turns. The Cartoon Museum, founded in 2006, charts the development of British cartoons from the 18th century to the present, through displays drawing on its 1500-strong collection of the genre, and through temporary exhibitions.
The well chosen examples on show take us from Hogarth up to today’s satirists. Early cartoons tended to be more complex, often containing a narrative progressing through multiple speech bubbles or scenarios, while more modern ones tend to opt for a single, punchy hit. What hasn’t changed though is just how cruelly they critique: an early example includes James Gillray’s ‘Doublures of characters’ of 1798, which satirises the Whig opposition of the day with a quite vicious glee. Others are less party-political, pointing instead to trends: George Cruikshank’s 1829 ‘London going out of Town – or the March of Bricks and Mortar’ is an early warning of the encroachment of urban sprawl, in this case on the fields of Middlesex. Cruikshank was also responsible for a cartoon that entirely eschewed mirth for a starkly moving morality, with two plates charting the tragic effect of drink on a family: there’s not much cheer there, but plenty of concern.
Meanwhile, you can enjoy favourites such as David Low’s famous ‘All Behind you, Winston’, and explore the rise of new satire in the 1960s, through the work of Private Eye and the likes of Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, as well as the gentler cartoons of Ronald Searle. When you’ve had enough of the puncturing of politicians’ pride, a visit upstairs takes in The Beano, Dandy and the growth of the comic strip.
Humour is in the eye of the beholder of course, and for me the laugh-out-loud cartoons are generally those of the more kindly observational sort. Satirical cartoons can make you laugh if the wit is sharp enough, but more often they lead to a knowing nod or startled shock, depending on whether you share their creator’s view: and I also imagine cartoons far more often offer comfort to the likeminded than they actually change minds. But that takes nothing away from the craft, craftiness, courage and chutzpah cartoonists have shown throughout three centuries, here wonderfully and thoughtfully celebrated. The mark of a healthy society was always one where its citizens raised just as many eyebrows as they did hats.
Tumba Paper Mill Museum (Bruksmuseum) – Sweden
Tumba Paper Mill - making money among the trees
At a time when central banks are dealing in bailouts of billions – incomprehensible quantities of currency which exist only as data – there’s a certain comfort in money you can actually touch. That’s an illusion of course: banknotes are also merely representative of their value, trust writ small if you like. But it’s their story that the fascinating (and free) Tumba Bruksmuseum, set in scenic semi-rural seclusion half-an-hour from Stockholm, explores.
The tale begins, however, with coins, whose face value reflected the actual value of the metal of which they were made. First silver, then copper – though as the value of copper fell the metal plates got ever larger, one example weighing almost 20 kg. A more pocket-friendly solution was sought, and 1661 saw the issuing of credit notes representative of the metal money stored safely away: it’s with these credit notes that Sweden lays claim to the world’s first banknotes. It was an inauspicious start however, as an early run on the bank saw the first manager jailed (having initially been sentenced to death). A more circumspect second attempt saw notes issued again in 1701. It was successful this time, and as the number of interchangeable, lower denomination notes increased, so too did the forgeries. The solution was for the Swedish central bank to build its own paper mill to make its own secure, specialist notes.
Anders Öfverström's Da Xieyi paintings
Which is why we find ourselves among a historic array of pretty timber buildings nestling within woodland, the melting snow and dripping icicles completing the picture-postcard scene. This tranquil haven was a small community of workshops, barns, cottages, a school, even a small fire station – a little like a Swedish Port Sunlight. Many of the houses are still occupied by workers from the modern mill next door, where money (both physically and figuratively) continues to be made. Housed in four of these buildings, the oldest dating from 1763, the Tumba Bruksmuseum has a two-fold remit: to trace the development of the Swedish currency system, and to tell the history of paper making. Paper is celebrated in other ways too. Until the autumn the temporary exhibition space is hosting works by Anders Öfverström, a Swedish artist who paints on paper in a Chinese style called Da Xieyi. Bamboo and birds are conjured with swift strokes steeped in rules and philosophy, the beautifully expressive delicacy of the images offering an intriguing contrast to Swedish functionalism.
