I was really looking forward to visiting the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, as I had last visited the old Glasgow Transport Museum at Kelvinhall 30 years ago. What a shock and disappointment!
This has to be one of THE worst transport museums I've ever had the misfortune of visiting. Now most museums have too much stuff in their collections and find it difficult to display properly - but this was a purpose-built £72M Lottery-funded project. So no excuses.
It is a complete and utter shambles. The fabulous collection of cars is stacked three storeys high on a "wall of cars" There are no labels on the shelves so you have no idea what they all are. I expect there is an interactive display or an app designed by a 12-year old somewhere, but considering the plethora of signs, cabinets, vending machines, lighting poles and other detritus cluttering up the major exhibits, I was surprised that there was not even a basic key to the "wall" display. So I can't actually tell you what some of these cars I saw actually are.
The lighting is dreadful, with weird green tinge to it like you find in some public toilets to discourage "cottaging" and junkies shooting up. To make it worse, there are huge free-standing lighting poles all over the place - usually right in front of something interesting like a steam loco. Stuff hangs from the ceiling for no obvious reason, there is a high-level internal bridge to the cafe, but it does not give any views of the car wall. Really good cars are displayed on a spiral slope - again with no possibility of viewing them and forget about trying to take photographs.
Yet another great museum gone to waste once the "museum professionals" got hold of it. Give me six months to re-arrange it and I could do a far better job for not much more than £50k in building works.....
And don't get me started on their model railway shop displays...
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