Museum of English Rural Life

Welcome back to Absolute Units, the official podcast of the Museum of English Rural Life.

I'm Joe Vaughan, the museum's social media manager, and my co-host is Dr. Olly Douglas, our curator of collections.

What will farming look like in a hundred years time? That's a question that a group of University of Reading PhD students, led by Rosie Scholes and Ellen Knight, have been exploring as part of the university's celebration of its centenary.

Well, I guess there's something, there's something really interesting in that a time capsule is buried with like it's afterlife in mind.

It's buried to be dug up again, which is an interesting poetic thing, I guess.

I wonder whether it will have the afterlife that you have in mind, though, because I think during that ceremony and that event, I gave a tour of the museum and I was likening the Museum of English Rural Life to a time capsule.

It's a gathering of things in a sort of physical body and it's trying to hold things from the past and... reveal them to people in the future and it's doing it over a much longer period of time potentially it's doing it in a larger space and it's doing it in a in a way that's constantly accessible and open so it's not quite the same as closing a box and sticking it in the ground and leaving it for a period of time but i think we've reflected on this in the past haven't we joe that particularly this year as the museum turns 75 that the museum is not what its founders imagined it would be back in 1951.

And it's different, but it's no less significant and it's no less powerful and it's maybe doing different things, but valuable things nonetheless.

Welcome back to Absolute Units, the official podcast of the Museum of English Rural Life.

I'm Joe Vaughan, the museum's social media manager, and my co-host is Dr. Olly Douglas, the museum's curator of collections.

Last time, we began our conversation with Kate Arnold-Forster, Director of the MERL and of the University of Reading's Museums and Collections.

And in our last round of funding, we were encouraged by the Arts Council to extend our work into SOW, which is a very different place to SOW.

But some of the models of work and practice that we've developed for Reading now are being rolled out in Slough too.

I'm going to be all curatorially nerdy here and remind you both that the second object to be accessioned into the Museum of English Rural Life's collections, 51-2, is a model threshing machine that originally belonged to Reading Museum.

It was gifted by the museum to the Faculty of Agriculture, who then passed it on to the Museum of English Rural Life when the museum was founded.

We've had those sort of institutional connections between town and gown going back a long time.