Peopling the Public History of Motoring: Men, Machines, and Museums

Abstract

"Using the whole range of objects in our collections, we want to tell stories about the people who made and used transport. Some are heart-warming, others tragic." --Notice board at Glasgow Transport Museum, 2008. The attractions of the motor museum are largely predicated on the visitor's love of, and interest in, automotive technology. But curators of motor museums, and staff of transport museums generally, are coming to realize there is more to the motoring story than the progressive development of automotive technology. Motor vehicles don't exist in technological isolation. They are the products of human genius, skill, and effort; they are driven by people in order to serve human ends; and there is a dire human consequence when things go awry. At every turn, the motoring story is about people - yet the public history of motoring, as represented in museum space, struggles to portray a human perspective and human interaction. Changing the way motoring history is presented in museums by including the human quotient is not easily achieved. A dramatic curatorial shift in focus is needed: from the vehicle's technological pedigree, to the engineer, factory worker, owner, driver, passenger, pedestrian, and road trauma victim. To privilege social over technological history is controversial for a museum sector still quite traditional in its clientele. Exhibitions in this realm are usually driven by the objects in the collections rather than by the stories they might tell (Divall and Scott 2001; Clark 2010; Bryan 2005; McShane 1991, Lubar 2004). More controversial still, of course, is the question of whose story to tell.