Wrest Park in Bedfordshire has submitted plans to the Heritage Lottery Fund for consideration which will see the site undergo a major upgrade of the visitor experience.
The English Heritage site – consisting of a Grade 1 listed stately home and outstanding historic gardens – is a recent acquisition for the charity and needs plenty of attention.
There’s detail about what they’re planning in an article live on Museum [Insider].
There’s a bar near where I live named after George Canning – one time prime minister and famous botched dueller – which has been neglected for a long time – passed from landlord to landlord over the years until it was run into the ground. But it’s just come under new ownership and things are looking up.
It’s now under the care of a young couple who have been brought in to turn its fortunes around. After a lick of paint and some fresh ideas, the place is looking great once again. They explained their ideas for the place to me the other day over a drink, and an article about them and their pub has gone live on Dulwich OnView this morning.
They’re a great couple – a real breath of fresh air – and they’ve got some great ideas, so good luck to them!
My word, that was a double exhibition-visiting weekend just gone.
On Saturday I went back to my old stomping ground of the Imperial War Museum to see the Ministry of Food exhibition. I was pretty excited about going, not least because of the excellent blog which had been putting out great messages about the show in the run up to the opening.
The show is, as always at the IWM, perfectly put together with excellent attention to detail. The design of exhibitions always seems to ‘work’ at the IWM, with beautifully constructed sets and amazing props. But I wasn’t really a fan of the interpretive hierarchy this time. Someone has clearly decided to do away with traditional long panels introducing each section of the show – which is an admirable and a brave step – but the complete absence of narrative left me a bit lost. I came out having seen many of the usual suspects I expected and having learned a few facts, but I didn’t get a sense of what the IWM wanted to tell me about food during the Second World War.
I must say I’m getting a bit tired of the visitor route in the upstairs exhibition gallery with its angular architecture and glimpses of what’s to come through the walls. It worked for a while, but I’m sure someone can come up with something new now.
Sunday was Tate Britain for the Henry Moore exhibition. It only opened last week, so it was pretty busy, but I must say I was utterly delighted with the show. I love Moore anyway, but I had gone into the space with a sense of dread. TB have in the past managed to completely ruin some artists for me with their preachy and unintelligble language and their snooty attitude to art, but this was a pure delight. Aside from the sensitive and well-paced design of the space and settings of the art works, someone has managed to get hold of the panel text and make it actually make sense this time. I came out knowing and appreciating much more about Henry Moore and even bought the catalogue – a rare measure of success for me!
Have you seen either of these exhibitions? Do let me know if you agree/disagree.
I’m really excited to be working with the British Library again.
Back in November I ran some focus groups for the library with members of the public, looking at their future temporary exhibition programme. We got four groups of people together – from different walks of life – and asked them to feedback on a range of potential future exhibition ideas and to rate them in order. That was all written up and presented back to the library, who are now refining their plans in light of it. So thanks to everyone who took part.
I’m now in the process of putting together some more focus groups for them, on a slightly different topic. They’re on Monday 1st and Tuesday 2nd March at the British Library building near St Pancras. If you’re interested in taking part (and earning £30 for an hour of your time), either leave me a comment on this page or drop me an email britishlibrary@steveslack.co.uk and I’ll let you know the details.
Have you ever seen an advert and wonder if it was written specifically with you in mind? Two adverts on the London underground have caught my eye this week.
The first is an advert for Alexander McCall Smith’s new book Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, the latest in his No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. (I quite liked the first of these books, but I must say that I prefer the 44 Scotland Street series.) Anyway, it struck me as another example of people using happiness as a marketing tool. Advertisers do it again and again – it’s a clever idea to associate your brand with making people happy. Another recent example of this is the current BMW campaign Expressions of Joy.
