Without culture, Albert Camus wrote, society “is but a jungle”. As we navigate the tangle of issues that have grown around Donald Trump and Brexit we need culture’s ability to bring us together, but we should also be alive to the reality that it can be divisive: perceived as elitist, or resented as London-centric.
The UK museum world has long been a quietly successful exemplar of cultural collaboration – loaning thousands of objects and sharing major exhibitions every year. But it is rarer to see the nation’s most prized objects on the road. Last year the Bowes Museum in County Durham lent its star attraction, the Silver Swan of 1773, to the Science Museum in London – an act of great generosity, but also a reminder that national collections belong to the whole country and should have several “good” homes.
The norm is that star pieces stay put, perhaps not surprisingly given that they are key attractions for visitors to our major museums. Taking them on the road can also be costly and complex, though the truth is that the risk of touring objects is often exaggerated.
The majority of these stars reside in London. Let me stress that this is not, in itself, a terrible thing. Our capital’s museums are cultural magnets which draw in people and the money they spend to the UK from across the world. But our national museums could do so much more to ensure that our greatest artefacts can also be seen outside London.
The Science Museum Group, with four museums north of Liverpool, is well placed to lead the way with its plans for Stephenson’s Rocket. The ground-breaking steam locomotive is returning to Newcastle, the city of its manufacture, for the first time in nearly 200 years for this summer’s Great Exhibition of the North. And today we are announcing that it will also visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester – home of the oldest surviving passenger railway station – and, more radically, that it will spend a decade at the National Railway Museum in York.
Objects that are on constant display, and never move, lose love. By contrast, I found myself in Beijing in October – the only month when some exceptionally rare manuscripts are displayed in the Imperial Palace – and was struck by the adventurous mood in the queue to see them. Rocket’s move north will be a coup for York, and inconvenient for the Science Museum in London, where Rocket currently resides. I relish that. It will mean fresh thinking and new stories.
This grand loco is not the only crowd-pleasing rocket in our collection that is on the move. Tim Peake’s Soyuz spacecraft is today unveiled at our museum in York as part of a UK-wide tour, supported by Samsung, that is taking in eight venues in cities such as Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. I have lost count of the number of people who, when seeing it for the first time, have marvelled at how this tiny, charred capsule could ferry people back from space.
Today we are stepping even further from our comfort zone by announcing that the final tour venue will be chosen from a competition shortlist that includes two cathedrals and a theatre, but no museums. Our brief is to deliver inspiring encounters with science and technology, and I’ve no doubt that presenting objects in different locations will spark imaginations in new ways.
Sending iconic items out in the world is not without its perils. There are practical risks, and there will always be assertions that one place has a greater claim to an object than another. But as national institutions we mustn’t be cowed by the prospect of uncomfortable debates: the prize of inspiring people all over the UK is too great. Tim Berners-Lee may have created the world wide web on a single computer (you can see his NeXT computer in the Science Museum, thanks to the generosity of Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), but it is only by recognising its importance across boundaries that we can all benefit from his work in our own homes today, and learn from his generous example.
• Ian Blatchford is director of the Science Museum Group
