News
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Shields, Spears and Samurai...
The Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum will once again be open to visitors from May 1st 2010, making it the last area of the Museum to reopen after the recent Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment. The principal new feature in the reopened gallery is the extensive firearms display, reuniting this important part of the Museum’s collection with the existing arms and armour displays. The previous firearms display, on the ground floor, was dismantled as part of the redevelopment programme in 2009.
The new display is wide-ranging, charting the development of firearms from fifteenth century hand-cannons to modern automatic assault weapons, exploring their use in battle, policing and self-defence, as well as for hunting and sport, and highlighting the different way firearms have developed in cultures across the world.
Old favourites on the Upper Gallery can be revisited, including the Japanese suit of armour, the displays of traps, nets and fish hooks, bows and arrows, swords, shields and many other examples of functional and ceremonial weaponry.
With all three floors of the Museum once more open to the public, there is a keen sense that the Museum has retained its distinctive period atmosphere and artefact-rich displays, whilst upgrading its facilities to meet twenty-first century needs. Helen Hales, the Museum’s Special Projects Officer who worked on the new firearms displays, sums it up:
'It's fantastic that visitors will now be able to enjoy all three floors of the Pitt Rivers again. Weapons collections have been housed in the Upper Gallery since the nineteenth century and the General's collecting originated with firearms, so we hope that the combination of improved lighting, more accessible interpretation, and new displays will provide a welcome marriage of old and new.'
