Visit - London Science Museum (Reprinted from Science Museum Web site)

"A look back at the Museum's old Agriculture gallery

It might take a small leap of imagination, but the Science Museum’s Agriculture Gallery was once a radical new visitor experience. Unveiled back in 1951, its detailed dioramas and hugely important prototypes of the latest machinery would have caused the same excitement as our new galleries do today.

Sixty five years ago William O’Dea, the gallery’s original curator, wanted to showcase the ‘immense strides… made in mechanization during and just after the war’.  With rationing still in place, it’s not hard to see why people would be keen to see how new technologies were helping to dramatically increase food production in the UK – and putting an end to the back-breaking labour of the old ways.

This month (January 2017), the Museum’s pioneering Agriculture Gallery closed to make way for a stunning new suite of Medicine Galleries (opening in 2019). Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a new team of Science Museum curators are carrying out research for a contemporary agriculture gallery that will examine the challenges facing global food production today.

BBC presenter Tom Heap came to the Museum to celebrate the original gallery, which was one of the first to use dioramas on a major scale, vividly presenting the latest agricultural machinery at work in traditional farm settings.

David Matless, Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham, is interested in what the old gallery tells us about how we used to live:

“These dioramas represent time capsules of mid-20th century environmental attitudes… The old gallery was a celebration of farming and its productivity… although now to us it looks very much like something from the past”.

Horses were still common on farms in 1951, so the tractors and combine harvesters on display represented the radically ambitious future."

Reprinted from Science Museum website; for educational purposes only.

Comments by Nicholas Kalis

While this is an attractive diorama with some instructive value for model railroaders, it does fall short on three points.

Notable is the absence of an effective valance. Without a valance, the seam between the backdrop and the ceiling of the exhibit is apparent - put another way, viewers are left to see where the sky ends.

While a photo can be tricky to decipher, I found that having the farm machinery come so close to the backdrop was also less than optimal. Ideally, it would have been nice to see some forced perspective as most call it - "reduced scale" would be a better description.

Finally, the backdrop curve is also a bit too sharp for my taste and hence draws attention to itself.