For Museum Monday, we’re highlighting the HMS Belfast. This is a historic warship and a 9-deck floating museum permanently moored in London on the River Thames.
The Royal Navy ship is named after the Northern Ireland city of Belfast and is operated as one of the Imperial War Museums’ 5 sites.
The ship was launched on St. Patrick’s Day in March 1938 and saw action during World War II and the Korean War
Visitors should wear sturdy shoes and arrive ready for a workout. You’ll walk the ship’s nine decks and climb up and down steep ladders while learning about the ship’s role in naval history and the daily life of sailors that served on board.
What You’ll See on the HMS Belfast
Visitors to the HMS Belfast will get to see, and in some cases, experience areas of the ship that include giant machine rooms, the gun turret, and the Operations Room (with simulated radars, equipment lights, and touchscreen plotting table). Below the Water line is where the shell room, boiler room, and engine room are located.
950 people at a time lived and worked on the ship, so you’ll also see the ship’s mess deck, chapel, radio station, medical bay, dentist’s office, and bakery.
Ngaire Bushell, from the Imperial War Museum Public Engagement and Learning Team
Most visitors to the HMS Belfast take self-guided tours with the aid of the audio tour included in admission.
But because we were tagging along with Gatwick Airport mascot, Gary Gatwick, our ship guide was the nimble and knowledgeable Ngaire Bushell, a producer from the Imperial War Museum’s Public Engagement and Learning Team.
She not only knows everything about the history of the HMS Belfast and all its nooks and crannies but has met many sailors who served on the ship over time.
Planning an HMS Belfast visit? Here’s a short video about exhibits and experiences added and updated while the attraction was closed during the pandemic.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia will be celebrating its 100th-anniversary April 28 through October 31, 2022, with an exhibit highlighting dozens of recently acquired Poe artifacts.
The list of artifacts includes Edgar Allen Poe’s pocket watch, which he owned while writing The Tell-Tale Heart, a horror story that, repeatedly mentions a watch.
“That means this might just be the very watch Poe was envisioning when he described the old man’s heartbeat as ‘a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.’,” says Poe Museum curator Chris Semtner.
“The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a classic story we have read in school, heard at Halloween, and even seen recreated on The Simpsons, and having the watch is like holding a real-life piece of that story.”
The gold watch is engraved with “Edgar A. Poe.” And in 1842, Poe gave the watch to one of his creditors to pay off a debt.
Other new-to-the-museum Poe artifacts include his engagement ring, the earliest surviving copy of the last photo ever taken of Poe, and a piece of the coffin in which he was buried for the first 26 years after his death.
Exhibit notes declare the ring “sad evidence of the tragic love story of Poe and his first and last fiancée, Elmira Royster Shelton.”
The couple was engaged as teenagers, but Shelton’s dad broke it off. Poe and Shelton got engaged again, in the last months of Poe’s life. He gave her this ring with the name “Edgar” engraved on it. But Poe died just ten days before their wedding day.
The coffin fragment comes from the original coffin in which Poe was buried on October 8, 1849. In 1875, Poe’s body was moved across the cemetery from his unmarked grave to a better location where a large monument could be placed over his grave.
When the coffin was lifted from the ground, this piece fell off and was later owned by a president of the Maryland Historical Society,
“Poe wrote so many stories about being buried alive that it seems only fitting that we have a piece of the very coffin in which he was buried,” says museum curator Semtner.
Fragment of Poe coffin
The Edgar Allan Poe Museumin Richmond features permanent exhibits of Poe’s manuscripts, personal items, clothing, and even a lock of the author’s hair. The exhibit of newly-acquired artifacts opens with an Unhappy Hour on April 28.
Opened in 1922, the Poe Museum is comprised of four buildings surrounding an Enchanted Garden constructed from the building materials salvaged from Poe’s homes and offices.
At a glance, they are clearly works of mechanical know-how and art. But these objects also tell a story about the emergence of modern science and the specialized instruments scientists built and used to explore the world.
From the exhibition release:
When modern science emerged in the seventeenth century, scientists invented specialized instruments to explore the world and universe in a closer, more logical manner. These intriguing devices facilitated the careful study of almost all facets of life through the research and demonstration of ideas and theories. During the nineteenth century, new technologies allowed for the precision manufacturing of scientific instruments. An array of instruments assisted some of the most brilliant minds on Earth as scientists made early discoveries in the fields of electrodynamics and atomic theory.
This exhibition in the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 of the San Francisco International Airport displays a selection of antique scientific instruments and explores their uses. Dates: September 11, 2021, to April 3, 2022. The exhibit is accessible to ticketed passengers but non-ticketed guests may get access by emailing curator@flysfo.com.
