As well as visiting Fountain’s Abbey, I took some time to go round York Castle Museum last Friday (12th Feb). http://www.yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk/Page/Index.aspx
On the whole I thought it was a great place to visit. There was loads to see- I am guessing most people would make a few visits rather than squeezing it all in one Friday. One of my favourite aspects were the re-created streets and period rooms. The streets made good use of simple, third person costumed live-interpretation and I liked that they had made use of basic lighting (candles in upper windows) and sound to indicate night falling.
Throughout the museum I was impressed with how well the interpretation related back to things we can all relate to. Some of the more traditional museum displays with old versions of washing machines and toilets were fairly typographical and old fashioned in some ways, but I actually liked seeing the various developments of them all in one place, and they always related it to things within common experience and popular interest and managed to maintain a light-hearted feel.
There is a good strong emphasis on personal stories, and good use of oral history, often with quite a light touch. I was also impressed that they keep their displays updated with contemporary collecting. Not only was there a Sinclair Spectrum in the video games case, for instance, but also a Nintendo DS, so young people would be able to enjoy the nostalgia too. I would guess from my own experience consulting with teenagers in museums that this is something they would probably respond well too.
Some of the exhibits, particularly the armoury displays were way too text heavy, and a good reminder not to put books on walls. That said, this display still had some nice elements to it, including the idea of a fictional character you could follow. The 1960s exhibition looked vibrant and fun if a bit overwhelming in terms of the multitude of ideas and concepts it tried to put over, but I was a bit tired by this point to take much in!
Finally, I visited the York Castle Prison http://www.yorkcastleprison.org.uk/home.html which opened in July last year. The prison makes good interpretive use of research about the prisoners who were captive there, and the conditions they were kept under. I have been to a few different sites lately which made use of projection but I think this was the strongest. It paid off that they had clearly used professional actors to play the parts of the prisoners (including Dick Turpin) and kept the projections and audio snippets short and sweet- usually under or near on 2 minutes. The scripting was naturalistic and conversational as opposed to informative and I felt it worked well at making me feel like I’d met the real people or their ghosts- probably more effectively than if live interpretation had been used.
In some cases the technology didn’t seem to be working but with the names over the doors it didn’t actually matter too much as there was no obvious screen etc. In the one area where the presentation was considerably longer there were seats, and transcriptions for the hearing impaired. I don’t know how satisfying a visit it would be for hearing impaired people though, given this was the only place where transcription was provided. Overall I thought they’d done a really good job of bringing the specific stories of this particular prison to life with just the right amount of interpretation, and I’d definitely recommend a visit if you are in York.
