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Thread: Liverpool`s new museum

  1. #46
    Re-member Ged's Avatar
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    Fantastic pics Joe. Nice to meet you at the Everton event last saturday grekko if you're looking in
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  2. #47
    Local Historian Cadfael's Avatar
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    Went to the museum for the 1st time on Saturday. I'll sort out my pics/video later. Have to say I was so unimpressed with the whole building. From the outside, well it's just a bloody eyesore of a periscope toy I had years ago - still in I went. And I was greeted with the same puzzled faces wondering where everything was. Everyone seemed to be wondering around looking for where the museum started and like most people, felt they had to trudge up the long and winding staircase to get somewhere else - the ground floor seemed a complete waste of space.

    But then things didn't seem to get any better above either. Maybe it was just me, but I have fond memories of the 'old Museum' where you walked in and everything was 'old fashioned', a bit dark and very formal so you knew it was an honour to go in the building. This museum looks like any school sports hall where randomly placed things were put together. Nothing seemed to have any relation at all and there seemed to be more 'things to press that lit up' than actual things on display. If anything it was like a 'facebook' version of a museum!

    Maybe I'll go back on a quieter day and have a slower look around, but for all that money?? My only liking of the place was the grand views it gave over the 3 graces. Pah to the future if this is all we can come up with.

  3. #48
    Senior Member chasevans's Avatar
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    Unhappy that building

    Quote Originally Posted by Cadfael View Post
    Went to the museum for the 1st time on Saturday. I'll sort out my pics/video later. Have to say I was so unimpressed with the whole building. From the outside, well it's just a bloody eyesore of a periscope toy I had years ago - still in I went. And I was greeted with the same puzzled faces wondering where everything was. Everyone seemed to be wondering around looking for where the museum started and like most people, felt they had to trudge up the long and winding staircase to get somewhere else - the ground floor seemed a complete waste of space.

    But then things didn't seem to get any better above either. Maybe it was just me, but I have fond memories of the 'old Museum' where you walked in and everything was 'old fashioned', a bit dark and very formal so you knew it was an honour to go in the building. This museum looks like any school sports hall where randomly placed things were put together. Nothing seemed to have any relation at all and there seemed to be more 'things to press that lit up' than actual things on display. If anything it was like a 'facebook' version of a museum!

    Maybe I'll go back on a quieter day and have a slower look around, but for all that money?? My only liking of the place was the grand views it gave over the 3 graces. Pah to the future if this is all we can come up with.
    Thanks Cadfael,for your honesty.
    I agree totally with you, although I haven't actually visited the building.
    Regards,
    Chas
    Last edited by chasevans; 07-25-2011 at 02:26 AM. Reason: clarity

  4. #49
    Creator & Administrator Kev's Avatar
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  6. #51
    Senior Member chasevans's Avatar
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    Thanks Kev,
    I rarely read the Observer but it's good to get an outsiders views.
    Cheers,
    Chas
    Last edited by chasevans; 07-25-2011 at 11:32 AM. Reason: claity

  7. #52
    Senior Member gregs dad's Avatar
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    Well said Cad, I could forgive the shape of the building but inside is a bit of a mess with half of the space taken up by it`s extra large staircase and the very large cafe. With the staircase large enough to take at least 10 people on each step,even when it was crowded on the first day people were only using the sides were the rails are so a small one would have sufficed. People go to museums to see and learn not to eat.
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  8. #53
    Re-member Ged's Avatar
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    I agree about the amount of space taken up by the spiralling staircase though having seen the numbers of people using it over the last weekend - which won't be the norm generally (as it's still a novelty and the laser show/concerts were on) it was certainly needed then.

    The Observer article though seems to gripe more about its location to the 3 graces than anything else. I was in there yesterday from 3.30pm until 6pm when it had to shut early - much to the dismay of everyone being shepherded out - and I could have stayed for another hour at least as there's so much to see.

    Fantastic too to see that photography in there isn't frowned upon but indeed encouraged. Also the number of different accents - both UK and foreign. Over 60,000 visitors to date apparently and a lot of the people I know haven't even been yet as they're waiting for it to die down. Brilliant photographic opportunities across the new plazas too - especially with the Crown Princess berthed there yesterday.

    All in all - anyone visiting the city from that liner or anywhere else last night couldn't have failed to be impressed. The projected light show onto the Liver was A1 - not so much so the one onto the museum - but again, just like everything else posted on this thread, it's all a matter of opinion.

