In December 1982, the Science Museum in London opened a new gallery devoted to nuclear physics. Occupying the full stretch of the recently opened Gallery 44, the gallery was designed so that, in three separate sections, visitors could be offered a comprehensive introduction to the history of atomic research, the science underlying it and its applications in nuclear-energy production. In the first section, visitors could find a recap of some key scientific principles: atomic structure, radioactive decay and nuclear fission. The second, running along the southern wall of the gallery, chronicled the history of nuclear research. Exhibits here ranged from early particle detectors to a scale mock-up of Enrico Fermi’s 1942 Chicago Pile-1 reactor. The third, and by far the largest, section supplied an introduction to the brave new world of nuclear energy. Here, visitors could stand inside a full-size, interactive model of a reactor core, read displays detailing the latest research in fast-breeder reactors and nuclear fusion, and learn about differences between magnox, advanced gas-cooled, and pressurised-water reactors – the three kinds of reactor that made up Britain’s stock. Soundtracking all of this was a series of instructional films offering stern reassurances about the efficiency of the fuel cycle and the safety of reactor design.Footnote 1
Conventional enough though the gallery was, Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Power soon achieved a kind of notoriety. The curators, it quickly emerged, were unhappy at the way they had been treated by the gallery’s main funder and sponsor, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (AEA), in the process of planning and making the gallery. Worse still for the museum, these complaints were given a very public airing, when the young STS scholars Robert Young and Les Levidow published them in a pamphlet written as part of the budding (and strongly anti-nuclear) ‘radical science’ movement. In it, Young and Levidow stitched first-hand tales of the censorial diktats imposed by the AEA on the museum’s curatorial staff into a blistering critique of the omissions and biases of the gallery. Their broadside concluded that, owing to the influence of the gallery sponsor, the whole affair was little more than an ideological exercise in acclimatizing the public to the benign atom. Such a brazenly one-sided depiction of nuclear power mattered, they argued, because the museum was a vital organ of ‘official culture’ and thus had the power to shape prevailing perceptions.Footnote 2
In this paper I revisit this controversy for what it can tell us about the changing constraints facing museums of science and technology in the later part of the twentieth century. The story of the gallery highlights two key features of this new landscape in particular: first, that museums were having to deal with more critical, less acquiescent publics, especially when it came to controversial subjects like nuclear energy; and second, that they were dealing with stakeholders that nevertheless considered that museums possess a significant degree of cultural power. In other words, people who interacted with museums were becoming both less and more deferential. Of the museum staff, patrons and public that interacted with the gallery, almost no one emerged persuaded by the gallery’s presentation of nuclear energy. And yet, for the gallery to have even come into existence, all of them had to recognize the museum’s power to convey truths and persuade audiences. This simultaneous pattern of deference and disavowal, already evident in Young and Levidow’s challenge, is at the root of a basic rhetorical affectation with which any observer of today’s culture wars will be familiar: commentators emphatically declare museums to be master manipulators of public opinion, and then (often in the same breath) equally emphatically declare them problematic and unconvincing.
Recognizing both sides of the equation here is important, since there is a tendency in this scholarship to adopt this rhetorical pattern rather than pursue its implications. The discipline of museum studies, which has its origins in the mid-1980s period that this paper discusses, was, after all, practically founded on exposing the kinds of connection between museums and power – the ‘politics of display’ – that Young and Levidow highlighted.Footnote 3 And although the Gramscian and Foucauldian approaches that dominated the early phase of writing about museums have become less fashionable now, they have acquired something of a second life in the history of science.Footnote 4 To take a recent example: a special journal issue from 2021 seeks to understand how exhibitions ‘embody and seek to order the spectacle of modernity’ and thus ‘shape a new kind of citizen’.Footnote 5 Other writers investigate how exhibitions promoted ‘fascist universalism’ in 1930s Italy, or how the display of industrial heritage built a Catalan proto-nationalism.Footnote 6 Other examples – handily enough for my purposes – find fertile territory in exhibitions of nuclear technology, showing how nuclear displays variously rendered atomic science benign, ‘spectacular’ and even ‘banal’.Footnote 7 In much of this work, the intention has been largely the same: to reveal how museums have upheld and promoted the ideological interests of the powerful.
