Day One At The Grant Museum

After just over 8 months of closure the Grant Museum reopened its doors in new premises yesterday with a special late night opening until 8pm.

After just over 8 months of closure the Grant Museum reopened its doors in new premises yesterday with a special late night opening until 8pm.

Not only was it strange to have visitors in the space again the initial response has been absolutely fantastic.

Just under 300 people came to see the museum on opening day including some new faces, some old friends and supporters of the museum and UCL colleagues. One of the most frequent comments just before we closed in June was that we shouldn’t change the museum at all. Although we’d attempted our best to maintain the aesthetic and atmosphere  of the museum we also had a much larger space to fill and we’d introduced some more thematic displays as well as introduced dun dun dun technology into the museum in the shape of QRATOR. So there was a slight concern that any change would be perceived as negative but fortunately, all of the visitors I spoke to and the comments in our visitor books suggest that we’d managed to mix the old and the new and please most people.

From yesterday alone we’ve already had a couple of new lines of research enquiries into specimens newly on display, some new friends signing up to our friends of the Grant Museum scheme, dozens of artists promising they will come back to sketch the objects and it’s only a matter of time before Jar of Moles starts to trend on twitter*. By far our most popular specimen.

The museum is buzzing with activity on our second day but I think all of the team are happy that the people who we built the museum for, our visitors, seem to be happy with what we’ve accomplished.

*For all our tweeting supporters it should be @UCLmuseums rather than @grantmuseum.