SFO Museum: Geissler tube rotator [with modern tube] late 19th centurySFO Museum: Helmholtz resonators c. 1890
To get the ball rolling, the museum has created “Museum Airlines” and turned the museum into a temporary pretend airport terminal.
The faux terminal has a check-in counter, flight board, baggage claim with luggage, a passport center, currency exchange desk, and a duty-free shop (aka the museum gift shop).
For those who can’t make it the museum in person, the airport has created a 360-degree video of the pretend airport visit that includes a digital quiz.
Planning your 2020 travel? Some museum-centric ideas
If history, art
and eclectic adventures are what you seek out when you travel, you’ll have plenty
of excuses to pull off the road in 2020.
For CNBC we put together a list of great options, from a retrospective celebrating 25 years of outsider art to fresh shrines and exhibitions devoted to everything from eyesight, motion pictures, shoes, music and rodeo culture.
Celebrate Southern Rock in Georgia
Courtesy the Mercer Museum at Capricorn
In early
December, Macon, GA celebrated the reopening of the Capricorn Sound Studios, which
captured the music of the Allman Brothers and other emerging bands playing a
new musical genre dubbed ‘Southern rock’ during the 1970s.
The new Mercer Music at Capricorn now operates as a music incubator, with
the Museum
at Capricorn opening
on January 2 to tell the history of the iconic studio with artifacts, photos,
recordings, album art and music-filled interactive digital kiosks. (Museum
admission: $7; Studio tour: $5)
Radical rodeo in Fort Worth
Red Grooms – Rodeo Ruckus – Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
If you’re headed to Fort Worth, Texas to attend the parades, shows, contest and other events that take place during the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas (January 17- February 8, 2020) be sure to stop by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The museum will display artist Red Grooms’ rollicking Ruckus Rodeo installation, a giant walk-through work that celebrates the Fort Worth rodeo with 3-D caricatures of rodeo regulars ranging from the rodeo clowns and cowboys to broncos to and bulls. (January 17-March 29, 2020; Admission: $16; half-price Sundays; free admission Fridays.)
Fancy Footwear in Florida
– Peep Toe Ankle-Strap shoes. Stuart Weitzman Collection. Photo Glen Castellano, New -York Historical Society.
The grandiose
Gilded Age estate that is now the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida is an appropriate exhibition space
for Walk This Way: Historic Footwear from the Stuart
Weitzman Collection. Organized
by the New-York Historical Society, the 100 shoes in this exhibition are not
just pretty to look at, they tell stories of culture, consumerism, power and
history. (Jan 28-May 10, 2020; Admission: $18).
In the Bronx, NY, the 250-acre New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) will present KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature, by celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama from May 9 through November 1, 2020. The garden-wide exhibit will include the artist’s signature mirrored environments, paintings, giant polka-dotted sculptures flowers and pumpkins, site-specific sculpture and a new greenhouse installation. Tickets go on sale on sale on January 20.
When women got the right to vote
Library of Congress
The 2020
Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative has an extensive list of museum exhibits around the country
marking the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th
amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote.
Wyoming, which gave women the right to vote 50 years before the rest of the
nation, kicked off its suffrage celebrations in 2019 and continues with many
special exhibits statewide in 2020.
In Washington,
D.C. the National Museum of American History will present “Creating Icons: How We
Remember Women’s Suffrage,” with artifacts from 1919 and 1920 donated by the
National American Women Suffrage Association, the precursor to the League of
Women Voters (Opens March 6; free).
A visionary retrospective
Matchstick sculpture by Gerald Hawkes. Courtesy American Visionary Art Museum
Baltimore’s American
Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) collects curates and celebrates
self-taught artists and “outsider” art and presents workshops, parades and
themed exhibitions filled with odd and exquisite creations. In November 2020,
AVAM will mark its 25th anniversary with a retrospective show featuring
work from its past 40 exhibitions, bring back some work which has been in
storage for years. (Admission: $15.95)
In Spring 2020, keep an eye out
for the opening of the Truhlsen-Marmor
Museum of the Eye at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. The free museum at
the headquarters of the American Academy of Ophthalmology will feature a
collection of more than
38,000 artifacts, books, and instruments and virtual reality activities.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, featuring a collection of photographs, films, videos, costumes, props and more, is scheduled to open in Los Angeles, CA (of course) in Spring 2020.
And in late 2020, the Museum of Science, Boston
will open “Arctic Adventure,” a major permanent exhibition that will immerse
visitors in a polar environment using state-of-the-art light projections and a real
ice wall. (Admission included with Exhibit Halls
ticket: $29 for adults, $24 for kids.)
