Dinky Toy main display cabinet update

This odd coach (a Maudslay "deck-and-a-half" observation coach)
is a visitors' favourite

We're putting the finishing touches to a reworking of our main Dinky Toys display, as part of our Frank Hornby 150th Anniversary project.

Everything in the cabinet has been re-researched and re-checked, and there's now an informative label by each piece, so that now you can find out what your favourite car actually is ... we're just waiting for some nice colour period colour advertising to be added behind the shelves.

Dinky's range captured a range of classic British automotive designs

The research was carried out by volunteers Nick Gibson and Francisco Dominguez, with Nick doing the labelling.

The re-lit and relabelled cabinet, just waiting for some new background inserts

RMS Titanic, temporary display

We've now assembled a display based on the doomed luxury ocean liner RMS Titanic, in Area 25.

In case you've missed the slew of centenary TV programmes, April 2012 is the one-hundred-year anniversary of both the ship's maiden voyage, and it's sinking. Titanic set sail from Portsmouth on 10th April 1912, and sank with the loss of over fifteen hundred lives on 15th April 1912.

As well as an array of memorabilia (including some White Star crockery and glassware), modellers might be interested to know that we have two large Titanic models on display, based on the largest commonly available kits and sets of plans – a ~thirty-inch 1:350-scale version that has been produced over the years by a number of different manufacturers (recently reissued as a special centenary edition by Minicraft), and an even larger ~forty-three-inch, 1:250-scale model, based on the Hachette/Amati plans.

Also on display is a copy of Daisy Spedden's "Polar the Titanic Bear" book, written by a Titanic survivor for her son, which recounts the events through the eyes of the child's Steiff polar bear. Alongside the book is an original ~1910 Steiff polar bear from the Museum's soft toys collection – this is the only original Steiff polar that we know of that is on public show, and one of the very few originals that still exists. There's rumoured to be another bear (in better condition) in a bank vault somewhere, but that's the only other surviving original that we know of.

The Titanic display will be on view until this autumn.

QR Codes

"Artistic" QR code for the Museum's Wiki landing page

If you haven't yet seen them, QR codes are the 21st century version of barcodes. They're like a graphical successor to Morse Code - they store text, and when you wave your smartphone camera at a QR code with the Google Goggles app running, it sees the code, works out how the image is aligned, and then offers to show you the hidden text, launch a file, or take you to a website page.

If you're in the Museum and you look at the bottom left corner of a cabinet, you should see a small QR code sticker whose embedded text leads to the online Wiki web page for that cabinet, and to a listing of any of the cabinet's items that have been given their own Wiki entries.

One of the great things about the Museum is that its collections are organised organically and sympathetically, with surrounding exhibits and backdrops providing a sense of context. It's a series of little worlds, not just a set of labelled items sitting in isolated cells. The Museum is a forest of toys and models ... or perhaps a jungle ...  and exploring it is like going on safari to do some wildlife photography. It's a visual onslaught of period design and craftmanship.

"Artistic" QR code for the Museum's "Train Running Day" event.
Scan me!

The exhibits are so densely packed, and many of them are so small, that if we labelled everything in the Museum using a conventional approach it wouldn't just disrupt the visual spell, it would require so much additional paper to be stuffed into the cabinets that you probably wouldn't be able to even /see/ the exhibits, and this makes "virtual labelling" an attractive option, once a sufficient proportion of visitors have camera-equipped smartphones.

Eventually we should end up with the best of both worlds, old and new, with the exhibits free to be arranged in whatever manner is most appropriate to the period, and with invisible 21st-Century technology providing background information and links to online resources and multimedia on the visitors' own mobile devices, without intruding on or spoiling the display space.

We're not quite there yet. Since we're built into a Victorian basement (under a steel bridge!), mobile phone signals don't yet penetrate very far into the Museum, and the Museum's wifi hasn't /yet/ been extended to reach more than about a third of the total museum floorspace, so we still have some work to do. It may also be that in a few years' time, QR codes will have been replaced with a newer technology such as NFC, and it might be that in 2018 you'll be placing your NFC-equipped smartphone against a cabinet to get a readout of its contents. But the organisational groundwork that we're doing now with QR codes will hopefully transfer across easily to whichever future technologies end up being used.

Another display case ...

A custom cabinet under construction in one of the Museum worshops

More behind-the-scenes building work. Having spotted a gap where (after some building maintenance), we could squeeze another very narrow cabinet into the Museum, it's time for some more custom-fitted cabinetry. Notice the 30-degree angle on the sides.

The new cabinet will appear in Arch Three in early December, housing the collection of cast iron locomotive models that used to be in Arch Two (before being displaced by the Budgie collection) .

Trams and tracks

The tramway backdrop under construction

A lot of work goes into Museum display presentation. Putting an item on display isn't just a matter of putting something in a display cabinet, it's also about providing a surrounding visual context.

So, for the new tram display, we didn't just build a shelf for the piece and set up an overhead wire and street supports, we also sourced a contemporary tram scene for background, and built a strip of proper tramway track set into a section of stone roadway that was hand-assembled from individual flagsstones.

This obviously takes more time than simply putting an item on a shelf with a label, but we think that the results are worth it.

Circus Toys, updated

A closeup of part of the new "Circus" cabinet

The "circus toys" display has been expanded, moved, reorganised and given the honour of its very own stand-alone glass cabinet.

The extra room means that more little circus folk and animals have been able to come out of storage to play!

Budgie Toys cabinet

The museum now has a new display cabinet of "Budgie Toys" cars and trucks.

It's just to the right as you enter the museum section, before the Dinky Toys.