The other advert to catch my eye is for Hot Chip’s new album One Life Stand. The album art features a giant head of the Roman emperor Hadrian, found at Sargalassos in south-west Turkey. It was discovered in 2007 while we were working on the content development for an exhibition about Hadrian at the British Museum. We managed to secure a loan of the head to the BM for the display, less than a year from when it came out of the ground. It was pretty big news and I remember seeing this image over and over at the time, so it was a real bolt for me to see it again on a tube poster.
It’s funny what triggers the mind, eh?
I spent a few months last summer writing content for the British Museum‘s new multimedia guide, which was launched in December 2009. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and so, it seems, is the BM.
What’s different about this guide is that it’s been produced in-house, by the BM itself – usually, museums outsource the creative writing, production, hardware, data uploading and even staffing to an outside company. But the BM has done this all – with some outside help here and there. And full credit to them to getting it done on time.
It means that not only have they saved a small fortune in outsourcing costs, since the guide was launched they have been able to tweak elements of the design and alter content as and when they please.
There’s two bits of news about the guide for now. Firstly, there’s a usability study going on at the moment, to see how user-friendly the guides are. Interestingly, the usability review is being conducted by the same person who worked on the review for Dulwich OnView – it’s a small world, eh?
And secondly, the BM’s multimedia guide is going to be a case study at a Museums Association conference, taking place on 14 July 2010 at the Royal College of Surgeons. All in hand: working with hand held devices will look at the latest developments in hand held technology and provide case studies for museums thinking of altering how they deliver hand held content to their visitors.
Matthew Cock, the BM’s Head of Web is hoping to share some of the results from the current evaluation at the conference. He recently said, “our new multimedia guides are going to make a big difference to the visitor experience at the British Museum and make the collection even more accessible.”
Here’s hoping that’s the case. We’ll see what they come up with.
The final instalment of my awards this year is for services for entertainment new technologies.
Facebook status update of the year comes from someone I forget, but they wrote: X thinks if you give a person a fish you feed them for a day, teach a person to use facebook and they won’t bother you for weeks.
i-phone application of the year is awarded to the trainline app, for changing my life (partly due to the i-phone itself) and always making sure I know when trains to East Dulwich are running. It even runs faster than the main trainline website.
The Self-Employed Homeworkers’ Daytime TV Award goes, in this first year, to Jeremy Kyle for services to waterproof mascara and out-and-out public humiliation.
Finally, the Special Sit-ups Award is awarded this year to Marvin from JLS for keeping us smiling all year.
The second instalment of my awards for 2009, charting my best bits of the year, relates to transport and catering.
Motorway of the year has to go to the M4 for always being clear and for having lots of service stations with M&S food outlets. Always a pleasure when you’re on the move.
Bus of the year – the 176 is always a high contender for its regularity and 24-hour service, but this year it was just pipped at the post by the 40. This route had a new fleet of vehicles in 2009, making it smell a lot less like fried chicken.
Sandwich of the year has to go to Pret a Manger’s Crayfish and Rocket sandwich which, even though it has 370 calories, is a quite a treat on any day.
The inaugural Ruining Christmas Eating Award goes to Morrisons supermarket who have placed adverts this year featuring their festive Wensleydale with apricot and amaretto. Who on earth thought that was a good idea? That said, they did go some way to re-establishing their brand with me when they launched their online cheeseboard creator. Try it out!
It’s the time of year for award ceremonies, so I’m instigating here the inaugural, annual awards from Steve Slack HQ. 2009 has been a great year for museum visits. Here are my highlights
Museum visit of the year is awarded to SS Great Britain in Bristol for their excellent interpretation and choice of audio guides – visitors can choose whether to listen to the perspective of a first class passenger, someone travelling in steerage or the ship’s cat.
Exhibition of the year goes to the futurist show Rodchenko and Popova at Tate Modern. I’m not always a fan of TM shows, but this one really did it for me, with some excellent pieces being gathered from far and wide for the display. And great exhibition branding too, which really fit with the show’s concept.
