Steve & Joe Talk Museums in 2013 at the Royal Festival Hall - London, UK

14th December 2013 - Gawd Bless Us... Every one.

Christmas hero Steve Slack and I talk 
all things museums and galleries in 2013. Merry Christmas, smellies!

The Jewish Museum - London, UK

14th November 2013 - £7.50

גוט־מאָרגן דו

Camden Town. Playground of the eager tourist and the desperate Londoner. Where the streets are paved with pavement. The land of goths, dreadful Irish bars, and that infuriating guy who sits by the bridge, hawking the plastic yolks you put in your mouth to make bird noises. Where better then to house the nation's flagship museum of history's most persecuted religion?

From the word go, I was bowled over by how kind everyone was at The Jewish Museum: the cloakroom lady, security guard, the man behind the till. I felt like a nephew who'd been away and "never calls and never writes". Ok, I'll stop stereotyping. After this: entrance isn't free. There. It's over. The fee's not a problem though, as the museum's a registered charity and I shouldn't laugh because a Yorkshireman poking fun at spurious claims of Jewish thriftiness has a distinct glass houses/stones smell about it. 

The Design Museum - London, UK

22nd October 2013 - £11.85 (joined by Amanda Leat and Farhad Agzamov)

Cool Joe

By creepy old uncle Thames, in Tower Bridge's meagre winter shadow, sits the old banana factory that now houses London's glittering Design Museum. I'll say this, right off the bat: I don't really care for this kind of thing. Perhaps my ambivalence renders an opinion of said institution obsolete, but I believe great museums should have the power to convert the heathen (like the National Railway Museum).

Our entry was inauspicious due to the surprisingly hefty queue for the relatively small space, perhaps adding credence to the museum's proposed move in 2014 to Kensington (an area, I'm sure you'll agree, in desperate need of a museum or two). The entrance was a little steep, granted, but they receive no government subsidies, are relatively transparent as far as their finances go and they do a lot for the world of design so I'll let it slide. For now. 

Sir John Soane's Museum & Hunterian Museum (The Battle of Lincoln's Inn Fields) - London, UK

15th October 2013

Tucked between the financial and legal bustle of Chancery Lane and Kingsway, sits Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest public square in Old London Town. Between 11 and 2 it serves as a leafy respite for young, bonny, soon-to-be-rich law students to drink coffee and talk loudly on their telephones. I enjoy the place for its myriad institutions and the people they attract: LSE - students, RCS - doctors, Queen Mary's - lawyers, the soup van - homeless people. 

Cliffe Castle Museum - Keighley, UK

3rd September 2013, Free (joined by Shelagh Deeney)

If they could see me now...

Cliffe Castle has always been a bit of a joke in our bustling metropolis of Bradford. Way out in the muddy backwaters of Keighley, we sophisticates saw nothing but a big house full of junk you'd find in your granddad's loft. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, a result of being dragged as a pre-teen on boring school trips through dusty corridors I'd seen a million times. That Tuesday morning was the last day of the school holidays in the region and you could tell, casualties of the never-ending summers you remember forever were everywhere. I empathised entirely. I know exactly how you feel, mate: school tomorrow and you're in Cliffe Castle. It was my mother's last day before the new term, so we celebrated by visiting a museum 100 metres away from the school in which she teaches, which was a noble sacrifice, indeed. 

The Clink Prison Museum - London, UK

30th August 2013, £7.50

Bring money

London, exceeding any city of which I'm aware, has a morbid titillation with the gruesome chapters of its past. We revel in the thumb-screws, the Halifax gibbet and the Tyburn Tree. We retrace the steps of the Krays and Guy Fawkes, and feel a rush of adrenaline when told the specifics of a Victorian madman tearing prostitutes apart. This may well be the saturnine aspect of all humanity, but nowhere is it more celebrated than the big smoke. 

The Motown Museum - Detroit, USA

15th August 2013, $10 (joined by Amanda Leat)

Come 'ere. 

I need to tell you something important... 

I love Motown.

I'm sure whatever music you're into's great, and good for you. Really. But Motown's ten times better and fifty times cooler and you hate yourself because you know this already.

Don't you?

Tate Britain - London, UK

23rd July 2013, Free

When you don't realise you've done a selfie

Since 2000, the name 'Tate' has generally come to refer to a gallery a little further down the Thames. Like Elvis circa 1964, Tate Britain has been superseded by a mop-topped upstart across the pond and been left a stuffy, out-dated relic, getting fat and starring in bad movies (RIP that metaphor). Upon the birth of Tate Modern, the rebadged Tate Britain has focused on British art through the ages, from the charred remains of a not quite so well dissolved monastery to some appalling 90s concept art. Much like UKIP: you don't have to be good to get in Tate, just British.

The National Media Museum - Bradford, UK

16th July 2013, Free (joined by Kieron Casey)

Hello you

For my maiden voyage into all this, I thought I'd take a trip down memory and Little Horton Lane to visit the place that saw me and many of my generation through the tedium of an adolescence in the provinces. However, this is not the overture for a nostalgic tongue-bath from yours truly. I just have to look at other teenage comforts such as Red Dwarf and The Deftones to see how vulnerable my younger days really were.