The belief, then, that museums play an important role in shaping public narratives has been a pervasive one, both inside and outside the academy.Footnote 8 Rather than addressing it directly, in this article I take a step back and ask what happens in contexts where this belief has actually influenced the production and content of an exhibition – in other words, where the discourse around the ‘politics of display’ has intervened in the processes it aims to describe. As we shall see in the case of the nuclear gallery, it was not only museum scholars and critics who possessed ideas about the truth-setting and audience-manipulating powers of museums. Curators, patrons and publics all did too, and their understandable nervousness around this directly shaped what the gallery was able to convey. My contention is that if we want to reach a more fine-grained understanding of the ‘politics of display’, we would do well to remember that it, too, has a politics.
To be clear, by focusing my attention on beliefs and ideas about the authority of museums, I am not suggesting that museums are not powerful, or that they are somehow ideologically neutral. I am instead suggesting, first, that these beliefs and ideas have their own history that is worthy of study, irrespective of whether they are ‘true’ or not (historians of science would surely agree). In the particular case that follows, I will argue that these ideas emerged most clearly in the midst of cultural changes taking place since the end of the 1960s, when organizations like the Science Museum began actively courting wider audiences. Second, I am suggesting that, from the late twentieth century especially, these beliefs and ideas have exerted a recursive effect on what museums do and how they do it. As such, taking account of this process is necessary if we want to better understand the kinds of scientific knowledge that museums communicate, and how.
‘The social historical background’
A major impetus for the Science Museum to begin seriously building up its treatment of nuclear physics originated in a rather idiosyncratic series of policy documents authored in 1960 by the museum’s incoming director, David Follett. A long-time curator who had organized a temporary exhibition about electrons in the 1930s, Follett was also one of a small pool of museum staff strongly oriented towards the emerging discipline of the history of science.Footnote 9 Under the tutelage of a previous director, Frank Sherwood-Taylor, Follett in the 1950s began the task of trying to reorganize the museum’s displays to better reflect new views of science’s history. In place of the chronologically ordered sequences of instruments and machinery that had been de rigueur since the famous Bell report of 1912, the new format would aim to show how different ‘branches’ of science, technology and industry related to each other within distinct historical periods. Sherwood-Taylor had reckoned that this more contextual approach would better highlight what he called ‘the growth of science as a method of thought and action’.Footnote 10 By the 1960s, however, Follett was using a different formulation to describe a similar approach. Contextualizing objects, for Follett, now meant not only telling a story of intellectual processes, but also revealing the ‘social historical background against which the developments of science and engineering took place’.Footnote 11
Partly enabled by this turn to ‘social history’, the other major component of Follett’s vision was to appeal to a new kind of visitor. Reprising a perennial complaint of Science Museum directors, Follett argued that the institution was still suffering too much from the ‘stigma’ of being regarded as a ‘children’s playground’.Footnote 12 The new audience Follett had in mind comprised what he called ‘people of general education’: the Penguin-reading, Listener-perusing, BBC Home Service classes formed within what Chris Hilliard has nicely deemed Britain’s ‘double helix of democratization and deference’.Footnote 13 Referencing C.P. Snow’s influential ‘two-cultures’ polemic, Follett claimed that the Science Museum might even have a role to play in correcting certain anti-scientific prejudices among this audience, the kind of prejudices that made the museum ‘relate to the art museums in much the same way as technical colleges are related to universities’.Footnote 14 Moreover, an explicit focus on the history of science would help to bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic pedagogies. Gaining the approval of the common reader, Follett thought, would help the museum to assume a new mantle as ‘part of the cultural background of the nation’.Footnote 15
Neither the focus on social history nor the desire to make the Science Museum part of the ‘cultural background of the nation’ would seem overly conducive at first to a new gallery about atomic energy. But building up such a gallery was in fact one of Follett’s main ambitions. Along with space technology, electronics and computing, Follett posited nuclear power as one of the ‘more outstanding features’ of the ‘modern scientific and technological scene’. Future audiences, he argued, would clearly want to understand this important slice of ‘contemporary social history’.Footnote 16 Follett’s concern, it seems, was just as much with historicity as with history. Devoting space to this important new development, and in the process reorganizing the collections away from long-held distinctions between ‘pure science’ and ‘engineering’, would thus allow the museum to speak more effectively to the appetites of the educated postwar public. All of this was bound up with what David Matless has called the ‘confident … technological optimism’ of the post-war era.Footnote 17
