A History of Museums in Britain

Museums are at the heart of the nation's cultural life, bastions of Britishness in almost every major city and town. Together they detail myriad aspects of our heritage: from lawnmowers to cuckoo clocks, pencils to chairs, there seems to be no end to the subject matter deemed worthy of collection and public display. This overview of museums in Britain traces their development from 'cabinets of curiosity' to large scale visitor attractions, taking in broad social shifts and trends as well as the collectors, eccentrics and visionaries and the legacies they have left.

TOC: 1. Stories of the Past / 2. Repositories of Curiosities / 3. Museums for the Masses / 4. Modern Times / 5. Looking Forward / Places to Visit

Christine Garwood is an author and researcher with a specialism in nineteenth-century social history and the history of science. She gained her Ph.D in 1998 from the University of Leicester and has since gone on to publish books and articles on topics as diverse as Victorian environmentalism, quack medicine, popular astronomy and the history of ideas. Her book, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea (Macmillan, 2007) was widely reviewed in publications such as the Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist and BBC History Magazine.