Museum Geography: Exploring Museums, Collections and Museum Practice in the UK

Abstract

In the UK alone there are more than 2500 museums of interest to international and home audiences. Despite their prevalence and a strong museological culture in the UK and beyond, the geographic study of museums is relatively under‐developed. To date there has been no systematic overview of this field either in the UK or internationally. This review article is intended as a contribution towards an emerging ‘museum geography’. Beginning with an exploration of research on museums, collections and museum practice, the author then considers the recent ‘spatial turn’ in museum studies and discusses how geographers have variously encountered museums, collections and museum practice to date. The article then reviews the potential for the future study of museums by geographers. In so doing, the author suggests that the study of museums offers some exciting opportunities for geographical research and teaching.

Provinciality and the art world: the Midland Group 1961–1977

“…Whilst this paper has been concerned with putting galleries in their place, and draws attention to the spatial possibilities within Becker's concept of art worlds in order to frame the collaborative efforts that create art works and spaces, further work remains on the geographies of galleries and art. One aspect of this would be acknowledging links with the growing area of museum geography, where cultures of display and exhibition content are already open to critical debate (Geoghegan 2010). As Douglas Crimp (1993: 17) points out the national museum can be understood 'as a representation of the institutional system of circulation that also comprises the artist' s studio, the commercial gallery, the collector's home, the sculpture garden, the public plaza, the corporate headquarters lobby, the bank vault' thus echoing the multiple geographies and networks of the gallery that this paper has set out.…”

Unlocking carceral atmospheres: designing visual/material encounters at the prison museum

“…Some museums work to project national stories, whilst others represent regional or local histories, or the histories relating to particular peoples, subjects and themes. The pervasiveness of museums (see Geoghegan, 2010Geoghegan, : 1463 6 has called into being the discipline of 'museology'-the critical exploration of how such sites function in their role as containers and communicators of the past. This project is unsurprisingly interdisciplinary in focus, bringing anthropologists, architects, sociologists, and geographers into touch (see Macdonald, 2007: 149).…”

“…Museums, as collections of materials, objects and narratives transformed into carefully curated displays and exhibitions can be traced back to the 'cabinets of curiosities, (and) study collections … belonging to royalty and wealthy families' in the 17 th century (Geoghegan, 2010(Geoghegan, : 1462. However, the project of preserving and displaying history more systematically began in the 1800s, as state powers sought to communicate 'authoritative knowledge' about the world to the wider public (Crang, 2003: 259).…”

“…In taking on such a task, academics have considered the role of materiality in museum design and the narration of history (see Hoskins, 2004;; the place of performance in presenting the past (see Johnson, 1999aJohnson, , 1999b; the importance of museum space and the routing of visitors (see Geoghegan, 2010); the role of shared engagement and sociality in experience (Macdonald, 2007); and new virtual, audio and sensory technologies as mediums of bringing the present into touch with the past (Ciofi and Bannon, 2007;Howes, 2014). However, each of these dimensions in museum design is taken as a discrete method of engineering historical narratives for visitors (and as ways visitors can themselves author narratives of the past).…”

“…Much penal tourism takes shape through the attraction of the prison museum (although there are exceptions-prison tourism can include visits to prisonerrun restaurants and residential stays at prison hotels, see Turner 2013). The prison museum, in many respects, functions much like any museum-communicating knowledge of the past, in the present (see Crang, 2003;Geoghegan, 2010;Hooper-Greenhill, 1992;Macdonald, 2007). However, the prison museum also represents a past that is dislocated for visitors, both spatially and temporally.…”