Building an Exhibition

At first glance you may wonder why we have chosen an exhibition about the seaside, when in Staffordshire we are almost as far from the coast as any county could be, but we wanted to place Staffordshire in the countrywide craze of the 20^th century seaside holiday.

Were the people of Staffordshire going to the seaside?

How did they get there?

What did a holiday look like 100 years ago?

From these questions we were able to form our themes for this exhibition and start to think about how we could show holidays and the seaside through our collections. Our themes for the display include subjects such as ‘Holidays at Home’, ‘Travel and Transport’, ‘Entertainment and Recreation’ and ‘Keepsakes’.

We were able to research into the hugely broad subject of ‘holidaying’ but use our county collection to shine a light on what that meant for the people of Staffordshire.

We knew from the very beginning that we wanted this exhibition to have a bright and fun traditional British seaside aesthetic. We wanted it to be immersive with large scale images. We wanted people to feel like they too have been on a journey as they explore through the exhibition.

The next thing we needed was to bring Exhibition Designers on board to the project. They help the team take the ideas we have and apply them to a real-world display. They help creatively by building on our ideas of how we can interpret our collection. They facilitate the team by bringing those ideas to life by creating graphics and building exhibition structures.

We appointed Noble Day Associates (Noble Day Associates) working in collaboration with Foil Designs (Foil Design – Leicester Design Agency).

While the exhibition designers worked up design concepts, it gave the team time to really explore our collections and draw out the objects, photographs and documents that are going to help tell our story. Our stores house thousands of objects from the Staffordshire County Museum collection. From that huge resource we were able to choose from some incredible costume pieces for the display – including sunglasses, parasols, dresses and swimming costumes!

Our photography collections holds around 50,000 images which have been a huge source of content – photographs of holiday fun, fairs, hospitality at home and bank holiday hijinks. The documents from the Staffordshire Record Office also proved invaluable for things such as posters, adverts, invoices, photo albums and letters.  

Increasingly, one of the biggest jobs for us in supplying content for exhibitions is digitising collections. This means that for almost every physical photograph and document we want to use for the display, we need to make a digital copy. This digital copy needs to be a high-resolution scan or good quality image for designers to use in large scale printing and compositions for wall panels or backgrounds. We also use those digital images in promotion for the exhibition, social media content and to use in place of original documents in displays if original documents are too fragile to move.

So, as the temperature drops outside, inside the office we are researching into suncream, sand toys and ice cream stands. We can’t wait to welcome visitors inside to warm up and take a journey with us from Staffordshire to the seaside in this fun and interactive exhibition.

See you there, Bon Voyage!

Sophie – Collections Interpretation Officer

The exhibition will be kicking off its tour from 11^th January 2025 at The Brampton Museum, Newcastle under Lyme.