I went to the British Museum Vikings exhibition today. It only opened yesterday, and I was looking forward to seeing their new exhibition space, and have had a minor obsession with Vikings since reading too much Henry Treece as a child, reinforced when as a teenager I visited the Viking museum outside Copenhagen. Something about those stones with runes and entwined dragons and ravens did it for me, and so did Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf when I read that. Fearsome pointed ships, lords dishing out gold rings, ravens, and a giant ash as the tree of life, what's not to like?
The queue to get into the exhibition, for starters. The BM issues timed tickets, and in the past it has never been a problem. It didn't look bad today when I arrived at the museum, but by the time I'd got back from my early lunchtime latte and muffin it was snaking half way back towards the reading room. It was a quiet, well ordered queue, but with nothing to indicate whether it was indeed the queue for ticket holders, or for people wanting to buy tickets, and no way of telling what time the people ahead of you might be booked in for. I had a ticket for 12.30 pm, the quartet behind me had tickets for 12.20 pm, and for all we knew we were waiting behind folk who weren't due in until quarter to one. Eventually one member of staff came out, who did at least look at our tickets and confirm that we would be let in, when we eventually got to the front.
Progressing from the Great Court into the new Sainsbury exhibition space turned out to be only half the battle, since there was a further stretch of queue inside, snaking back and forth between tape barriers, airport style. I purposely arrange my leisure time so as to avoid airport queues, and began to feel increasingly irritated, as did the people behind me, to judge from the comments. Eventually we were allowed in, at ten past one, which was forty minutes after the entry time on my ticket, and fifty minutes after I joined the queue. I felt tired before I'd started.
The member of staff on the entrance to the actual exhibition encouraged us not to all queue just inside the door, but move on into the exhibition, saying we could come back to look at the first exhibits. Nobody did, first of all because with a properly curated exhibition you expect it to take some logical sequence you would quite like to follow, and secondly because it was equally crowded as far into the distance as we could see. People who have been patiently waiting for five minutes to get close enough to a perspex case to view what's inside don't take kindly to others muscling past them to get to the front, so the only way to see most of it was to shuffle round at the same pace as everyone else.
The new perspex cabinets are very smart, with tiny little spotlights inside to shine on the cups, coins, broaches, swords and other Viking relics. The things in the cabinets were fine, and interesting. Learning what they were was another matter, because to save cluttering up the lovely cases of objects with any captions, the labels and explanations had all been mounted on a sloping shelf running in front of the cases at approximately hip height. As soon as another visitor stood in front of the case, or allowed their bag to hang over the shelf, nobody else could read the captions. I am all in favour of looking at the actual exhibits in museums, and not just walking around reading the labels, but it does help to be able to find out whether the thing you are looking at was made in Scandinavia, or made in Byzantium but found buried in modern day Denmark, after being traded or raided by Vikings, or simply found in Byzantium, full stop, and merely included to show the artistic similarities or differences between the two cultures.
The growing popularity of audio visual guides did not seem to help. There were quite a lot of people standing right by the exhibits, while their attention was focussed not on the real life artefacts in front of them, but on the little screen in their hand.
The big ship was good. Some critics have grumbled that there is not much of it, just a section of floor planks and part of the keel, but the steel frame gives you an idea of how large it was, and I liked what technical information there was on its construction, having spent quite a few years playing around with wooden boats. The gothic arch-shaped stirrups just like the ones in the Bayeux tapestry were good. All sorts of individual items were good, but as an exhibition experience it was a failure. I started queuing at twenty past twelve, and emerged at ten past three, aching more than if I'd spent a day in the garden from all the standing about, craning and shuffling. To judge from the conversations I overheard, quite a few of my fellow visitors were equally underwhelmed, with the total number of visitors (too hight) and the captions (too low) drawing particular ire.
By the time I got out, the queue outside the exhibition doors had completely disappeared, and when out of curiosity I went and looked into the airport style lobby, that wasn't nearly full either. Perhaps I was peculiarly unlucky, and was caught out by a statistical glitch of people staying longer than expected, or the museum made an error in their ticket sales for the morning of 7 March. Normally the British Museum is very good about managing visitor numbers. Today they weren't.
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