The New Waterfront Museum Swansea: Teething Problems and Solutions

The Waterfront Museum Swansea is the phoenix rising from the ashes of the, now demolished, Industrial and Maritime Museum in Cardiff and that of Swansea Museum.  The building, which opened in October 2005, comprises the listed 19th century dockside building which formed the original Swansea Museum industrial and Maritime Museum, and a brand new building connecting to it.  The architect's brief was to blend the old with the new and to provide a 21st century museum in which to display a wide variety of collections.

The conservation problems envisaged were

• time to prepare the collections for display
• correct conservation grade mounts and exhibition cases
• correct environmental conditions

As is normal with such a large scale undertaking, the plans were subject to constant change.  Objects chosen for exhibition would be exchanged for others and often an excess of objects would be picked out in order that a later choice could be made.  This made the planned programme of conservation difficult, owing to the sheer number of objects required.  The changing date of the opening also made hard and fast planning difficult.

The mounting of the objects was carried out by an external contractor who made the original mounts from pictures and dimensions.  They then spent time on site with the collections doing the final fittings.  Entertainingly, some of the mounts fitted so well that they stuck to the objects, while one or two objects fell through the mounts and then dried out and shrank.

The exhibition cases were both bespoke from a good recognised company and purpose-built ones designed to our specifications.  After some initial problems with poor sealing of gaps, misalignment of glass sides, non-sealing of the wooden surfaces against off-gassing, etc., these were resolved.  However, we have had ongoing problems with the case lights heating up the interiors and causing daily fluctuations of temperature and relative humidity.  The problems were connected to the heat output of the fibre-optic projectors which are located under the exhibition cases.  Various tactics were tried to limit the heat transfer including adding additional insulation, ventilation fans and lowering the wattage of the lamps.  These actions have, in the main, reduced the fluctuations to within our original design parameters.  Where there are still isolated problems, we proposed to change the lighting system to cold LED's.

The building itself has had the usual teething problems.  We wanted a period of at least a month to allow all the systems such as air-conditioning, case lighting, etc., to be evaluated.  In the end, we were denied this and objects were put in - in some cases to be taken out again until the subsequent snagging could be undertaken.

The museum has now been open for nine months and is very popular with the public.  We are already preparing for the first 'refreshing' of the exhibitions and to evaluate the condition of the objects.  This will allow us to develop realistic cleaning and maintenance schedules and to change exhibits.  No longer can we lock something in a case for 20 years and ignore it.