Follett’s vision turned out to be strangely prescient. ‘Social history’, including the social history of science and technology, did come onto the agenda in the 1960s, as part of an extraordinary explosion of interest in the recent and industrial past that lasted well into the 1980s. The new discipline of ‘industrial archaeology’, the vogue for historical re-enactments and the unprecedented expansion of local, independent museums all quickly revealed how Britain’s technological past was now being opened up and excavated in new and popular forms.Footnote 18 Crucially also, this was a kind of heritage making that sought to place the experiences and desires of ‘ordinary’ Britons at the front and centre, most spectacularly exemplified by the new open-air museums at Ironbridge Gorge (established in 1968) and the Beamish (opened in 1972).Footnote 19 The Science Museum’s own gestures in this direction – a gallery devoted to domestic appliances, and its eventual takeover of the highly popular Railway Museum (1979) – suggested that it was well placed to take advantage of these new developments. That its visitor numbers continued to tick up all the way through this period suggests that it did so successfully.Footnote 20
Yet Follett was also wide of the mark in another way. Britain’s heritage boom, as it played out, relied on a kind of DIY energy that ostensibly found itself at odds with the establishment ethos of places like the Science Museum. As the erstwhile director of the Ironbridge museum once noted, it was precisely during the 1960s, and because of museums like the one he ran, that words like ‘musty’ and ‘old-fashioned’ began to appear most frequently in the media to describe the national museums.Footnote 21 Even Jennie Lee’s famous 1965 White Paper, written while she was Britain’s first minister for the arts, felt compelled to characterize them as ‘retaining a cheerless unwelcoming air that alienates all but the specialist and the dedicated’.Footnote 22 Contrary to what Follett had predicted, even by the middle of the decade it had become clear that what was once imagined as a homogeneous public of common readers, ready to be educated about industry and technology, was fast transforming into something else entirely: an active body of participants, ready to assert their right to become the keepers of cultural memory.
The situation occupied by the major national museums amidst the ‘heritage boom’ was thus a contradictory one. On the one hand, these institutions profited enormously from the new interest in social history and the expansion of cultural provision in the period. The Science Museum was a particular beneficiary of this: by the mid-1960s it had become the most-visited museum in Britain, a position it retained well into the 1980s. On the other hand, the new and fast-innovating leisure culture of the period also saw the museum’s authority being challenged, tallying with what several historians have observed as a ‘decline of deference’ in British society more widely during this period.Footnote 23 Yet whether they were being praised or criticized, one key upshot of all of this ferment was to sweep the museums into a discursive environment that seemed to grant them a heightened degree of power. In their efforts either to critique or to champion the New Heritage movement, commentators on both sides of the notorious ‘heritage wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s turned their attention towards understanding what it was, exactly, that lent institutions like museums such great cultural weight.
That emphasis was most assuredly there, for instance, among the critics of the ‘heritage industry’ like Robert Hewison (though he was by no means the only one), who positioned the older museums as a kind of spiritual salvation, defenders of civilizational values against the ravages of commodification.Footnote 24 But it was also there, though less so, among the champions of the New Heritage like Raphael Samuel, who lumped the traditional museums in with the professional historians as part of the hegemonic, elitist reaction to the new democratizing tendencies.Footnote 25 And it was certainly there among the early adopters of the ‘New Museology’, in whose hands the almost god-like meaning-making power of the modern museum became newly open to examination.Footnote 26 Even a young Donna Haraway, writing in 1982 to critique the gendered and racialized exhibits of the American Museum of Natural History, felt sufficiently compelled to refer to museum going as a kind of ‘communion’.Footnote 27
What did all this mean for the Science Museum’s nuclear gallery? Needless to say, there is very little evidence that museum staff in the 1960s and 1970s saw themselves either as instruments of cultural hegemony or as laggards behind grass-roots energies. For the most part, the museum carried on pushing its postwar social-democratic mission – educating the common citizen about the meaning and history of science and technology – while remaining largely oblivious to wider trends.Footnote 28 But between Follett’s early pronouncements in the 1960s and the more intensive efforts to build up the nuclear gallery at the end of the 1970s, something had profoundly changed in the public sphere, in ways that would pose significant problems for the museum’s attempt to get the project off the ground. Glibly, one might say that by 1982 Follett’s wish to make the Science Museum ‘part of the cultural background of the nation’ had been granted. It was nothing to do with his own efforts.