Interpretive device of the year goes to the Antwerp Fashion Museum for their exhibition on Belgian handbag design house Delvaux. I particularly liked the display of how to make a handbag, and also some great mock-ups of advertising and promotional material from the last 150 years. I blogged about it here.
I’ve just had a bit of a diversion from normal writing service. I’ve spent most of this week editing a conference paper. It’s by an evangelical pastor who basically ran out of time and steam and wanted me to knock it into shape for him - so it was a creative editorial job, basically.
It’s a really inrersting topic. He spent some time discussing the nature of ‘discipleship’ – i.e. following in the footsteps of the disciples of Jesus Christ. He then wrote to 150 evangelical pastors in the UK and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about how they see discipleship in terms of their ministry in their churches. The results are actually quite surprising. The author was showing that there’s a tension within evangelicalist movements at the moment. Should the main aim of such ‘seeker’ churches be getting as many people as possible to convert to Christianity, or is it more about getting ‘good’ Christians who really understand what they’re believing? Is it a numbers game or a project of spiritual enrichment and development? Which is more important – quantity or quality?
The author of the paper suggests that there need to be some changes in the way such churches operate and, while he’s fully committed to the principles of evangelism, recommends some pretty major reforms for the church.
I got this piece of work through guru.com, the free online service marketplace for freelancers. If you’ve got a trade and you want to show yourself to the world, then get yourself on there. And if you’ve got a piece of work you need doing, then stick it on there and see who bids.
Or if it’s a writing/editing job, give me a call!
Lincoln Castle is due to put in a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a major renovation of the castle buildings. At present Lincolnshire Crown Court shares the building with a visitor attraction, but the two are not natural bedfellows. When high profile cases are being heard, visitors to the castle are greeted with added security patrolling the building and a throng of media presence – not the greatest visitor experience.
Once the court has been relocated to a new building in Lincoln, the plan is overhaul the visitor experience. The castle holds one of the only four remaining copies of Magna Carta, which was signed in 1215. So, the plan is to revamp the museum in time for 2015 and a spectacular 700th anniversary re-display.
As always, there’s an article about it on Museum [Insider].
I’ve been working with the British Museum of late, writing their new multimedia guide to the permanent collection – it’s like a traditional museum audio-guide, but it has a screen as well so you can show images and have visitors click on little interactives and games. It’s been great fun, but a bit of a learning curve for me as I was previously used to writing pure audio. I find that the more gudies I take, the better my writing becomes. I’ve really enjoyed making little interactives – click on the screen to find out more about ……
Recently I’ve taken some good tours. The Imperial War Museum multimedia tour is great and has loads of content on there for families especially. And the tour for the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery was brilliant – it really got me looking closely at the paintings and comaring them to works in other museums being shown to me on my screen. One of the golden rules of audio writing for museums is don’t write about what you can’t see, but with this you can!
I’m now working on a tour of the Parthenon galleries at the British Museum for visually impaired visitors, which is a real challenge, but great fun. I’m having to come up with as many different ways of saying – the object infront of you is made of pale grey marble. It all goes live in December, once it’s been translated into nine languages!
There’s a new exhibition of paintings, etchings, drawings, maps and all sorts of 2D material chronicling the history of Southwark life and architecture at the Cuming Museum in south London. Popped along to see it last week and to write a piece of Dulwich OnView about it. Lost Southwark is definitely worth a look if you live in south London and are interested in local history.
I’ve been investigating what it might be like to live the life of a writer for the last year, shifting to working part-time in my role at the British Museum and experimenting with the lifestyle of a wordsmith. It turns out I absolutely love writing and the life that goes with it.
So, now it’s time to move on from the BM and give this career a proper chance. As of today, I’m officially a writer. It’ll be strange, but I’m very much looking forward to responding to the question ‘What do you do?’ with ‘I’m a writer.’
