Just down the road from me they want to build a new World War One "museum". It appears they want to take some fields and basically dig some trenches in them, stick in a replica tank and call it a deal. It's all a bit Father Ted.
Whilst the fields aren't exactly exciting, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer them to be fields than fields with blinking great holes in them filling with water and looking, well like something out of a battlefield.
What's the purpose of things like this? If you're not imaginative enough to be able to visualise the horrors of war without having weedy replicas shoved in your face then frankly you're not going to say "oh look, a huge muddy hole, now I get it , goodness, perhaps I'll not start a war after all" are you.
Link (as perhaps a little too often, sorry, do tell me if it's boring) to local news.
tinyurl.com/mra7hfq
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IF the area had any real claim to a significant historical link to the battlefields it may have had some justification.
As it is, its just a grubby attempt to fleece money out of the grockels pockets by glamming up a pathetic useless swamp.
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>> (as perhaps a little too often, sorry, do tell me if it's boring)
Its not. At least, its not to me.
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What is not being mentioned in the "look at my tank" promo type stuff hitting the media is that this planning application is part of one to build a large garden centre on the same land. The garden centre is being planned as the existing nursery type business on the site is finding times hard and needs to expand or it will likely fail.
I see the site allows just 4ac for the WW1 stuff. Buildings etc might reduce the trench experience to perhaps 2ac and that is going to feel a bit small scale.
It's also right next to the A14 and I wonder if the constant whooshing of traffic might detract a little from the experience.
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>> It's also right next to the A14
Ah well then. to blend in it needs to be a Warehouse.
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>>If you're not imaginative enough to be able to visualise the horrors of war without having weedy replicas shoved in your face......
I don't know how good this particular "museum" is going to be. But I have to say that I find such things can have quite an impact on understanding. Certainly I find it helps my girls understand stuff.
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>> >>If you're not imaginative enough to be able to visualise the horrors of war without
>> having weedy replicas shoved in your face......
>>
>> I don't know how good this particular "museum" is going to be. But I have
>> to say that I find such things can have quite an impact on understanding. Certainly
>> I find it helps my girls understand stuff.
Take them to France and Belgium. Look at acres of pristine white crosses, They can understand stuff better, get a more rounded education and you can eat good food and drink fine wine.
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>> Take them to France and Belgium. Look at acres of pristine white crosses, They can
>> understand stuff better, get a more rounded education and you can eat good food and
>> drink fine wine.
Visiting those graveyards and the memorials such as Thiepval is one aspect and well worthwhile. The trench experience at the IWM (and its companion blitz exhibit) bring it to life though.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Thu 13 Mar 14 at 12:29
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>> (and its companion blitz exhibit) bring it to life
>> though.
Don't need that, spent too many years as a kid playing on bomb sites and in Anderson shelters, and far too many years since of my mother saying "you don't know what it was like......"
If I hear about my uncles false teeth being blown out by a land mine one more time, or "and the doodlebugs was the worse you know" I swear I will swing for her.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 13 Mar 14 at 14:58
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>>>Take them to France and Belgium. Look at acres of pristine white crosses, They can understand stuff better, get a more rounded education and you can eat good food and drink fine wine.
Yep both our girls have been there.
This is the site for the tank/trench farm... goo.gl/maps/VkBOL ... between the crem and Bar Hill golf course. It's the old Hackers fruit farm where F snr would call in during the 60s when the A14 was less busy and we were in the back of his mk1 Cortina hoping a glass bottle of coke was on offer while he bought fruit.
Now of course the site is dominated by the frantic A14 and the turn off is one that increases accident potential.
Last edited by: Fenlander on Thu 13 Mar 14 at 12:36
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>>Now of course the site is dominated by the frantic A14 and the turn off is one that increases accident potential.
300,000 visitors a year. So 1,000 a day on average. Say 30,000 on a summer Saturday? So 10,000 cars, so 2,500 additional cars leaving/joining the A14 each hour. That's one every second. I cannot believe the council have given planning without a s106 requirement to upgrade that junction.
Better still, go to Browndown and see some real trenches!
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>> >>Now of course the site is dominated by the frantic A14 and the turn off
>> is one that increases accident potential.
>>
>>
>> 300,000 visitors a year. So 1,000 a day on average. Say 30,000 on a summer
>> Saturday? So 10,000 cars, so 2,500 additional cars leaving/joining the A14 each hour. That's one
>> every second. I cannot believe the council have given planning without a s106 requirement to
>> upgrade that junction.