Fusion
Although Follett was responsible for providing the impetus to build up the nuclear collections in the 1960s, a lack of space and resources meant that treating the subject with any serious attention faced significant constraints. It took until 1966 for the museum’s existing display on the history of nuclear physics to be finally expanded to include a new display on ‘applied atomic physics’, mainly nuclear power and radioisotope applications.Footnote 29 Throughout this period, the museum’s veteran keeper of physics, F.A.B. Ward, had been working steadily to obtain models of reactor piles illustrating the newest British research: TORUS, BEPO, ZETA (the latter of which had been exhibited as a great spectacle at the Brussels Expo 58).Footnote 30 In the process, Ward had established an ongoing relationship with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the only body with the sufficient expertise to build, supply and interpret the artefacts.
It was on the basis of this long-standing relationship that the idea for a new gallery on nuclear energy began to be mooted. Although very little effort was devoted to the concept between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, a chance visit to the museum from a member of the AEA’s Public Relations Department in 1975 set the ball rolling in earnest. On her visit, the PR manager had found the existing atomic-physics display both hopelessly outdated (object labels referenced processes ‘due to come onstream in 1966’) and generally dishevelled (she had offered to ‘come with a bucket and a bottle of detergent’ and clean the exhibits personally).Footnote 31 The museum immediately wrote back with an offer of forming an ‘advisory committee with reps from the AEA’ to redesign the display.Footnote 32 Early negotiations began in 1977, and a final agreement was reached in 1978 for the AEA to provide £200,000 towards the construction of a new gallery. The process would be overseen by a joint working group consisting of AEA scientists and museum curators.
By this point in time, forming partnerships with industrial patrons, especially nationalized ones, was standard practice for the Science Museum. Since the Second World War, similar procedures had been followed in several of the Science Museum’s new offerings, beginning with a 1954 gallery on gas manufacture and distribution installed at the behest of Britain’s Gas Council. Other nationalized industries, like coal, oil and steel, would all also be given their ‘own’ space within the museum over the course of the 1960s.Footnote 33 As Alison Boyle has noted, partnerships of these kinds formed part of a broader postwar climate in which the museum, in cahoots with industry, operated as a window onto the ‘benign’ face of Britain’s developmental state.Footnote 34
Quickly, however, it soon became clear that this quintessentially postwar model of gallery development could not survive the changing context of the late 1970s. For a start, the asymmetry between museum and patron was much starker in this period than in the 1950s and 1960s. A squeeze on museum funding from the mid-1970s (as a condition of Britain’s IMF loan) had made the Science Museum ever more reliant on external sources of revenue. This feature would become a permanent fact of existence just a few years later, when the National Heritage Act 1983 removed the museum from direct ministerial oversight and encouraged it to act ‘entrepreneurially’ in search of income. And although the AEA would eventually be set on its own path to Thatcherite privatization, by the 1970s it still possessed a virtual monopoly on both the artefacts that might find their way into the gallery and the expertise needed to interpret them for the public. Indeed, from the 1950s onwards, the AEA already possessed its own more or less developed programme of touring exhibitions.Footnote 35 Unlike gas, coal, or steel, there was little sense that Britain’s nuclear industry actually needed the exhibition opportunities offered to it by the Science Museum.
That the AEA pursued the opportunity anyway owed less to its sense of duty towards a national collecting institution and more to its sense of anxiety to control the public narrative around nuclear energy. The mood in the AEA at the end of the 1970s was both highly expansionist and extremely defensive. Global anti-nuclear campaigns had begun ramping up from around 1975, partly as a redirection of activist energies following the end of the Vietnam War, partly owing to a growing environmental movement, and partly a consequence of heightened nuclear fears with the onset of the so-called Second Cold War.Footnote 36 In Britain, the 1976 Flowers report on nuclear power and the environment had recommended that no further nuclear power stations should be built until the industry could prove it had a method for the safe containment of radioactive waste.Footnote 37 At the same time, only a year later, James Callaghan’s Labour government greenlit the construction of two further advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs). The incoming Thatcher administration followed this up in 1979 by approving plans for an American-style pressurized-water reactor (PWR), subject to a public enquiry that would begin in 1983.Footnote 38
Internal memos from the AEA’s Public Relations Department from 1975 onwards reveal a lively debate about the best way to get ahead of anti-nuclear sentiment in the context of its upcoming expansion. The previous policy of deliberately restricting publicity would have to be replaced by a more active, interventionist approach.Footnote 39 And although the programme of touring exhibitions appeared initially as one potential solution – it would allow the AEA to meet ‘opponents of nuclear power on occasions of our own choosing’ – by the end of the decade it was becoming increasingly understood that a different approach was needed.Footnote 40 Rather than making ‘emotive’ appeals or delivering arguments too forcefully, the AEA would aim to present itself as a provider of ‘independent information’ and ‘facts’ to as wide a public as possible.Footnote 41 (That, at least, was its response to a parliamentary question about why there had been such a sharp increase in the AEA’s PR budget).Footnote 42 As the new public-relations director, Peter Vey, wrote in an internal memo, the Science Museum might form a welcome site for such activities, if nothing else because it received such a large yearly influx of visitors.Footnote 43
