What I didn't expect to find in this gem of a museum
YOU know you’re getting old when one of the cars you used to drive ends up in a museum — alongside the bicycle you lusted after as a child.
It’s doubtless that very personal sense of connection many visitors feel when visiting Glasgow’s £74m Riverside Museum that helped win it the lofty European Museum of the Year accolade this month. That and a visionary design and layout which nails forever the myth that museums need be dreary, dusty frozen-in-time repositories of the past.
The Riverside Museum, opened two years ago on the banks of the River Clyde, was built to showcase the city’s transport, shipbuilding and engineering heritage. It finds space for 3,000 exhibits — double that of the old Museum of Transport which it effectively replaces.
Exhibits range from a super-cool, custom-built skateboard owned by former pro skater, Colin Kennedy, to a massive Glasgow-built South African locomotive, the largest exhibit in any of the city’s collections. Go along and you’ll see couples of a certain age getting misty-eyed over a Hillman Imp or an old-fashioned Glasgow bus. There’s even a 115-year-old Tall Ship, the Glenlee, berthed outside on the river.
Amidst all these splendours, it was the bargain-basement “supermini” — the vehicle of choice for many a thrifty cash-strapped car buyer in the 1980s — that stopped me in my tracks. That and the suspended Raleigh Chopper, even now tantalising just out of reach after all these years.
I found myself peering with glassy-eyed nostalgia at the Metro sitting, quite literally, on the shelf. Flooding back came memories of buying it second-hand — and the fateful Monday winter morning I wrote it off on an ungritted bend on the Struie. That didn’t stop me buying another with the insurance money, this one, unfortunately, a rust bucket with a hole in the petrol tank. Good times!
The beauty of the Riverside Museum is that if you lift your eyes for a moment from the objects on display and take a look at the people looking at them, you’ll see dozens of similar trips being taken down memory lane — via paddle steamer, motorcycle, subway train and automobiles no longer being made.
The interpretation of these exhibits lifts the museum head and shoulders above the vast majority of its counterparts. Amongst the best are film clips of ordinary people recounting their own experiences. Often sceptical of this footage-on-a-loop concept, I found myself transfixed by what people had to say about the Chopper.
Surely the most desirable mass market child-orientated bicycle ever made? And though I never actually owned one, I have fond memories of getting a shot of primary schoolmate Gary Mann’s nifty machine in the playground, learning to pull wheelies and perfecting the art of looking cool. Pretty easy really on a creation which, one suspects, would never make it past our modern-day health and safety gurus.
It turns out my experience in a small Black Isle village was replicated in Glasgow housing estates — right down to an unfortunate accident involving that protruding gear stick.
Long-suffering children seem to intuitively find their way around the many touch screen displays. If they’re good, you can reward them with a jaunt to the tall ship play area. If they don’t, you can make them swab the decks off the same vessel (no, really, you can!).
The Riverside Museum should do well during next year’s Commonwealth Games and is well worth a visit beforehand. Just brace yourself before going for what you might find looking back at you from the displays.
Planning a visit? Find out more here.