I’ve left the employ of the BM, but I’m not leaving them completely. One of my next projects will be to write a tranche of new material for the museum’s audio tour, which is going to be great fun. I’m also continuing to write for Museum [Insider] and for Dulwich OnView (where I cut my teeth as a writer) and will be contributing to other blogs and online magazines too. And research into happiness continues as well.
It’s going to be a busy year. Let’s see what happens next …
A piece in The Independent today pointed out that we live in a frenetic, throwaway society and that we don’t take enough time to do things slowly and really enjoy them. They suggest the good life – the elusive happiness we all crave, apparently – can be achieved through celebrating ten simple pleasures of life.
How many of these have you done recently? I wonder if this is the path to happiness:
Roasting a chicken - the smell, the slow cooking, the crispy skin. And the accopanying trimmings.
Going for a walk - recharge the batteries through exercise and appreciate your local area.
Caring for clothes - a sense of achievement through fixing something rather than buying new.
Cleaning the windows – let the Spring sunshine into your home.
Servicing the car - er, like the clothes, I suppose. Not sure it would make me that happy.
Baking a cake - the smell, the satisfaction, the icing. And a cup of tea with it.
Making sloe gin - expectation as it matures in the bottle infront of your eyes.
Reading a map - I don’t understand this one. Just use google.
Brewing a cup of coffee - another aroma one. They like smelly things don’t they?
Or just doing nothing - personally, I find this one terribly irritating.
I can see where they’re going with these ten steps, but I’m not sure they’re necessarily a recipe for happiness. And it’s not a great path to the good life if you’re a wheat intolerant, sober, vegetarian, caffeine-free cyclist who lives in a windowless space and hates baking – but there’s got to be something that makes you happy.
Some interesting research about political motivation and happiness from Syracuse University. Prof Arthur Brookes claims in his book Gross National Happiness that conservatives report significantly higher levels of personal happiness than liberals.
Increased happiness in conservatives is not necessarily down to their individual politics, but is linked to contributing life factors. They are are statistically more likely to be married, go to church, and be optimistic about their future – things we know boost personal happiness. For liberals, the rates of happiness are somewhat lower. The author suggests that the liberal equity agenda, while completely honorable, takes a stronger personal toll and contributes to a life with more questions asked than answered. Liberals are more likely to have less smooth home lives, when compared to their conservative counterparts. There’s an interview with the author here.
It’s important to remember most studies like this reporting levels of happiness have collected data via personal response questionnaires. So, in fact it’s more a case of conservatives reporting that they are happier, rather than actually being happy in themselves. For me, this research perhaps means two things:
-1- Conservatives say they are happier than liberals. Is that because they truly are happier (they do appear to have very settled lives) or is it because they feel they ought to say they are happier and living the American dream?
-2- The research shows that liberals report lower happiness levels because they have a more challenging lives. They are less likely to have as much family stability and they have that oh-so cumbersome liberal agenda to which they feel they ought to contribute. It might just be me, but I think living a life with an open liberal agenda that doesn’t mean being tied down to a family, a dog and a church sounds rather fun.
Aristotle asks us whether we would rather be a pig satisfied or a man dissatisfied? To be honest, as much as I crave the perceived stability and wealth of the right, I think I’d rather be a dissatisfied liberal than a satisfied conservative. But that’s just me.
I’ve been adding content to this site for a while now, but today I’ve told everyone about it. Here goes nothing.
There are plenty of links on here to pieces I’ve been writing recently.
And I’ll be updating the happiness project pages regularly as this research project develops.
Have a look around and let me know what you think.
Another step on the road to online enlightenment. We have today been experimenting with ‘domain mapping’ – whatever that might be. From now on, I’m the sole registered owner of steveslack.co.uk.
Exciting stuff.
So, I started adding some content to this blog today. It’s far from ready, so I’m desperately hoping nobody finds it yet, but if you’ve come across this website already and fancy taking a look around, please do so.
Cheers.
Steve Slack is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
He’s in the process of buidling a website, but it might take him a while. Try January, maybe?
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with him leave a comment here.