Clearly, then, the AEA was beginning to buy into the discourse that suggested that museums were sites where publics could be persuaded of a particular point of view. Specifically in the case of the Science Museum, this persuasive power seemed to derive from its status as a place where information could be presented in an ostensibly neutral way, however contentious the topic. Yet here another problem would soon present itself: museum and patron were increasingly beginning to diverge on the question of what a ‘neutral’ presentation of information might look like. In particular, the museum’s turn to ‘social history’ that I noted earlier contrasted directly with the AEA’s wish to provide simple, technical explanations of its procedures.Footnote 44 A modest proposal put forward in the early stages of negotiation by the curator Kenneth Chew in 1977 involved covering the history of UK nuclear power from Calder Hall to the present day. It was immediately turned down by the AEA, who insisted on providing their own display that would educate ‘the public as to the true significance of nuclear energy in the economy of the UK’.Footnote 45 Chew countered by insisting that the AEA’s plan for a ‘textbook on the wall’ style of display was ‘anathema’ to anything the Science Museum might consider.Footnote 46
As the negotiations proceeded, it appeared it was not only the AEA who had grasped the possibilities that the museum’s cultural authority afforded for smuggling in ideology under the guise of objectivity. An early warning sign came from Derek Robinson, the museum’s keeper of museum services, actively involved in the project throughout. Writing to the museum director, Margaret Weston, in 1980, Robinson expressed carefully worded reservations about the appropriateness of the museum as a venue for a subject that ‘must be more complex, globally interwoven (and economically) beset than any other of modern if not of all times’:
Does this necessarily make it a subject for extensive treatment in the Science Museum where I believe we would all want to pull off such a presentation, if we so elect, better than anywhere else in the world and appropriately to our recognised tradition and reputation as a museum in all the best interpretations of that word, rather than a science centre? … How far can the questions and uncertainties be posed in museum terms in a way satisfactory to the recipient visitor – are these matters more appropriate to the book, the TV programme, the radio debate – or are they all issues we cannot avoid without seeming biassed, superficial or naive?Footnote 47
Detectable here is an anxiety not only about the suitability of the subject matter, but also about the very function and place of a museum in a fast-moving cultural landscape. The book, the television programme, the radio debate, the science centre – with the exception of the last, none of these were new competitors. But the dual context of shifting public expectations and a controversial topic seems to have supplied Robinson both with a renewed defence of the museum’s ‘recognised tradition and reputation’ and with an uncertainty about its exact nature.
A balder formulation of a similar sentiment came from the museum’s newly appointed curator of physics, Alan Morton. One of a new breed of professional historians of science entering the museum in the late 1970s, Morton approached the task of putting together the gallery with a more critical sense of the political and ethical stakes.Footnote 48 His cautious memo to the director addressed the subject of patronage head-on, warning that ‘when the Gallery opens we will be accused of bias simply because some of the money for the display came from the UKAEA and that they were formally able to comment on our plans’. One solution, he suggested, would be to consult anti-nuclear campaigners. Another would be to firm up the museum’s treatment of ‘energy’ more broadly, in order to ‘meet criticisms that we were dealing with energy matters in a selective way’.Footnote 49
Fission
Partly in an effort to smooth these concerns, Margaret Weston met with the AEA finance director Arnold Allen in July 1980. Over lunch, they sketched out the likely shape of a modus operandi between the two organizations.Footnote 50 The contract that resulted turned out to be a rather unhelpful document. On the one hand, the museum would be guaranteed its editorial freedom. On the other, the museum was sternly reminded that under section 2.2(f) of the Atomic Energy Act 1954, the AEA was required to ensure that ‘public funds disbursed by them … are used for purposes and under financial procedures which they consider justified’. A joint working group consisting of AEA and museum representatives would be set up to reach consensus on gallery content. Help on ‘technical points’, as well as an overall view on the ‘balance of the exhibition’, would be supplied by a select committee of AEA experts. In the event of disagreement, matters would be referred to a steering committee consisting of Margaret Weston, Arnold Allen and Lord Flowers, author of the 1976 environmental report. If agreement could still not be reached, then either the ‘Museum’s view would prevail’, or the AEA would reserve its right to withdraw funds at any time.Footnote 51 The ultimate purpose of the contract, it seemed, was to refer matters back to the very gentlemen’s agreement that produced it.