Those numbers are not going to materialise.
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>>Take them to France and Belgium
I intend to. Actually its something I want to do for myself as well. I've been but it was a brief moment in the middle of a business trip. I'd like to be able to go back with time to absorb.
The last time we had an opportunity the girls were too young.
Hopefully soon.
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Call me old-fashioned, but I expect a museum to have lots of exhibits and old things in glass cases.
Forgotten small-town museums are sometimes especially endearing. I remember one which had an enormous disintegrating wasps' nest, donated by Col. Blathers in 1935.
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>> Call me old-fashioned, but I expect a museum to have lots of exhibits and old
>> things in glass cases.
Now you're talking. Plymouth Museum, and I kid you not, used to have a collection of old milk bottles. I found them worryingly interesting in the early 80s. And Mrs C had a museum as a child, consisting largely of nature finds, and she made little typewritten labels and put everything in cases (boxes with cotton wool linings) and everything. She even had little tickets to hand out. Sweet.
Mind you, at the age of 13, I discover, her idea of a pinup (and I've seen the book in which the picture is pasted) was Cardinal Basil Hume, so you can't draw much of a conclusion from that.
A recent visit to a railway museum was marred by the infantile descriptions of the exhibits. I got talking to the curator, who, sotto voce, agreed that the headlong rush of society to aim absolutely everything at eight year olds was a tad wearing for the majority of us, but of course "that's the only possible way of getting any funding these days".
When I was eight we thought a trip to the tree in the playground and back was an adventure, bah, humbug.
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>> >> And Mrs
>> C had a museum as a child, consisting largely of nature finds, and she made
>> little typewritten labels and put everything in cases (boxes with cotton wool linings) and everything.
>> She even had little tickets to hand out. Sweet.
>>
>>
All our three had museums. We've had mummified rats, disintegrating bat carcasses, a collection of all the different shapes of coal-egg, and famously, a length of old rusty mooring chain from the bottom of Tenby harbour.
In his archaeologist phase our son carried out a series of trial digs across the lawn, unearthing and identifying old coke bottle tops, a 60s Stanley knife, bits of broken china, horseshoes etc.
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>>I expect a museum to have lots of exhibits and old things in glass cases
Me too. Try a few years living out side the UK, and probably Europe, to realise how good are the Nat History, V&A, Nat Science, Aquarius, Sea World, Warwick Castle, Tring NH Museum, various London Museums, The London Art Galleries to name just a few that we use
I wish people actually living in the UK realised and appreciated what a high quality country it is.
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BTW, the Zoo outside Santiago has foxes, hedgehogs, mallards, peacocks and geese.
I guess I can see why, but I still find it weird.
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Probably the worst museum I have ever been to is the Tower of London, and the worst aspect of it the Crown Jewels. You queue for ages and then get hustled past the most incredible seventeenth century gold and silverware, that is still in use today, that has such revealing labels as 'orb' or 'flagon'. In any other museum, a single one of these would be an item that would be worth travelling to; it would be heavily described and worshipped by the curator. In the Tower, it's just yet another bit of undescribed tat.
As for the rest of the Tower, it's a nice little village to visit, but really, it's not a museum in any sensible sense of the word.
I dread the reopened IWM. A friend of mine is curating the new exhibitions and promises me that it will not be entirely dumbed down... though with a twenty word (or whatever) limit per item, I do not expect to be favourably impressed.
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MM,
I had same reaction to Madame Tussauds. Wallet bending entry fee only to be pushed round at breakneck speed.
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>> As for the rest of the Tower, it's a nice little village to visit, but
>> really, it's not a museum in any sensible sense of the word.
Unfair. Agree about the crown jewels - Incredible stuff badly displayed. The tower however is superb, history oozing from every pore, especially when your tour is guided by a delightfully irreverent and cynical Yeoman Warder taking huge delight in wittily insulting his tour party, employers, royalty, the church, the government and any other body of authority, twisting history unmercifully to display everyone in a bad light.
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Is that Ronnie Corbett in that rather un-endowed tank?
Sorry mother. Language Timothy.
Last edited by: BiggerBadderDave on Thu 13 Mar 14 at 14:55
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New WWI "museum" - Zero
