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.]

I was thrilled to discover the V&A Plaster Cast Courts for the first time recently. Tucked to the side of the museum, and away from the weekend crowds, the Courts house plaster copies of famous architecture and sculpture from across world. The scale of the rooms and the gigantic Trajan Column that dominates them is the first thing to be impressed by (even more so when you realise that they should be stacked on top of each other to achieve their original height). The spectacle of seeing such impressive architecture inside another building, framed and lit in the context of the museum is incredible.

The sheer randomness of the collection is intoxicating. The courts have Frankenstein displays where the front of a cathedral from Santiago de Compostella has doors inset from Germany from 200 years earlier. Old mixes with new and everything from all over the world is together in one excessive architectural Disneyland.

The really interesting thing around the casts is of course that they aren’t real. That is to say that they aren’t the original objects. They are facsimiles of much coveted masterpieces of art and architecture from throughout the ages. But the discussion around an objects authenticity and it’s subsequent relevance to scholarly or artistic study is only part of my fascination. In 2014, Room 46B was renovated, (the courts having originating in 1873), and it’s in this more modern world that this odd collection exists now. A modern museum setting that is constantly reassessing the usefulness and quality of facsimiles in all their forms – from digital print outs and online representations, to VR experiences and 3D-printed stand ins. What is and isn’t valid as an accessioned artefact seems to be as much up for grabs as ever.

Here are some links about the history of the Cast Courts:
I never knew the V&A was originally the Museum of Manufactures! The History of the Courts. Room 46A. Room 46B.

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