That the contract was beset with ambiguities turned out to be relevant, since it proved largely incapable of resolving the manifold tensions that persisted throughout the period between January 1981, when the joint working group first met, and December 1982, when the gallery opened. An early and obvious source of conflict arrived over the proposed treatment of the history of nuclear weapons. The general AEA line was that mentions of weapons research should be kept to a minimum, though within this there were a range of perspectives. Much initial discussion was focused on the proposed display of Fermi’s CP-1 reactor, an object that, by virtue of its size, some AEA representatives felt would command too much attention in the gallery.Footnote 52 One representative even objected to any mention of the bomb at all, on the grounds that ‘even without the Manhattan Project nuclear power would have been developed’.Footnote 53 Others acknowledged that ‘references’ to weapons were ‘inevitable’ but suggested foregrounding the ‘British contribution’ to atomic science over the American military–industrial complex, or else emphasizing the commitment of the Manhattan Project scientists to developing ‘peaceful nuclear energy’.Footnote 54 (Intriguingly, Alan Morton later recalled that one reason for the AEA’s objections was that one of its representatives – it is difficult to tell who – had been in Nagasaki shortly after the war, and as such felt a moral duty to emphasize peaceful uses of the atom.Footnote 55 This fact alone probably cannot account for the full gamut of protestations. But it does at least suggest that wishing to play down the bomb could be an ethical commitment as well as a PR strategy.)
Another sore point in the discussions concerned a proposed section comparing reactor types. The curator, Alan Morton, was especially keen to provide such a comparison given that the newest addition to Britain’s stock – the PWR – was about to become the subject of a public enquiry.Footnote 56 The Science Museum might, in his mind, have provided a forum for public debate. For the AEA, however, the ‘choice’ for the new reactor had already been made, ‘and so there was little point in going over old ground in their view’.Footnote 57 The AEA especially disliked the idea of comparing its existing reactor stock with the new Canadian CANDU model, a design that was, in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident, arousing public attention as a potentially safer alternative to the PWR.Footnote 58 At the same time, AEA representatives tended to feel that the proposed display as it was contained significantly fewer reassurances about both safety and radiation than they would have liked.Footnote 59 Their preference, it seemed, was to present safety as a problem that had already been solved.
Compromises on most of the above points had been reached by the autumn of 1982, when the final preparations were in train. The historical section would address the bomb, but it would also emphasize the British contribution to nuclear power, and contain exhibits from the famous Atom Train exhibition organized by the Atomic Scientists’ Association to show the commitment of scientists to developing peaceful nuclear energy.Footnote 60 Reactor designs would be displayed, but they would be shown only in relation to the existing UK power stations that employed them.Footnote 61 CANDU was flatly ruled out. And the AEA would produce a video display on safety that would be shown under the gallery mezzanine.Footnote 62 And yet, with only a month to go before opening, several further sticking points emerged. Two proved to be decisive. The first was a quibble over the wording of a panel containing data about the likely economic impact of the civil energy programme.Footnote 63 The second concerned a selection of newspaper cartoons published shortly after the war that Alan Morton had picked out for display in the historical section, supposedly without first clearing them with the AEA.Footnote 64 Not only did several AEA representatives protest that they were ‘distasteful’, but one even felt that they ‘might cause unnecessary concern to visitors’. ‘CND supporters’, this representative went on, ‘would be pleased that the Museum had shown this’.Footnote 65
A desperate last-minute attempt to patch up relations by Derek Robinson was of no avail.Footnote 66 For one thing, the Science Museum were in a weaker position than at the start of the project, since a budgetary overspend had forced the museum to ask for a further injection of £10,000 from the AEA, and a similar amount from British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL).Footnote 67 For another, neither side was prepared to give way on what they understood had been pre-agreed content. The matter was only resolved when, a matter of weeks before the exhibition opening, Margaret Weston unilaterally capitulated to all the AEA’s demands. A minute from an internal meeting summed up the attitude of the curatorial staff: the whole project had descended into ‘a very depressing and highly dismaying state of affairs’.Footnote 68
Fallout
