Visiting certain museums feels less like seeing a collection of objects and more like stepping into a different world. It’s a sensation I had recently when I visited the venerable Pitt Rivers Museum and the brand new V&A Storehouse. Both offer a unique kind of experience, inviting you to soak in their distinct atmospheres.

There are obvious architectural similarities – in both, visitors enter through a modest doorway, traversing stairs to multi-storied, rectilinear galleries around a vast atrium. The visitor is immediately confronted by the chaos, abundance and variety of the collage of things in front of them.

Both embrace storage as a mode of display. The aesthetic is a product of their vast collecting ambitions which far outstrip the means either institution has to display the collection in its totality – resulting in the glorious, behind-the-scenes feel.

It’s that back-of-house aspect that gives such a cosy feeling of complicity to the visitor. We’re being shown the ‘other stuff’; shown how the museums work.

In this way both places are more than the sum of their parts, functioning as meta-museums that reflect on collecting, displaying, and what it means to make sense of material culture.

This creates a complete environment, charming and welcoming in its cluttered, almost junk-drawer-like eccentricity. You know you won’t see everything. The joy is in getting lost, exploring, and simply being amongst the objects, becoming part of the exhibit for a while. To bathe in the museum.

Abundant cases and storage at the Pitt Rivers

Racking forms the structure of the museum at V&A Storehouse

[It’s a bit of interesting historical symmetry that the Pitt Rivers collection had it’s first home in east London in the V&A. It was on show as part of the Bethnal Green outpost of the South Kensington Museum – it later moved to the main site at South Kensington (now called the V&A) and was later donated to Oxford University who created the permanent home for it within their Museum of Natural History.]

The Museum of Everything: Another fantastic show, this time the Museum was out of it's Primrose Hill space and had taken up residence in Selfridges (I imagine a fairly contentious choice- but come on, to try and separate art and commerce is just naive and anyway I think these guys genuinely bring something great to the world and the more people that see it the better.)

The show was again outsider art and the obsession and otherness of the work was brought into the space by a series of small, packed rooms similar to previous exhibitions. This was really effective at giving a sense of discovery and strangeness, especially when you consider you were in Selfridges. I wish the book was more similar to the exhibition and less of an art book, although I understand why the work in the book is placed on white spreads and is quite 'proper' looking. However there is the digital version of the show for guys like me who enjoy the slightly more chaotic form of the exhibition: http://www.digevery.com/room1.html

Wellcome Collection- A Charmed Life

The standout bit for me in this exhibition was the layout of the charms in the center of the room. I also liked how visible the methods of collection were, (see photo below) where there were gaps from other objects collected at the same time which were now lost- being able to understand a little bit more about an objects story post-use or post-context, once it had entered the world of the 'collected object'.

Pitt Rivers:

Wonderful as ever.

Ashmolean Museum:

A very well designed space and a nice place to have a walk around. I'm not mad into archeology but there were some great moments throughout the museum. The older part of the museum with the paintings in was entirely different in feel, more chambers and carpet and warmth than the informative, new, open space where you enter.

I really liked this quote in the exhibition about how the museum came to exist, (John Tradescant the elder to John Tradescant the younger to Elias Ashmole to The University of Oxford). On the cabinet of curiosity:

"I am almost persuaded a man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in travell."