INSIDE THE MUSEUM’S MEMORY

The most secret of spaces are our memories. There are those bright memories we take out often to marvel over and relive. There are those we hoard, gathering a feathery film of dust, just in case we miss them some day. Then there are those that shimmer at the edges, ready to pass over into the forgotten at any moment, like the lost seconds of a morning dream.  

It has been said that a building, too, has a memory.  

On the fifth floor of the Discovery Museum is an attic where huge windows sift sunlight onto the dusty wooden floor. It is a space packed with the lingering traces of the Museum’s past – some recent, some almost forgotten.  

If you were to take an inventory of this room, you might note the broken wooden desk with many tiny drawers fitted with brass handles; rows of filing cabinets full of mystery archives, with little paper signs penned, ‘please keep!’; an old map of Newcastle and Gateshead with an ornate compass in one corner; and several arched, latticed windows full of sky.  

Perhaps most interesting among these relics, however, are two huge, old logbooks for tracking laundry. These would have been utilised by the now disused laundrette, left over from when the building was Blandford House—the headquarters of the North East branch of the Cooperative Wholesale Society. The building was taken over by the museum in 1981. The remains of the laundrette are also tucked away inside the locked rooms of the Museum’s memory.  

These hardy, oversized books were more recently used for a Christmas event and now don the labels ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’, but it is unlikely that any of the children who had hoped to make it onto the ‘nice’ list would have relished receiving, among other mundane items, ‘cosy covers’ ‘curtains, coloured’, or ‘hearth rugs’.