As ever, evidence of how audiences responded to the display after it went live is sorely lacking. What we do possess comes from a small cache of letters sent to the museum after the gallery opened, the vast majority of which (aside from the occasional schoolchild requesting help for a homework project) took the form of complaints about pro-nuclear ‘bias’ in the gallery. Clearly, it would be foolish to treat these letter writers as representative of the exhibition-going public, but the letters are nevertheless revealing of some of the wider framings being used to discuss museums at the time. As might be expected, several of the letters focused on specific, contentious wordings in the displays. A handful of correspondents, for instance, strongly objected to a voice-over line in the AEA-supplied video exhibits which stated that ‘no member of the public has ever been killed in a reactor incident’.Footnote 69 This was a claim that, even at the time, required rather narrow definitions of ‘public’, ‘reactor’ and ‘incident’, though in any case the line was doubly unfortunate since the gallery remained in place during and after Chernobyl. Most writers, however, tended to focus on what the gallery omitted over what it showed. The majority of complaints addressed the limited space given to issues ranging from the health effects of radiation poisoning, to the difficulty of long-term disposal of nuclear waste, to the moral hazard of sourcing uranium from apartheid Namibia.Footnote 70
Perhaps more tellingly, almost all the writers thought fit to relate their specific critique of the gallery to larger concerns about the power and authority of the museum. Suspicions of the malign influence of the AEA abounded, as in one letter which directly accused the museum of becoming ‘a tool for what is really company advertising’, or in another which felt it was a ‘serious abuse of a great museum’ if the AEA had indeed had ‘editorial control’.Footnote 71 References to the museum’s status as a public institution (one that spent ‘public – i.e. my – money’, as one correspondent wrote) and its ‘duty to present information in a balanced manner’ were common, as were comments about the potential for sacrificing the ‘international reputation’ and ‘enormous authority and prestige’ of the museum.Footnote 72 But the letters became most damning when they accused the museum of wielding the power to influence a largely impressionable public. One particularly strident correspondent expressed a deep concern over the ‘“don’t knows” who have been influenced by your exhibition’, while others worried about how ‘in the long term political decisions on the appropriateness of [nuclear] technology will be determined by the votes of just the kind of young or undecided people as are now being influenced by your exhibition’.Footnote 73 ‘Imagine’, implored another writer, ‘the number of children who pass through your hands every year who have been brainwashed by this publicity stunt.’Footnote 74
Many of these complaints parallelled and echoed the more lengthy critique of the gallery that Robert Young and Les Levidow subsequently wrote up in a self-published pamphlet aimed at anti-nuclear activists.Footnote 75 In several instances, it appears that the link between Young and Levidow’s article and the complaint letters was more than incidental: several correspondents outwardly declared their involvement with the same kinds of anti-nuclear activist circles that the two authors were associated with. One correspondent, writing soon after the pamphlet was published, even admitted to not having seen the gallery herself, having only ‘read a description of it’.Footnote 76 In any case, the thrust of Young and Levidow’s piece followed many of the same lines of attack: that the gallery contained key omissions and distortions, that it was indisputably in hock to its sponsor, and that it dressed up a pro-nuclear stance in the guise of neutral objectivity.Footnote 77 What differentiated their article was a keener theoretical sophistication and a more explicit sense of the social and political stakes of putting the gallery together.
The ‘radical-science’ movement of which Young and Levidow were part, and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) which gave the movement institutional form, had their origins in the leftist counterculture of the 1960s.Footnote 78 As James Secord has argued, a central motivation for Bob Young’s brand of activist scholarship especially was exposing ‘science’ for its role in ‘naturalizing’ what were in effect highly ideological views about the nature of reality.Footnote 79 That emphasis was most clearly there in his famous essay about Malthus and Darwin.Footnote 80 But it was also there across a whole body of writings about the presentation of science in culture, including some about museums.Footnote 81 Young even argued that museums occupy an especially privileged place in ideological reproduction, because ‘until television came along … museums were the main place where people consumed official scientific and technological culture’.Footnote 82 Citing his friend Donna Haraway, Young asserted that museums were places where ‘constructs’ can be portrayed as ‘reality’.Footnote 83 From this perspective, it was easy to see how they might become vehicles for state power and corporate capitalism.