In a red warehouse built in 1800, a time capsule of manufacturing machinery, I even get to try my own hand at paper-making. I plunge my wooden mould into a swirling vat of water and cotton pulp then draw it briskly out, carefully letting the water drain away to reveal what remains. It’s a bit like panning for gold – though all I’m left with is a piece of paper. Which is not a bad analogy for the history of the banknote, really.
Fashion and Textile Museum – Bermondsey, London
A suitably bold Bermondsey building houses the Fashion and Textile Museum
In an appropriately arresting building – stylish or garish depending on your personal penchant for pink and yellow – halfway down London’s Bermondsey Street, is the Fashion and Textile Museum. Founded by designer Zandra Rhodes and now run by Newham College, Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta’s bold building houses a large multi-floored but integrated gallery space, used for temporary exhibitions, a small shop showcasing designers new and established, and a café.
On my visit, it was hosting Catwalk to Cover: a Front Row Seat. Images from leading fashion photographers and garments from famous designers tell the story of the high-profile, high-stakes fashion showcase. The texts touch on such things as: the use of celebrities, their attendance every bit as choreographed as the clothes; who gets all-important access, how and why; and how, in a world where every front row viewer wields a smartphone, coverage can be influenced and controlled. The epic glamour of the still shot is juxtaposed with the frenetics of a fashion industry which has to reinvent itself annually, and whose success depends to a large part on the dissemination of images worldwide, instantly, constantly.
Catwalk to Cover, in the museum's airy main gallery
As I worked my way through the exhibition’s images, I was increasingly drawn to looking not at the strutting models or their clothes, but at the people watching them. There’s something intriguing about how a person sits and scrutinises another person, knowing that they are being observed in turn. Watching the watcher watch, as it were. I was also struck by the contrast between the transience of trends, the painstakingly prepared, exquisitely crafted, one-off moment, the brief appearance of the often brief creations on the catwalk – and how us normal souls relate to clothes, which tend to become oft-worn, garnering a treasured, or at least tolerated, familiarity.
Upstairs I wandered into a room celebrating the photography of Jane Ashley, whose work defined Laura Ashley’s image in the 1980s. Flowery frocks and rustic charm feel a long way from the flamboyant theatricals explored downstairs. And yet with her ‘pastoral romantic’ portraits Ashley was a pioneer in using a lifestyle narrative to create the photographic identity of a brand. Which isn’t really so very far removed from the carefully choreographed catwalk, when you think about it.
Beryl Burton display – National Cycling Centre, Manchester
An astonishing athlete honoured: Beryl Burton display, Manchester velodrome
More a display cabinet than a museum, but above the banking track of the Manchester velodrome is a small but appropriately located tribute to one of Britain’s most successful ever cyclists – and for that matter, athletes. Not that her name is one often uttered in the same breath as, say, Bannister, Redgrave, Thompson (or for that matter Boardman or Simpson). That’s something cycling has – perhaps until now? – always had to face, and matters are not helped by the fact that women’s cycling was not an Olympic discipline until Burton was in her 40s, nor was the time trial – her discipline par excellence – then a world championship discipline. Even today, on the road at least, women’s cycling is not given the same profile as men’s racing. Which makes it all the more ironic that one of Burton’s great achievements was, in 1967, to set a record for the 12 hour time trial which stood ahead of the mens’ for 2 years. On setting it, she caught and passed the man who was about to set the record, handing him a liquorice allsort by way of consolation.