    None of this is happening in Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Sunderland or Bristol so I say embrace it. We've enough knockers for the least little thing from elsewhere.
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  9. #54
    Liverpool Photographer Gerard Fleming's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gregs dad View Post
    Well said Cad, I could forgive the shape of the building but inside is a bit of a mess with half of the space taken up by it`s extra large staircase and the very large cafe. With the staircase large enough to take at least 10 people on each step,even when it was crowded on the first day people were only using the sides were the rails are so a small one would have sufficed. People go to museums to see and learn not to eat.

    And well said the independent Observer reporter..
    (No doubt they'll get s.lagged off as Liverpool haters..)

    Its good to hear an independant non biased view from somebody
    that does not have a vested interest in the place...


    I haven't been in it yet, and I'm in no hurry to either..

    I was down there again last night trying to make a better video of the light show..
    I couldn't be bothered videoing the light show when it moved on to that ugly f'n
    excuse of a museum...
    that ugly b***** thing is not ruining any of my vids and will never be in any.
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  10. #55
    Senior Member chasevans's Avatar
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    • This is a copy of the Observer article in full, might make it a bit clearer. There are also readers views on the full link that Kev posted. (#49)


    Museum of Liverpool – review

    It's part of a world heritage site, but the showy Museum of Liverpool fails to complement the city's proud past







    • The Museum of Liverpool's spiral stair: 'Like the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim installed in a Travelodge.' Photograph: Mills Media Limited

