Visit to Birmingham

On Friday I took annual leave and travelled up to Birmingham to look at the Staffordshire Hoard. We took the coach and then waited in line for almost 3 hours to see the display. Was it worth is? Yes. The items were lovely; such amazingly intricate patterns.

But, we thought Birmingham Museum could’ve stepped up to the plate in better form. Two criticisms: firstly, finances and secondly, crowd movement.

In order to keep the hoard local a lot of money needs to be raised. Yet the museum shop had no Anglo-Saxon themed merchandise. Considering the crowds of people willing to travel long distances and queue for hours it should follow that we’d want to buy a souvenir of this “one off, must do thing to tell your kids about”. I wanted to buy a book and look at the usual Celtic jewellery. My companion expected to take home a cheap mug. What a wasted opportunity to raise funds.

Crowd movement within the display room was also a problem. The items were in a largish room, in short rectangular cases. We thought they let too many of us in at a time. This meant we were 3 or 4 deep around each case and had to wait ages to get near enough to see. We thought the use of long cases would’ve spread us out. Also, if there had been information provided (about the find, about Anglo-Saxon life, etc) say on the walls between the cases, this would also have spread us out, or at least distracted us from the frustration of not being able to see. Arguably this would also have encouraged us to linger, rather than keep moving, but we couldn’t move anyway. Another idea we had was if they provided a staff member at each case to tell us about one or more of the items, after their short speech we’d’ve felt that we’d done that case and there would’ve been a natural progression around to the next case.

After seeing the Hoard a trip to the British Museum was in order, to once more look at the Sutton Hoo exhibit. The sword hilts and bosses are identical to those from Staffordshire. It will be interesting to see what the experts make of this new find.