Statistics tumble from the cycling CV of this proud Yorkshirewoman - her club, Morley Cycling Club, is the only lettering larger than hers – of records set, trophies won, including 7 world titles (track pursuit); throw in silver and bronze too, and she took home World medals in three different decades. Many are displayed here, along with a World Championship jersey complete with wool collar, and a characterful selection of photographs. Burton looks like she’s trying really very hard in many of them, effort and steely determination etched on her face. She died aged 59, of heart failure, while out cycling.
For all the National Cycling Centre’s high-tech research facilities, cavernous auditorium and shiny white reception area, the banked wooden track and the roar of the crowd at least would be familiar to Beryl Burton. What might she have made of it? I expect she’d have pulled up her toe straps and given her young successors a run for their money.
Spazio Pantani – Cesenatico
Spazio Pantani: celebration of a cyclist
Marco Pantani. Few cyclists have so dominated the sport at any single point – on the ascents, in the media – as he did in 1998. He won both the Giro and the Tour. His greatest achievement? Perhaps, or perhaps it was this. That two years earlier he had hit a car head-on during the Milano-Torino race, sustaining injuries that might have left a lesser man limping for life, and yet returned to racing at the highest of levels. Either way, the following year began a spiral of decline. His ejection from the Giro d’Italia for blood irregularities triggered five years of limited subsequent success, though with occasional flashes of brilliance, sustained legal action, cocaine addiction, and finally death, in a hotel on Rimini seafront.
It was from Rimini, from near the hotel in which he died, now restyled and devoted to health and well-being, that we cycled to Cesenatico, the coastal town where Pantani grew up. From whose pretty dockside streets the young ambitious cyclist set off in search of Emilia Romagna’s sharp climbs. The route passed through miles of endless resort roads, at one point crossing the Rubicon, the threshold of historical and idiomatic renown, though in reality a somewhat uninspiring muddy river.
The Spazio Pantani is housed in one wing of Cesenatico railway station. Through his bikes, his cycling attire, thick folders of clippings, and film footage showing his astonishing, agonising summit successes, Pantani’s tale is told. His famed bandana, the pirate logo adorning everything. The hero and the heroics. The valour and the victor – and the victim. For that is how Pantani is here presented. But whatever the truth, a passport disfigured by a desperate man with protestations of his innocence remains a poignant object (there’s a copy here). But this is not the place to discuss drugs – be they performance enhancing or recreational. Not in order to airbrush such affairs, but because others have covered them elsewhere. Cycling’s past, however glorious, remains compromised – and Pantani is a part of that story. But so too is the touchingly primitive, by modern standards, 1982 Vicini on which the young aspiring athlete began his journey, or the fading photos of the junior rider in period jerseys. His 1997 Bianchi, his 2002 Wilier, his bikes mapping out top-end technology’s progress through the era. The looped footage of a man battling not so much with opponents but with the landscape and with himself, in pursuit of victory. In a small museum, minutes from where it all started, not so many miles from where it all so tragically ended.
Museum of Transport – Greater Manchester
Civic pride: restored buses at Manchester's Museum of Transport
Manchester can claim the country’s first bus service – opened in 1824, from Pendleton to the city centre. While Manchester’s Museum of Transport doesn’t have whatever bone-shattering conveyance plied that route, you will find an impressive horse drawn bus from 1890, on which commuters could pay 6d for the dubious comforts of the carriage, or less to take their chances with the elements and sit on top. It’s where this lovingly-restored collection of vehicles begins. Things move quickly from then on – by 1900 trams were running on tracks, and by 1925 the petrol engine, driver cabin and pneumatic tyres resulted in a bus not unlike those that served the roads for many subsequent decades.
Proudly ranked in lines, in one of the city’s oldest (and Grade II listed) bus garages, 90 or so buses tell the history of Manchester’s transport. Low ones for the peak district routes, to cope with bridges. Experimental ones, such as the first electric bus from 1975, with a battery which could only be used for a couple of hours in peak time, before spending the rest of the day being charged. This was ambitiously ahead of its time: batteries are not uncommon on modern buses now. Another technological return are trams – after initially retiring in 1949, their sleek modern descendants now whirr their way through the city streets.