      How can this have happened? How could so many positive words – "regeneration", "vision", "culture" – plus so much public and private funding, plus so much scrutiny by bodies such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, have led to what now stands on Liverpool's waterfront? How could so many noble titles – Unesco world heritage site, capital of culture, the "Three Graces" – have been bestowed on what is, to use a sophisticated critical term, a godawful mess?
      Last Tuesday, the £72m Museum of Liverpool opened to the public, billing itself as "the largest city museum in the world" and "the largest newly built national museum in Britain for more than a century". It contains busy, impressionistic displays of the city's history and culture – the Beatles, football, Brookside, trade, wealth and poverty – that are light on original artefacts and big on videos and blown-up pictures. The pace is frantic. You hardly get a moment to dwell on the horrors of the first world war before you're on to something else. Slavery gets a single 3ft by 2ft panel, with a couple of small exhibits, there being an International Slavery Museum elsewhere in the city that goes into more depth.
      The museum's tone is boosterish, albeit seasoned with sobering data about deprivation, rates of heart disease and low voter turnout. You hear much about the city's fast-talking, cheeky, gobby, independent spirit, its perseverance and endurance, its wacky chaos and madness. "In one word, I would describe the accent of Liverpool as brilliant," says one talking head. A more eloquent quote comes from Willy Russell: "The nature of the spoken word in Liverpool" is, for writers, "as the sky and the light must have been to the impressionists."
      The exhibition areas are planned by the Los Angeles-based exhibition and theme park designers BRC Imagination Arts and are the bet-hedging mulch of video, exhibit, text, sound, image and 3-D mise en scène that is now standard in museums. It is like a ready-made school project, or a Wikipedia entry made flesh, a warm gloop of unchallenging information.
      To judge by the lively opening day crowds, having their memories prompted by this or that nostalgic nugget, the museum's aim of connecting the city with its past is powerful and important, but those crowds deserve more provocative and insightful displays than they are now getting.
      The Museum of Liverpool, right, opposite one of the waterfront’s Three Graces buildings. Photograph: Mills Media Limited But the main issue is not the presentation of the museum's contents nor, exactly, the design of the building that houses them, but, rather, the composition, or lack of it, of the museum building, combined with other new structures that are rising around and the historic monuments that were already there. For the museum stands in a Unesco world heritage site, between the impressive warehouses of the Albert Dock and the Three Graces, the three great Edwardian commercial buildings that define the city's waterfront. One of them, the Royal Liver Building, was a century old on the day the museum opened.
      The Danish practice 3XN is credited as "creative architects" of the museum, which means the company designed it, but was later removed from the project, and it has been completed not entirely in accordance with 3XN's wishes. Inside, there's a big spiral stair conceived as a social heart of the museum, which is nice enough, except that it rises towards cheap suspended ceilings that undermine its splendour. It's like the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim installed in a Travelodge. And it seems to eat space: for all the museum's boasting about how big it is, the galleries feel squeezed.
      Outside, 3XN has created a dynamic twist of a building, in pale white stone, that rises at its extremities to give panoramic views of the Three Graces in one direction and the Mersey in the other. There is also a forbidding-looking slalom of wheelchair ramps and stairs at each end, with the idea that people can wander up, through and down again, choosing to look into galleries or not as the mood takes them.
      This idea of casually strolling up ramps and stairs seems over-optimistic, as it's easier just to walk round the outside of the building at ground level. Overall, there's a sense of misplaced energy, with too much in elaborate circulation, and too little in the details, in the gallery spaces.
      3XN's Kim Herforth Nielsen has overcome his differences with the museum sufficiently to turn up at the opening day and he claims he wanted to be "respectful" of the Three Graces and not "to compete with them, but do something completely different". So in place of their square, symmetrical, majestic repose, he came up with a restless squiggle, which he says is also inspired by both the shapes of ships and land art.
      This approach was probably a bad bet, as it is possible to be different from and respectful of the older buildings without being so ostentatiously their opposite, but it might just have come off if the squiggle had been undeniably brilliant and if the other new buildings in the area had been quiet and unified, so as to offset its individualistic dazzle. But they wanted to be clever and different, too, so in addition to the museum there is a block of flats in the form of giant black crystals, by Broadway Malyan architects, and the Pier Head ferry terminal, a sub-sub-Hadid exercise in odd shapes by Hamilton Architects of Belfast. (The terminal won the 2009 Carbuncle Cup, for the nation's worst building, a prize for which the museum is this year shortlisted.)
      Further off are the jerky shapes of flats on the edge of the Liverpool One shopping development. It is as if a huge incontinent dog had deposited them on the pavement, except that the latter's droppings would have had more consistency of form and texture, one to the other. There is no coherence, rapport, sense of wholeness or purpose to the ensemble. The older buildings manage to be expressive, varied, bold, dignified and unified all at once; the new do not.
      There is history to the current state of Liverpool's waterfront. In 2002, a "Fourth Grace" was proposed – a public-private enterprise whereby a landmark building would house the Museum of Liverpool, some other ill-defined purposes and a money-making development. It would be the centrepiece of Liverpool's capital of culture celebrations in 2008. Leading architects were invited to suggest ideas and Will Alsop won, with a giant blob called The Cloud.
      The original Three Graces were classical goddesses and if you were to imagine Canova's marble statue of them hugged by a giant, full-colour Katie Price, you would have some idea of the effect of the Fourth Grace proposals – by whichever famous architect – inflated as they were by their commercial content. The Fourth Grace plan eventually foundered, but it established the idea that the historic buildings could be honoured by blocking views of them and surrounding them with noisy new structures.
      The only improvement is that what has actually been built is smaller than the Fourth Grace proposals, but this is a short-lived relief. Close by, an undistinguished, 55-storey tower is now proposed as part of a £5.5bn scheme called Liverpool Waters, which will poke its way into views of the Three Graces.
      According to Building Design magazine, members of Unesco's world heritage committee have expressed "extreme concern" and are sending a delegation to urge Liverpool's city council to reject the plans. The council might finally wake up, but if so it will have to reverse a direction in which it has been heading for a decade.




    Regards,
    Chas
    Last edited by chasevans; 07-25-2011 at 01:29 PM. Reason: kevs link

  11. #56
    Liverpool Photographer Gerard Fleming's Avatar
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    Thanks Chas for posting this review..
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  12. #57
    Senior Member BlueJeans's Avatar
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    As Oscar Wilde once said 'The thing worst than be talked about, is not being talked about'. Most building have come in for a lot of stick when first erected, even the Liver Buildings had it critics in 1911. The Eiffel Tower was castigated by the Parisians, but is now one of their largest assets.

    The outside structure and staircase of the Museum have been heavily discussed on this forum, but little has been said about the actual exhibits inside. I was down the Pier Head on Saturday night, but have not yet had a chance to go into the Museum as I have been away. Looking forward to calling in this week.

    What are peoples views on the exhibits inside?

