The Royal Museum of Scotland: A voyage of discovery

Published on Monday 21 September 2009 18:59

GREAT museums are encyclopaedias of the real.

We may go there seeking particular knowledge, but in them we encounter real things, not abstract text, and so we always end up making discoveries. It was natural therefore that discovery was a recurrent theme in a conversation I had recently with Gordon Rintoul, director of the Royal Museums of Scotland – but he was not talking only about the public making discoveries, but also about a museum rediscovering itself. He and his staff are, he says, half-way through the huge project of the refurbishment of the Royal Museum of Scotland. This magnificent Victorian temple of discovery began as the Industrial Museum of Scotland in 1854. Its present building was begun in 1861.

Over the door are the portraits of Victoria and Albert and Prince Albert's last public act was to lay the foundation stone. Following the Great Exhibition of 1851, he had been closely involved in the movement that eventually gave us the V&A, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, and with them here in Edinburgh the Royal Scottish Museum. Together these institutions represent a huge investment in public education, bringing the world to the people. But the creation of these museums also had a clear purpose: people who know something of the world's richness and diversity are better able to take their place in it.

The three London museums are divided between three different areas – art and design, science, and natural history – but from the start the Edinburgh museum had to cover them all. Gordon Rintoul agrees with my suggestion that it is actually the largest general museum in the country – its collections are certainly huge and diverse. Before the refurbishment project could begin, everything had to be moved out. A new store was built, with a new conservation centre alongside it.

"There are four million items in the collection," Rintoul tells me. The sheer mass of this, compounded by cramped storage conditions, made it inevitable that there was much that had hardly been seen in living memory. Everything had to be examined, logged, catalogued and relabelled. Innumerable geological and entomological specimens might never be shown, "but quite a lot of important material was rediscovered," he says, adding "expertise was brought in from many different places to help deal with it". Rintoul was plainly excited to have presided over such a programme of rediscovery. When the new displays are installed and the museum reopens in July 2011, he says, "80 per cent of what is on view will not have been seen before".

Rintoul describes how there have been discoveries in the building itself, too. It was originally built in two halves, he says, the east half opened in 1866, but the west not until 1890. Other bits were added, internal spaces were divided and redivided until the architects' original vision was completely lost from sight.

When it reopens, the first striking change for the visitor will be the entrance itself. This will not be up the familiar steps, but at street level directly into a long, stone-vaulted gallery that runs the length of the building.

"Caithness stone paving will be continuous from outside to inside," he says. "There will be no steps." Previously this space was a series of cramped, subterranean cellars with giant pipes snaking through them. Now the partitions have gone, the Craigleith stone has been exposed, the central stone pillars have been replaced by steel columns and the whole space has been opened up into a vaulted "street". The inevitable shops, restaurant and information desks are what will greet you, but at least they are cleared out of the main museum area.

From here you will arrive in the magnificent top-lit space of the museum's main hall via a new stair on the south wall. Going up into the light, the effect will be dramatic. The same stair (with accompanying lift) then continues up to the top floor. As you climb, an open display will rise vertically on the wall beside you.

Clearing the balconies will reveal that they have much greater depth and space than was apparent before. A series of arches has also been discovered that link the main, glass-roofed space at each floor with the large central gallery that runs southwards from it. This had previously been closed in and divided up, but now it will be open so that you can see right through the building on this once-hidden north-south axis. A similar vista will be opened from east to west. So instead of the gloomy confusion of the building as it was, from a single viewpoint the visitor will get a sense of the whole of it. There will be escalators in the north-south space – with escalators, stairs and lifts, the ambition is to improve substantially on the tiny percentage of visitors who in the past managed to reach the upper floors.

The other ancillary spaces will also be restored and opened up. There will be a major new exhibition space on the first floor and several smaller ones elsewhere. Sadly, says the director, it was too costly to put back the red encaustic tiles of the original floor of the main hall, but at least the fish ponds are going. The limestone floor that he tells me is to be installed may be more sympathetic than the shopping centre floor put in 40 years ago.

At this stage it is impossible to comment on the plans for the new displays. Nothing is finalised and there is much healthy debate, Rintoul says. That's probably an understatement, but at least he is emphatic that there will be no Kelvingrove-style labels that demand more attention than the objects they describe. What will be new and will really be another discovery is the way he plans to open up the story of the collections. For all that it is a general museum, its collections are not blandly international, parachuted in from some limbo beyond identity, he argues. They derive their special character and much of their richness from the history of the Scottish diaspora.

The native American collections are especially rich, for instance, says Rintoul. The reason for this, he explains is that the first director, George Wilson, asked his brother, the antiquarian Daniel Wilson, who was in Toronto, to canvass among the Scots community in Canada for material for the institution. Daniel Wilson approached George Simpson, another Scot and head of the Hudson's Bay Company. Collecting followed. It was a typical story of the Scottish diaspora.

There are a good many similar stories to be told about the collections, but Rintoul's favourite, he tells me, and the single object that he feels encapsulates this whole wider Scottish story, is an enormous Polynesian feast bowl. It is, he says, made of wood like a dugout canoe and is around four metres long. It will be displayed along with a number of large, key objects in the main hall.

This bowl, he tells me, belonged to Titaua, a Polynesian princess who married John Brander, a successful Scottish trader in the South Pacific. She ended her days in Anstruther and sold her feast bowl to the museum. What is on view will not just be a series of sadly displaced objects, therefore, but marvellous things with a human tale to tell.

They will help us to better understand the wider world as great museum collections have always done, but, presented now as part of Scotland's own story, they will also help us to understand our place in the world, the richness of our connection to it and thus perhaps they will also help us better to know ourselves.