A new and novel exhibition, a collaboration between the Museum of Bath at Work and a group of local community organisations, has opened at the Museum in Julian Road.
It’scalled ‘Costing the Earth? Bath Industrialised Environment’ land ooks at how Bath’s urban and rural environment has been affected by 300 years of industrialised leisure, industry and agriculture.
In particular it looks at how living in the city, and its surroundings, has been compromised by our demands for higher and higher standards of living and lower and lower prices for manufactured goods and food.
The exhibition is displayed on ten cardboard cubes featuring five large images and text – visitors are invited to lift and look at each side of the themed cubes. After the exhibition is over the display cubes can be recycled.
Museum Director Stuart Burroughs said ‘The Museum of Bath at Work has traditionally been accused, if that is the word, of celebrating industry, technology and all its works. Not the case, but regardless, we felt it timely to put on an exhibition about the environmental reckoning we are all facing.
We were the first industrialised nation and the first to have to deal with atmospheric, water, noise, and visual pollution, as a consequence. Bath is special case because of the industrialisation of leisure – tourism and so on- so the exhibition looks at the particular problems Bath has faced since 1700.
The intensification, the industrialisation of agriculture in the fields around the city has had its consequences- at the beginning of the 18th century the countryside around Bath looked, smelt, and sounded like a garden, in the first part of the 21st century the countryside around Bath looks, smells, and sounds like an open-air factory’
The exhibition is free – with admission to the Museum of Bath at Work -and will run from June 27th to November 1st 2024.
