Riverside Museum

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As outlined in last week’s Picture of the Week, we’ve had a new team come aboard the Riverside Museum Project to assist us with the removal of our middleweight objects from the Museum of Transport at Kelvin Hall.

Constantine, who are specialist museum handlers and familiar faces around our various museums, have been working on emptying the ship models cases in the Clyde Room. They will be transporting these delicate ship models as well as bicycles, motorbikes and cars to storage and, in the next few weeks, to the Riverside Museum at Pointhouse.

The slideshow above shows the steps they take to move our often very large and heavy ship models. Purpose-built crates are forklifted upstairs towards the Clyde Room, where the models are carefully removed one by one from the cases that have been their home since their arrival in the building in the late 1980s. Once set down in the crates, plastezote blocks are used to secure them in place for their ride to their final destination.

Soon enough we’ll have a Clyde Room full of empty cases as the objects in the building continue to move out and we get closer to the Riverside Museum opening.

This week at the Museum of Transport we’ve had more contractors starting work with us, this time on the decant of Glasgow Museums’ ship model collection. The emptying of the building continues with the decant work now concentrated in the Clyde Room.

The picture of the week shows staff from Constantine packing ship models into crates which will next week move to storage at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. Once these have moved, they’ll move the remaining ship models to Riverside where they’ll be readied for display.

More picture on how these models are decanted will be revealed next week. Keep watching!

Great news. Next year’s Monte Carlo Rally will kick off from Glasgow’s Blythswood Square as part of the race’s centenary celebrations. Glasgow might seem an unlikely starting point for one of the world’s most glamorous rallies, but the city was among the original line-up for the first Monte Carlo Rally in 1911. The tradition was revived in the 1960s and 70s, when Glasgow was again one of the endurance race’s starting points.  

One of the most renowned Monte Carlo Rally drivers is Rosemary Smith, who triumphed in numerous races in her Imp Sunbeam, the racing variant of the Linwood-produced Hillman Imp. In 1966, Smith won the ladies’ Monte but was later disqualified in a controversial decision that many people claimed was unfair. Glasgow Museums has in its collection several photos of Smith racing her Imp as well as photos of Provost Jean Roberts starting the Monte Carlo race from the RAC Club on Blythswood Square in 1961. Below’s a dramatic shot of Smith and her navigator Margaret Downey. We think it’s from 1971.

Glasgow Museums’ collection is also fortunate to have the very first Imp to roll off the Rootes factory production line. You’ll be able to see Imp 1 in its new home at Riverside Museum after it opens in spring next year.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Riverside’s Conservation team have been nominated for two national awards, one for their work on South African Railways locomotive 3007 and another in preventive conservation.

The Institute of Conservation’s annual conservation awards aim to recognise “excellence in conservation, collections care, conservation research and digital preservation”. The awards are supported by Sir Paul McCartney.

This year the Riverside Conservation team have been nominated for the Pilgrim Trust Award for their work on the South African Railways locomotive 3007, and the Care of Collections Award for their work tackling the moth infestation among the transport collection.   

Members of Riverside’s Conservation team will present their work to the award judges on 25 October. The final results will be announced on the 1st December. Watch this space …

Good luck Team Conservation!

Conservation of South African Railways locomotive 3007
Problematic Pests: moth combat

This week’s Picture of the Week is an abstract shot taken of the north side of the Riverside Museum on a recent clear night. It shows the light from the interior of the museum escaping from a ventilated window.

The Riverside Museum building is clad in a reflective material which interacts with the changing light around it. When finished, the building will take on an ever-changing appearance dependent on the weather, the seasons and the time of day. This shot shows it reflecting the red hues of the evening city lights.

This week we reached a major milestone in the decant of the Glasgow Museum of Transport on Bunhouse Road – the final loco and tram was removed from the building. Although we’ve still some way to go with moving the remaining transport and other objects, the main hall of the museum is now looking decidedly empty without its beloved large vehicles.

The Picture of the Week shows a 360° panoramic shot of the emptied main hall. I shot this using a tripod standing on the former station platform in the middle of the hall and then merged the 10 shots together to allow you to get a sense of just how empty it has become. To get a closer look click on the picture for a larger view and see if you can remember where your favourite objects used to stand.

Maggie Dobbie and I recently went to the Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust at Bridgeton bus depot, in Glasgow’s East End. We were there to remove the upper deck seats from the Albion Venturer bus, which is going on display at Riverside Museum next year.

The Venturer’s seats need a fair bit of conservation work as a lot of the leather has deteriorated and torn. We’ll soon be moving the bus from Bridgeton to the Riverside Museum, where we’ll reunite it with the seats once the conservation work is complete.

The Venturer, along with two other Glasgow Museums’ buses, has been in the care of the GVVT since 2007, when they were removed from the Museum of Transport in Kelvin Hall as part of the preparations for the move to Riverside.

In the slideshow below, you can see a few pictures of the Albion Venturer bus as well as the Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust’s Bridgeton depot. For a bus journey down memory lane, please contact the trust to arrange a visit to the depot.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Here’s a striking image of the south facade of Glasgow’s Riverside Museum by Glasgow Museums photographer Jim Dunn.  Let’s hope the complex flowing/zig-zag structure impresses next year’s Stirling Prize judges as much as Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum impressed them this year!

Riverside architect Zaha Hadid wins Stirling Prize

Award for Riverside Photographer Jim Dunn

Congratulations to Zaha Hadid Architects, the designers of Glasgow’s Riverside Museum, who won the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize on Saturday.

Zaha Hadid Architects won the architecture prize for the MAXXI National Museum for 21st Century Arts in Rome. This was the third time that ZHA had been nominated for the Stirling Prize, which is run by the Royal Institute of British Architecture.

This year’s other nominated buildings included the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Batemen’s Row and Clapham Manor Primary School in London, Christ’s College School in Guildford and Neues Museum in Berlin.

It’s a great win for Zaha Hadid – who has also won the Pritzker Prize and a string of other awards – and a great boost for the Riverside Museum prior to its opening next year.

Riverside Museum’s decant team have been extremely busy over the past few weeks due to the return of our heavy haulage contractor, Allelys, and the removal of most of the Museum of Transport’s large objects.  

With the exception of the horse-drawn tram, all of the tramcars at the Museum of Transport have been removed. We’ve been busy with the locomotives, too. Only the Gordon Highlander remains in the museum.

And while Allelys’ specialists and Riverside staff have been working on removing the large objects, Glasgow Museums decant technicians have been preparing objects such as ship models, bicycles, prams and motorbikes for transportation to the stores at GMRC. We’ve also prepared a selection of objects for removal to Riverside, where they’ll go on public display when the museum opens in spring 2011.  

The biggest move we’ve made recently has been the South African Railways locomotive 3007 – featured on this blog and in the press. I was lucky enough to courier both the engine and the tender – a-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. SAR loco 3007’s arrival at Riverside was a momentous occasion for the project, and to have ridden in the cab hauling both the engine and the tender was a great privilege!

Now that the majority of the large objects have been installed at Riverside, we’ll start to see some of the smaller vehicles and objects moving to their new Clydeside home.