LOL…C

A few photos from yesterday's trip to the Land of Lost Content, Craven Arms' premier museum of everyday material culture. As I've been there before, I didn't take hundreds of pictures, but you may like these. Click on them to enlarge, and I've added the rest to the Flickr set.

Stuffed fox: acquired for £20 from a charity shop

1950s? football boots

It isn't? It is… a bust of Hitler

Outsider art, to put it kindly. I think this is meant to be George Harrison

Tin rocking horse

Frightening child on a bricklaying game box

Brut men's aftershave. Perhaps it doesn't quite work in English. 

Nick Owen, West Midlands news-reading heart-throb. And supposed model for Alan Partridge.

It turns out that Uncle Mac was quite a predatory paedophile as well as the best-loved children's broadcaster of his day.

Anti-Tory badge demonstrating how far we've moved on…

We're all going on a winter holiday

No blogging from me today (other than this, obviously). I'm taking a group of students to the Land of Lost Content, a sure contender for Shropshire's oddest museum. It's basically an old warehouse filled with the contents of the charity shops nobody ever goes to. Old detergent boxes, 1950s underpants, a telephone exchange, Wham records and a very disturbing collection of golliwog memorabilia. You can see the disturbing photos I took last year here.

The name of course is from A. E Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad', which also features the line about Shropshire's 'blue remembered hills'. The irony is of course that the narrator is looking to Shropshire from Herefordshire, and the subtext of the poem is homoerotic… which would no doubt horrify the tweedy Tories who like the line but have never read the poem. It amuses me though.

Talking of homoerotic, the only book I've acquired so far this week is Rhys Davies' 1947 The Dark Daughters, a rather melodramatic Lear retelling which features the first Welsh cocaine abuse in literary history. Davies was proper Valleys boy (though not a miner) whose works carry a considerable homosexual charge, albeit one rarely mentioned by his contemporary reviewers. Apparently this books is 'sustainedly unpleasant' and carries hints of 'perversion'. Excellent.

I'm hoping the bus breaks down - otherwise I get back to the Hegemon and go straight into another meeting, damn it. Have a good day.

Land of Lost Content

OK, a few more pictures from this bonkers, and disturbing, museum: some of the racist stuff really bothers me. See the full set here. Click these to enlarge.

Hugely popular free gifts from Robertson's Marmalade: golliwogs

Deeply racist postcard

Another terrifying doll: this Girl's World one's hair grows, I gather

Spacehopper box

Mansell's Gay Panties. 

Cushions of Wham! and Kylie and Jason

Hilda Ogden (Coronation Street) bust

9/11 rug. 

What I did on my field trip (1)

OK, we left The Dark Place and headed west through the beautiful, autumnal Shropshire countryside and arrived at the Land of Lost Content. It's a massive warehouse literally piled high with the things we throw away: toys, games, clothes, office equipment, kitchen gear, packaging, bottles, postcards, luggage, electrical items, magazines: almost everything except for (interestingly) much on politics, sex or religion.

It's mind-boggling. The cultural choices made in archiving are fascinating and often troubling. The proprietor framed the collection as an art installation. You might see it as junk. Some of it really bothers me: there's an awful lot of racist material, particularly golliwogs. The museum's stance isn't clear: is this a fair representation of a past culture which simply didn't care about minority races, or is this material collected for other reasons?

I think the students enjoyed themselves, and learned a lot about past and material culture.

Here's a selection (click to enlarge): full set here.

WW2 Jobs for the Girls poster

Plastic Sweat Yourself Thin clothes (ugh)

50s Horlicks sign

Well-Meaning Guardian Readers Against The Bomb (that's me!)

Actual Subbuteo streakers!

Terrifying, freakish crawling doll

Enid Blyton merchandising

A romantic cigarette from Craven "A"

Tretchikoff's 'Chinese Girl' - hugely popular in the 1950s/60s

Official Girl Scout Camera

Blue remembered hills

Hurrah! My reward for being in the office for 11 and a half hours yesterday (and back in 10 hours later) is a day out: a field trip to Shropshire's Land of Lost Content, no less. It's a barkingly mad place, half museum, half junk shop. I can never tell whether it's hugely reactionary (there's a strong whiff of an idealised British past) or unsettlingly radical through its obsessive, seemingly unselective piling-up of the kind of things a more staid establ
ishment wouldn't collect: odd board games next to a vintage telephone exchange, uniforms and bed pans, the lot. Even the website is rather retro - perhaps accidentally so:

There's certainly an air of determined Tory individualism in the owners' bloody-minded individualism, and of the Daily Mail in their racial insensitivity: the Black History Cupboard is  simply disgraceful, but there's also something anarchic about an undiscriminating collection of disposable - and disposed - items. I also love the name: what an excellent pun. It will be fascinating to see what the students make of it all. Pictures later.