Both the letters and the article must have been a rather jarring experience for the curators involved with the gallery to read, not least because, as Young and Levidow appeared to suggest, many of their concerns were ones with which museum staff agreed. Indeed, it had only been possible to publish the Young and Levidow article because the two authors had been invited to attend a conference of science museum curators in which Alan Morton had given an unusually frank discussion of the issues surrounding the sponsorship of the gallery. Most of their knowledge of what they described as a ‘scandalous’ exhibit had come from things museum staff had told them, both formally and informally. In their efforts to play down the scandal, the curators suddenly found themselves in the strange position of having to defend themselves from their own critique.
This is why it is so interesting that the museum staff chose to respond in the way they did. Although we now know about their concerns over the politics of display – namely the possibility that the museum might be seen to be wielding its cultural power to influence a public debate about nuclear power – their primary form of response when faced with criticism was to revert to a more traditional understanding of what museums do. Rather than being vehicles for particular interests, they argued, museums were simply places that held collections of objects. As such, they were necessarily limited in what they could and could not say about nuclear physics. It was this explanation that Alan Morton offered to the AEA when they asked him why there was not more information about safety or waste in the gallery.Footnote 84 It was this explanation, too, that he offered to most of the letters of complaint.Footnote 85 And it was primarily this explanation that he focused on in his discussion of the tensions between museum and patron at the science curators’ meeting.Footnote 86 But the very fact that the museum staff were having to make this justification at all suggested that they were no longer operating in a context where this rather innocuous understanding of museums had much purchase.
Conclusion
The discourse about the politics of display thus tended to have self-reinforcing effects. If, as I have suggested, the belief that museums were strongholds of official culture had become culturally available from the 1960s onwards, then it was surely this belief that had led the AEA to approach the Science Museum in the mid-1970s. In turn, the AEA’s desire to manage the museum’s outputs only served to heighten the curatorial team’s own sense of the political stakes of museum display. The resulting dismay with which some sections of the public greeted the gallery only further strengthened their sense of the museum’s authority, however nefariously they felt it was being deployed. As a defence, all the curators could do was to revert back to a more naive interpretation of the museum as simply a more or less innocent collection of objects – to argue, politically, that there was no such thing as a politics of display. But the museum’s own earlier turn towards contextualizing its objects via ‘social history’, coupled with the fact that many of the new generation of curators were recruited from the developing discipline of history of science, suggested that this interpretation was born more out of convenience than of conviction.Footnote 87
Of course, a controversial subject matter like nuclear power was more likely than most to bring ideas about the museum’s ideological authority into clear view. But similar stories to the one in this article could be told (and have been told) about other topics on which the museum exhibited in this period: stories in which the process of making displays was itself profoundly shaped by stakeholders’ sense of, and worries about, the museum’s status as a purveyor of official knowledge.Footnote 88 More tellingly, the Science Museum’s later ventures into exhibiting nuclear power were even more overwhelmingly informed by these beliefs. In 2003, a team from the Science Museum worked on redeveloping the visitors centre at the Sellafield nuclear site operated by BNFL. Once again, it was precisely because of the museum’s status as an ostensibly neutral site of scientific authority that BNFL pursued the arrangement.Footnote 89 For the museum’s part – perhaps informed by its previous experience – it took great pains in its publicity to make clear that it had total editorial control over what was displayed there.Footnote 90 The resulting display, seemingly unusually for a visitors centre at a working nuclear site, leant heavily into anti-nuclear arguments and themes.Footnote 91 The whole project was as much a performance of a particular construction of the museum as it was an informational exhibit about nuclear energy.
What should this all mean for how we should think about the ‘politics of display’? Clearly much of the literature dealing with this topic has travelled in different directions ever since Young and Levidow’s point-blank exposé of the museum’s capture by capital. There is now at least more inclination to believe that museum displays do not only exhibit one kind of narrative, that museum meanings are fluid and plural, and that in any case they can be open to contest.Footnote 92 Yet the old idea of a museum deploying its status as a ‘neutral site of expert discourse’ to convey the narratives of the powerful to a largely impressionable public has died hard.Footnote 93 Whatever truth there may be in this description, revisiting projects like the Science Museum’s nuclear gallery reminds us that the description is itself a historical artefact – one that arose in a particular historical context, one that has exerted effects on the display of science and technology, and one that, presumably, could disappear or change in the future. We may do well to bear this in mind if we want to understand our current culture wars without simply reproducing their battle lines.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out as part of the Museums and History: Long Histories of Collaboration (MaILHoC) research project, funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage (JPI-CH). The author would like to thank Sharon Macdonald, as well as the participants at the MaILHoC workshop in Aix-en-Provence in February 2024, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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