April 25, 2024

The Museum of Shit, Cambridge

It boasts one of the coolest looking buildings in Cambridge.

And it has a pretty cool name too,

The Cambridge Museum of Technology

But, really, its not a museum of technology is it?

Like my kids said, after five minutes coming to terms with the place – its all about sewage.

Put crudely this is ‘the museum of shit’.

To put our gloved finger on it, the building is really a Victorian Sewage processing factory, preserved and explained for visitors to look around.

Its a nice walk – the old steam powered equipment they’ve got there is quite something.

There is, admittedly, a second museum located in a prefab building next to the sewage processing factory, that you can look around. It has an exhibition focused on two Cambridge technology companies: Pye and Cambridge Scientific Instruments.

The preserved factory and the exhibit feel scraped together – an attempt to preserve two incongruent features of Cambridge’s past. True they are united by being located in Cambridge and by technology, but I’m not sure that that’s enough to justify the name.

This isn’t the Museum of Technology you might be expecting in the world’s greatest university city.

The name is a cunning marketing ruse in my opinion.

I wonder how many tourists leave, like my children did, feeling rather disappointed.

A Museum of Technology in the city of the world’s most famous university ought to be offering more.

I’d expect a stunning homage to the technological innovation thought up by the university’s great brains over the last five centuries.

Not a social history of poo.

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