Exhibition design at the National Railway Museum

Posted on 18 November 2021

Former MA Public History student Holly describes her crash course in exhibition design as part of her placement with the National Railway Museum

Velvet Railway Queen gown, NRM - Railway Uniform & Costume, 1990-7590 Pt1 (image source: Science Museum Group Collection Online)

Holly Smith, MA Public History 2020/21

On the Public History MA, we explore how to communicate the past to the public and, of course, a museum setting is one of the most traditional and important forms of this type of communication. That is why the group placement to create a dummy exhibition at the National Railway Museum (NRM) - the home to the past, present and future of the railways - was such an incredible opportunity.

The project was titled 'Diversifying a National Collection', relating heavily to the aim of the museum to present more complicated and diverse narratives with Vision 2025 which is the £55.3 million transformation programme of the NRM and Locomotion in Shildon. It was fortunately a group project which meant that I worked closely with two fellow students to design the dummy exhibition which we decided would focus on the experience of women working for British Rail (BR) after the Second World War. It was not a topic that any of us had intimate knowledge of, but we set off to discover the voices of these women and, by the end of the project, we were all obsessed with the stories that we discovered.

'See a friend this weekend' 1976 BR poster, NRM - Railway Posters, Notices & Handbills, 1979-7657 (image source: Science Museum Group Collection Online)

We were working in a nationwide lockdown throughout the placement period which meant that we had no access to the physical archive. Instead we had to start with the newspaper archives and the NRM online catalogue to build up a picture of women’s experience in the workplace at this time. This was not easy. Due to the discrimination that women experienced in their roles on the railway, trying to find their voices in articles was complicated. Often the reported stories were, understandably, only those of note such as Karen Harrison becoming the first female train driver in 1978, court cases concerning discrimination against same-sex couples and Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith’s role in revolutionising sandwiches on the railways. After many hours spent trawling through such articles, five main themes emerged which would form the basis of the exhibition: the changing roles of women in the period, their visual representation in the company, female employees' experience of sex discrimination in the workplace, the revolutionaries who changed the landscape of BR in their roles and the resultant experiences of women working in the railway industry today.

With this footing of research, we proceeded to spend the coming weeks creating an exhibition which presented these research clusters in as effective a way as possible, with weekly meetings with the placement host to drive the project forward. Initially, we translated these exhibition clusters into objects from the online catalogue that could tangibly communicate the stories of these women on the museum floor, as well as considering objects for contemporary collecting to represent the workplace environment for women in the railway industry today. This led into learning about audience segment targeting, sentiment mapping the exhibition, developing the floorplan, writing object labels, theme and sub-theme panels, and finally presenting the dummy exhibition to a group of NRM employees. It truly was a crash course in exhibition design.

Proposed floor plan design of the exhibition drawn up by the placement students

Being able to present our exhibition to a group of NRM employees was a valuable experience, as much as it was a testament to the collaborative environment of the museum. We had been able to interact with a number of different people during the placement, beyond the placement host, including meetings with the marketing and exhibition teams. The placement offered me the opportunity to work on a public history project within a team which fostered a number of discussions about how to convey hidden and difficult histories. It highlighted to me the practical complexities involved in every aspect of exhibition design, only then to present to visitors with a simplified narrative that necessarily lacked nuance. There was so much to absorb and so much expertise that we could draw on during the development stage of this dummy exhibition that it was an incredible learning experience.

Personally, the placement built my confidence as it offered me more workplace experience than I could have imagined - in fact it was my first time in a museum environment. I am truly proud of the stories that my fellow students and I discovered in the archives and never will I watch the Great British Bake Off again without remembering how Prue Leith transformed catering on the InterCity 125 and in turn, revolutionised women’s place in the railway industry today.