York Castle Museum

Another Easter day off for me and another quest to find somewhere to entertain us for little money.

My first choice was Salford Quays as everything except the parking fees seems to be free, The Lowry Gallery and The Imperial War Museum would have satisfied my curiosity for the day, but as usual I was outvoted by females who spat the words “Imperial War Museum ?” back at me as if they had just been forced to eat something very vile that the night soil man had maybe missed during our visit to the Thackray Museum.

So York it was and the excellent and huge York Castle Museum, site of the first museum I can recall to actually arrange and stage its collections into “streets” so that you walk down a Victorian street scene looking into shops and suchlike, a much more pleasant way to view artifacts than simply putting them behind glass – York did this way back in the 1960’s and the place is hellish impressive now.

Speaking of which there is a special exhibition on at the moment of life in the 1960’s and I wallowed for a long time in nostalgia and stopped counting the number of things on display that I had actually owned as a boy – my Batmobile, James Bond DB6 and Man From Uncle Oldsmobile Corgi cars were all there, as was my “base pack” Action Man (original Army Action Man with hard plastic hat and slip on boots), and Neds Action Man Apollo space suit – its weird seeing your childhood exhibited in a museum with small children staring in wonder at how poor you all must have been.

A transistor radio in a leather case identical to one I had owned as a child was there and I must write this down for the benefit of the memory – Radio 207 – that was the pirate radio station that operated off the coast of Scarborough for a short while in the summer of 66, my tranny managed to find it on the dial for the whole two weeks at Cayton Bay that year.

A life-size model of John Glenn’s Saturn rocket space capsule sat in the middle of the gallery with room inside for a small person to have laid on their backs with their feet up in the air, but not me, John Glenn must have been as small as a chimpanzee and as mad as a box of frogs to allow himself to be encased in that thing and fired off to infinity with the faint hope that it might just literally fall to earth a bit later on if he was lucky – the phrase from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” song “… here am I floating in a tin can…” is uncannily accurate.

Most of the exhibits are of social history importance and one gallery depicts what can only be called “Kitchens through the ages” starting with a Georgian kitchen, a Victorian kitchen, and so on. In front of us was a family group with the grandmother giving a commentary to the grandkids telling them what a peggy tub and poss-stick was used for and so on. we reached a 1930’s kitchen layout with the Yorkshire range combined fireplace & oven and a tin bath on the rag-rug in front of it ready for the Friday night scrub-up – the grandma happened to mention that her parents lived in a house like that and at that very moment Suzanne shoved in front of me to declare in a very loud voice that the small two roomed flat that she, her three brothers and sisters and two parents had lived in was identical to that layout – everyone stared at her in wonder as they tried to guess how bloody old she must be, I had to explain that she was from the North East where such kitchens are still presented as “all mod cons” by estate agents.

And here is a nice little snippet of local history gleaned from an exhibit of Victorian mourning and burial accoutrement’s – in the 1830’s a diarist in York had written that every churchyard in the city was now full to bursting with graves and that it was impossible to dig a new grave on consecrated ground anywhere at all in the city boundaries without disturbing previously interred remains. In order to combat this severe lack of burial space for its citizens most churches were importing tons and tons of soil from the countryside and dumping it in their graveyards to quench the stench of newly uncovered remains and also raise the ground level to enable new burials to take place over the top of the old graves – apparently you can still see the result of this today where many of York’s old church graveyards are up to six feet higher than the surrounding land and streets, they’ve got coffins double and triple stacked in those graves.

Another damn good day out, another learning experience by means of fun, another museum that is not a national museum and therefore must charge for entry but at £20 for a family of four with unlimited free returns for the next twelve months its not breaking the bank (just don’t look at the pricing for the Yorvik Centre in York, you’ll die) and we’ll be returning to take advantage of their offer during the summer.