  13. #58
    Re-member Ged's Avatar
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    I personally would have liked to have seen something like the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse have a use as a living museum catering for all the large objects as there's 93% of them still not on exhibit here. However, 77,000 people through the doors says more than any reviews - I didn't see anyone bailing out shouting rubbish. The galleries are not tiny but could have been larger - there's barely enough space between exhibits and glass cases and lots of push button interactive stuff. I saw a few short film clips I hadn't seen before and a layout of Everton in 4 sections taking us from the days of Molly Bushells and Prince Rupert right through the decades including the piggeries and now with lighting up parts so identify local Everton landmarks. Wonderous place takes in music (and not just the Beatles - similar to the beat goes on that was on in the world museum last year) and Liverpool's sporting events with a mock up of the Sandon - origins of efc & lfc and a mock up of the stadium with lots of boxing memorabilia and a few lads there yesterday that looked like boxers seemed impressed with it.

    I'll post a few of the things up that are on show.

    DON'T FORGET THE SCROLL BAR AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LAST PIC


    This Albert Dock model is right under the south facing picture window and an audio tells you what you are looking at both on the model and in real life out of the window.



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    An old court. Looks a bit too tidy actually but I doubt anyone had stayed around much if it stunk. This area was packed just beneath my shot.



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    A model of Gerard Gardens depicting tenement living. The original portland stone sculptures that adorned the walls of it stand guard. The Lumiere bros film is projected onto a white wall behind it and Gardens of Stone tenement film documentary (in part) is on an interactive audio visual along with the Kirkby rent strike documentary that's on youtube.




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    Liverpool Stadium featuring John Conteh memorabilia, audio on Dom Volante and general boxing exhibits including I think it was the lonsdale belt and Alan Rudkin memories and the large photo of ex boxers outside the stadium - this part too was packed so I didn't get the chance to see everything after even 2 visits. I think you need to do a gallery at per visit as there are card books to thumb through, info cards everywhere and those films.



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    As well as the old Chippy range that was in the old Museum of Liverpool life and manufactured at No2 Cazneau Street (for us local to the area) there is the Ford Anglia (somewhat out of reach and away from inspection), a penny farthing, features on Liverpool's Welsh and Irish - though I couldn't see any on the Jewish community. Beatles suits - an Eric's feature etc.

    Yet another model - which needs no introduction. I would have liked to have seen the Eldon Grove on in there and the Southern Hospital - both missing since being on view at the last museum.




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    ---------- Post added at 08:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:47 PM ----------

    First visitors to new Museum of Liverpool give it a glowing review

    * by James Morris, Liverpool Echo
    * Jul 20 2011

    *
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    Add a comment
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    THE first visitors to the new Museum of Liverpool gave it a glowing review yesterday.

    Jack Cosgrove, 68, of Wavertree, said: ‘‘It is really impressive. I think it is a beautiful building and it will bring a lot of people into the city.’’

    Audrey Derbyshire, 69, of Brighton-le-Sands, said: ‘‘I think it is very good. Time will tell whether it has been worth the outlay. The fact it is free is another attraction, because it is a great place to take your kids.’’

    David Price, 47, of New Brighton, said: ‘‘It is lovely to see the museum so vibrant and the amount of support it has been given on the first day. People are definitely going to come.’’

    Michele Doyle, 34, of Edge Hill, said: ‘‘The architecture is really beautiful and it is quite awe-inspiring once you walk in, especially the spiral staircase.’’

    Mark Barker, 38, of the city centre, said: ‘‘I have been to a lot of museums around the country, but what struck me here straightaway was the amount of history Liverpool has. It looks really well put together and there is a lot of hands-on stuff for the kids. It is a great documentation of Liverpool’s history.’’

    Robin Hood, 70, of Warrington, said: ‘‘It is certainly an impressive building. It should bring a lot of tourists in, so it can only be good for the city.’’

    Vicky Kelly, 34, of Walton, said: ‘‘It looks fantastic. To be honest, I was not expecting to see so much content. There is so much here and it just makes me very proud to be from Liverpool.’’

    Robert Eccles, 68, of Halewood, said: ‘‘It is definitely worth £72m. If you want to educate people, you have to spend.’’

    Read More http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liver...#ixzz1T93slHDa

    ---------- Post added at 09:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:00 PM ----------

    Then there's the views from the picture windows. Try getting this elavated view from anywhere else.




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  14. #59
    Smurf Member scouse smurf's Avatar
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    Judging by your post Ged, I might actually like this museum. But as I said, I'll wait till it's finished before I go

    I actually think it looks quite nice on the outside

  15. #60
    Senior Member BlueJeans's Avatar
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    Thanks Ged, looks like some interesting facets of Liverpool life, no wonder we are the first city to have a dedicated museum. The Capital of Culture slogan 'The World in One City' looks like it is summed up here: The history of the UK in one city museum.


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