Museums

We have some great local Museums in Newcastle favourite is the Discovery Museum , least favourite [only for content not the building itself ] is the Baltic Art Gallery. I have been several times and each time I have come away thinking what the hell have I just seen , I don't think of myself as either an art aficionado or a total art pleb, but I just do not get it, irrespective of which of the may exhibits I have seen . All time favourite Museum was the National Railway Museum in York , strangest was the one in Matlock Bath which had some lovely local old photographs but they have padded it out with some really awful and tatty holographic pictures all above a fruit machine arcade in the old Spa Bath House.
 
The museums I've visited over the last few years have been aircraft museums. However I'm close to Matlock and agree with the Captain about that one which I first and last visited close to 10 years ago. I'm told it hasn't improved ! :eyesroll:
 
Many museums I like. The one I always remember was one of the first I went to - Transport Museum at Clapham. Marvellous seeing these old buses and locomotives close up when an impressionable teenager. In those days it seemed you could get closer than they allow you now.

Also remember when could visit Haworth Engine Shed and walk round everything, even in light steam, and just had to be careful. Now you are kept at a distance - not the same.


Quite an interestign one recently was the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire. Also there is a superb collection of old motor cycles at a cafe in a shoe retailers just off the M65 near Haslingden - company known as Winfields.
 
There is a wonderful museum of old airplanes near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It started out as an old aircraft restoration company. Word got around and people began asking for tours and they finally made it official. I think that they're still restoring airplanes.
 
A quick question to my friends over the pond and of course in the UK who have travelled to the US has anyone visited the museum for the old neon signs from Las Vegas . I vaguely recall a short documentary about it being shown in UK . I cannot imagine not only how colourful it must be but also the sadness at seeing these iconic works of art just sitting there , life over after being replaced by something even more glitzy .
 
A quick question to my friends over the pond and of course in the UK who have travelled to the US has anyone visited the museum for the old neon signs from Las Vegas . I vaguely recall a short documentary about it being shown in UK . I cannot imagine not only how colourful it must be but also the sadness at seeing these iconic works of art just sitting there , life over after being replaced by something even more glitzy .


Would they still be lit up? Or just pale images of their former glory?
 
I believe some have been restored and are therefore presumably lit but not really sure [ their site does not give much away from my initial look http://www.neonmuseum.org/about/the-collection) . I imagine most are just displayed as removed with no lighting but hopefully with some narrative explaining where they were located and when in Vegas.


Unlit neon signs are not that dazzling - the colour is in the gas! They tend to look grey and lifeless.
 
I always enjoy a visit to the National Railway museum in York, last time I went they had several A4 Pacific's in the great hall and I had managed to get tickets for entrance before the place opened at 9am, so we arrived at 6am with only about 30 other visitors, as we left at 9am there were queues around the block, great fun
 
Visiting the Duxford IWM air museums when I visit in July:) and probably a couple of other air museums in my travels around the UK
 
I always enjoy a visit to the National Railway museum in York, last time I went they had several A4 Pacific's in the great hall and I had managed to get tickets for entrance before the place opened at 9am, so we arrived at 6am with only about 30 other visitors, as we left at 9am there were queues around the block, great fun
I went there last year Terry. loved it. A lot bigger than I imagined it would be.
 
We have quite a few museums where I live - Cliffe Castle, the Haworth Parsonage (Bronte connection), Keighley Bus Museum (about 100 buses there), various rail museums at Ingrow and Oxenhope as well as a heritage railway, then there is always my house :08::08::08:
 
Back
Top