Just 70

Museums are an unsung glory of our cultural life. But I only have to open my cupboards to see decades of history

Just 70


I have a growing awareness that more and more of my life is turning up in museums. It began many years ago when I first visited the Museum of Childhood, and was swept back to my early years by baby clothes from the 1930s that were exactly those I watched my mother bestow on my baby sister. No mother would consider them now: they belonged to a time before disposable nappies, before Velcro, before plastic, before nylon. They involved giant safety pins, lots of ribbons, and long strips of flannel known as binders, which were wrapped tightly round the baby's bellybutton.

In those days, the matter of childbirth was seen as a medical condition. The mother spent upwards of a week in bed after the birth, and the baby's navel was treated as an open wound to be poulticed out of sight. Nappies came in two layers: the layered muslin ones known as Harrington squares, and, over them, the looser ones of folded towelling. Despite the effort, everything still got wet, including the bedding. Everything had to be washed, every day. Motherhood was slavery.

After the Museum of Childhood, it was the Imperial War Museum, which put on an exhibition called The 1940s House, a re-creation of a two-up, two-down semi (it was also the subject of a Channel 4 series). Welcome home, Joan! I walked in, almost expecting to be met by the smell of overcooked cabbage or toast burning on the gas grill, and the sounds of Alvar Liddell coming from the walnut-veneered radio.

Upstairs were the pink satin bedspreads and plump eiderdowns. In the kitchen, a mangle, a whistling kettle, aluminium saucepans - it was as though a slice had been cut into my memory and a segment made real.

Next time, same museum, and we visit the Blitz experience. Sitting in the reconstructed air-raid shelter, I reminisce, but without the spiders and the smell, not to mention the fear, it doesn't feel right. Younger generations queue, and shuffle through, falling silent as the sound effects overwhelm them. Yet I can't help feeling that, although the bric-a-brac is genuine enough and the period research impeccable, the actual experience is missing. You can't re-create how other people experienced other times.

Yet museums have other roles, and are a rather unsung glory of our cultural life. Unsung, that is, if you don't have to dream up ways of entertaining children. The fact is, every half-term, Britain's museums are swarming with families. At the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Maritime Museum, you can hardly move for children tugging at parents to come-see-this, let's-try-that.

And the museums are ready for them - planning, designing and presenting ever more engaging exhibitions. I know because I am serving on the jury for the Gulbenkian prize, the country's largest cultural prize - £100,000 - that goes to the museum of the year. We are touring the country surveying the great range of competitors, from the hi-tech brilliance of Birmingham's Thinktank to Black History Month at Sutton House, Hackney; from Reticulum at the Museum of Antiquities in Newcastle, to a touring exhibition of Romany history in Pembrokeshire.

Everywhere these displays are feeding what seems an insatiable appetite to know more. Perhaps it is all those quizzes on television that have done it: knowledge being worthwhile simply for its own sake. Certainly today's young people know more than we ever did about the artifacts and circumstances of how life used to be, how it still is, and how it might become.

As with all success stories, demand races ahead of capacity to meet it. Never enough seats for a hit show, never a ticket for a football final. In the two years that followed the introduction of the government's free-admissions policy in 2001, there were almost 11 million extra museum visitors. Last year, 13.3 million people visited the museums that fomerly charged, compared to 7.7 million in the last year that turnstiles were in place. Attendances at the Science Museum rose by 120%. The numbers are staggering. That is why museum leaders from all sectors - national, regional and independent - have put in a plea for more funding. They are asking for an extra £115m a year to meet the tidal wave of popularity. This is, after all, education by another route, one that children are eager to enjoy.

As for me, I simply throw open my cupboards and survey the debris of decades - the 40s gasmask, the 60s pressure cooker, the 70s coffee percolator. One day, perhaps, some of it might even go on show.