This is a museum of engineering history. Nostalgia plays an important role too, though I’m not sure I’d swap the smoke-filled, cramped conditions of a 1960s top deck for a spacious air-conditioned modern bus. But perhaps above all, this is a chronicle of social and cultural history. Just as civic pride encouraged councils to built grand town halls, so each area once wanted its own transport fleet, with its own livery. The colours – from bottle green to bright orange – are as eloquent of their eras as the iconography and font types of both the adverts which adorn the vehicles themselves, and those which advertise their routes to potential customers. Have a cuppa in the 1950s tea room and dream of a day out to the seaside: book early we’re advised.
Buses, in an era before wide-spread car ownership, were a convenience for many, and a liberation for some. But despite the modern fleet still processing in and out of the active depot next door, with the exception of London, the communal commuting these vintage vehicles represent is not what it was. Perhaps the return of the more environmentally-friendly tram, the trend back to city-centre living or the soaring cost of fuel might change this. I hope so.
But back to the buses. Several are once again fit for purpose, and hiring them out for period films is a valuable source of income for the museum. Our visit ended with a trip across the city centre in a restored vehicle, courtesy of a driver resplendent in his original vintage uniform. Inside we shook, and shouted above the din. Outside people pointed and took photographs. Museums such as this prevent iconic objects from the past becoming mere part-players in black-and-white photographs. Ding ding, tickets please!
Museo Casa Natale Arturo Toscanini – Parma, Italy
Toscanini's birthplace, now a fascinating museum
On a quiet street to the west of the city centre, just along from the walls that ward off the waters of Parma’s river (which, this scorching summer, is entirely absent, the river-bed a grass-strewn chasm), backing on to the ordered avenues of the Parco Ducale, is the Casa Natale Arturo Toscanini.
It’s not a small house by modern standards – until you discover that the Toscanini family shared it with three others. The maestro’s father, a tailor, used the downstairs room as a workshop, and the Toscaninis lived in the room above it. They were not wealthy – rather heart-breakingly Arturo’s mother would not visit him at music school as she didn’t think herself to be sufficiently elegant. Though Toscanini was to earn greatest international fame for his work in America, this was where he grew up, across town from Parma’s beautiful Baptistry, a walk through the suburbs from the tomb of Paganini.
The one-time workshop is the first room we arrive at; it’s devoted to Toscanini’s relationship with his hometown, concert programmes from the Teatro Regio di Parma, pictures of his teachers. From Parma to Milan: a corridor lined with posters of La Scala triumphs takes us up to his self-imposed exile from his homeland following the rise of the Fascists. Toscanini, an early supporter of the movement, became a committed, outspoken adversary, refusing to conduct the Fascist anthem, incurring the wrath of Mussolini but the support of figures throughout the world: the museum contains a letter from Einstein, praising Toscanini for his commitment to fighting Fascism and his work with musicians in Palestine, soon-to-be Israel.
The Toscanini family’s room, where Arturo was born, explores his personal life: his birth certificate, characterful caricatures drawn by the tenor Caruso, mini Shakespeare volumes mere inches tall (with correspondingly tiny text and appropriately sat next to his reading glasses), hats, canes, portraits of him, one of his father as a Garibaldi soldier, and a gallery of musical heroes: Verdi, Debussy, Wagner, Catalani.From the personal to the professional: Toscanini’s conducting clothes, some of the 1200 photographs taken by an RCA Columbia engineer over a 20-year period, correspondence with composers, including Strauss and Puccini (for whom he premiered La bohème, La fanciulla del West and Turandot), a chain-mail costume from a Lohengrin production, his Bechstein piano. Among the museum’s many recordings available to listen to is one of him rehearsing the orchestra in La traviata, Toscanini occasionally singing the parts and giving directions in a mix of Parma dialect and American English. Finally, in an air-conditioned upper-storey room, a looped-film takes us up to his final years, and so bringing down the curtain on this fascinating tribute to the life of a great conductor, reuniting one of the past century’s most formidable and famous musicians with the quiet Italian side-street in which he was born.
