Questions for the Museum of East Anglian Life

By Tony Butler, Director of the Museum of East Anglian Life

The musings of Nobel laureates, economists and scientists are coming to the market-town of Stowmarket as the Museum of East Anglian Life (MEAL) plays host to the University of Cambridge’s 100 Questions (produced by its Sustainable Leadership Programme). The installation contains provocations from amongst others Wangari Maathai, Nicholas Stern and Jonathan Porritt. Visitors, it is hoped will be inspired to add their own prescient questions to press policy makers as they grapple with the political challenges of climate change. Two questions grabbed my attention, one from Simon Schama, “How do we mobilize culture -  pop and high – to create the words, images and music – that will make the destruction of the planet and its irreversible loss to our posterity, the cause of the world’s people?” The other question was from Sarah Severn, Director of Horizons “How might we break through the paradigm of continuous economic growth as the only viable future for humanity?”

To me there is moral and social imperative to enjoying more with less. A range studies have shown that despite GDP tripling in 30 years, people in the West live in poorer environments, suffer from greater levels of mental illness and are generally more unhappy than their counterparts in many developing countries. According to the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet index Costa Rica and Vanuatu are far better places to live than the UK which was 74^th out of 200 countries surveyed whilst the US languished in 114^th place. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s brilliant The Spirit Level (2008) drew on research from over 100 countries and concluded that more equal societies almost always do better. People who lived in countries where the gap between rich and poor was narrower were invariably happier and had a lower carbon footprint.

At MEAL we’ve been attracted to the idea of interpreting the lives of people in rural East Anglia in terms of their well being. In 2009 we launched an online exhibition  When Were We Happy which tried to compare comparative levels of well-being in the village of Stowupland in 1850, 1901, 1940 and 2009. The museum’s business planning is now based on NEF’s five ways to well-being. All our activities should ensure that people make new friends, are more active, learn something new, look at the world differently and give back to their communities in some way.

Next year we are putting on a small exhibition about Trust. We are trying to articulate why levels of trust appeared to be higher in communities 100 years ago than they are today. There are many everyday objects such as bottles of herbal medicine prepared by the village ‘midwife’ which show the health of a community was based on reciprocity, non-monetary transactions which built strong social networks and relationships  (‘social capital’ in today’s parlance). According to the economist and Labour peer Richard Layard in his book Happiness (2007), those societies which are more trusting have high levels of democratic participation and religious faith and are made up of communities which are homogeneous and whose members have strong family ties and common interests.

However if living a good life which doesn’t cost the earth consists of having less and living in strong, safe but almost static communities, the future seems wholesome but unattractive. The cultural challenge remains trying to steer a course between the devil of hair shirt environmentalism and the deep blue sea of Daily Mail reaction.

Tangled Banks

This is not going to be a post about how the banks are in a mess or how entangled their corrupt dealings are.  I’m going to save that for a future post about cultural heritage and economics, though I need to do some research first, for example looking at articles from the Institute for Collapsonomics .

No, this is about Darwin’s tangled banks. The final paragraph of his Origin of Species posits an ‘entangled bank’ as a way for us to envisage evolution taking place.

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This ‘entangled bank’ is not one of the various extraordinary ecosystems that Darwin studied on his Voyage of the Beagle, but one close to his home and pretty close to many of his readers’ homes, in the home counties near London. As Easter for me is more of a time to celebrate Spring in nature rather than the Resurrection, we went on a day out to Down House, the home of Darwin for 40 years. We also wandered round the village of Downe, and looked at the church which was for Darwin the significant centre for the community. Then we walked through Keston Common, one of his woodland and heathland areas of study. See here for some photos of these places.

The house is owned by English Heritage, who have put a good deal of resource into improving the experience to coincide with the Darwin200 celebrations. This investment was also part of the bid to make Downe and Cudham (or Darwin’s Landscape Laboratory) a World Heritage Site, although that application is now withdrawn.

Overall, it’s a pretty good experience. The house is perfectly restored and the downstairs rooms highly atmospheric, especially his study. Upstairs, there is a new exhibition, Uncovering Origins, which is very informative and accessible. It includes a mock-up of his room on the Beagle with a ‘pepper’s ghost’ of him at his desk. We spent a lot of time looking at the large map of the voyage, at the family tree that showed Darwin’s entanglement with the Wedgewood family, and at the Turning the Pages treatment of his notebooks. We also spent time in the two (yes, two!) rooms aimed at children, which had some pretty good interactive games designed with a Victorian sideshow feel. We found the gardens a little bit underwhelming, although walking Darwin’s ‘thinking path’ was lovely.

The enriched interpretation in the house is really welcome, although as a family we did have some criticisms:

The provision of free PDA audio-visual guides is a good thing. But this meant that the downstairs rooms were clogged up with people taking their time listening and fiddling with their devices so you couldn’t actually see the detail in the rooms. In the upstairs exhibition, the devices were taken away from you and so in these spaces the visitors were much more able to concentrate, play with the exhibits and talk to each other. I was disappointed with the content of these AV tours as they missed the opportunity to create an ambient layer to enrich your experience of moving around the house and the gardens. I generally find recorded speech far too slow and irritating as a way of taking in information, but I do like it if it is music, sound effects, poetry or drama. A recent discussion on Twitter about audioguides sparked by Nina Simon shows that I’m not alone in this.

Our second criticism is that we would have liked a way to interact with the ideas in the exhibition. There was one video called ‘What does Darwin mean to you?’ but it only showed talking heads and we had no chance to leave our own ideas. There could be some wonderfully creative ways to engage people with Darwin and evolution, for example, by inviting them to contribute to an evolving story or an artwork.

I’ll soon make a visit to the Darwin Big Idea exhibition at the Natural History Museum and will be interested to see how it enables visitor interactions. It’s so important that we get beyond simplistic debates about evolution vs belief and extend public understanding of historic ecology and biodiversity. That’s why heritage experiences must be as interactive and creative as possible.