RNLI Henry Blogg Museum – Cromer
The HF Bailey, which Henry Blogg commanded during World War II
The story of Henry Blogg is a humbling example of human nature at its greatest, and a fine corrective in an age in which celebrity status and actual achievement seem so often to be inversely proportional. For 53 years this modest man served as a voluntary lifeboatman in the violent seas off Cromer – an area of the north Norfolk coast known as ‘Devil’s Throat’ – saving 873 lives in 387 launches, only retiring aged 71, 11 years after he should have done. The statistics alone leap off the page with the thunderous force of a North Sea wave.
Remove the lifeboat, and it was an uneventful life. Born in Cromer, in a cottage on the clifftop, Blogg left school at 11 to work on the family crab boat. He married a local girl in the local parish church. There was sadness: one child died in infancy, the other in her 20s. He ran a business renting out deckchairs and beachhuts to tourists. He didn’t smoke or drink. He lived his whole life in Cromer, dying in the town’s hospital.
But of course you can’t remove the lifeboat. And shouldn’t. Blogg’s life story is indelibly linked with his selfless, courageous deeds. He first joined the lifeboat crew in 1894, aged 18 (his step-father was a lifeboatman, as was his step-father’s father – and when Blog retired he was succeeded as coxswain by his nephew). This first launch saw the crew battle through sleet and hail in a winter sea to reach a stricken vessel – and then row 30 miles home again.
Blogg became coxswain aged 33, and over the next four decades was decorated many times for his bravery. His first gold medal was awarded for rescuing the crew from the SS Fernebo in January 1917. The shattered boat was 350 metres off shore, and such was the conditions that it took 14 hours to reach it. This was in an open top boat, powered by 14 oars – the average age of Blogg’s colleagues was 50; two were over 70. The lives of 11 sailors were saved. Other medals and national distinctions followed, for acts equally as staggering: the tally of hours spent fighting the elements – and the number of lives saved – multiplying with the years.
Dominating the centre of the Henry Blogg Museum is, appropriately enough, a lifeboat – the HF Bailey, which Blogg commanded throughout World War II (during which it saved more lives than any other lifeboat). Exhibitions and models on two floors tell the proud story of the RNLI and its history in Cromer. But Henry Blogg, pictured with his kindly weathered face staring out from above his cable-knit sweater, remains the museum’s real centre – just as he probably wouldn’t want to be, but just as he should be, an example to us all.
Mundesley Maritime Museum – Norfolk
Small but charming: Mundesley Maritime Museum
‘Probably the smallest museum in Britain’ it states, and with some justification. The tiny two-floored structure perched overlooking the North Sea was built in 1928 as a coastguard lookout, and when closed in the 1990s was converted into a museum. As with the best local collections, the more focused you get, the less gets left out – clippings chronicling courageous deeds, such as those by mine clearance officers or the 19th century lifeboat crews, sit side-by-side with evocations of the everyday. Which is, of course, just as life in any small sea-side village has always been: sometimes tranquil, sometimes storm-swept, the scenic setting both blessing and curse. Other cabinets tell of the developments of Mundesley’s fishing and trade from the early 1800s, and of the rise and fall of the village’s railway, its three platforms built – like the village’s three hotels – in the hope of a tourist trade that never quite fulfilled expectations. Upstairs has been recreated as a coastguard lookout of the 1930s-40s era, memorabilia mingling with modernity as volunteers once again man the post, monitoring passing craft on the radar, hot-linked to the Coastguard should incident occur – the crumbling cliffs and shifting shoreline of this haunting, exposed corner of England once again under the vigilant gaze of its inhabitants.
Mundesley Maritime Museum Open May 1 to September 30
