The People's Story Museum in Edinburgh, and the Lives It Collects

Most museums are organised around things that were expensive to make. Paintings, silver, weapons, the possessions of people who had possessions worth keeping. A smaller number are organised around the opposite, and they are harder to build, because ordinary life leaves less behind and what it leaves is rarely thought worth saving at the time.

The People’s Story Museum in Edinburgh is one of the better examples of the second kind, and it is worth looking at from a town like Ramsgate or Margate, where the same problem exists and has mostly not been solved.

The building came first

The museum occupies the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a building of 1591 that served as a courthouse, a council chamber and a prison. Its clock projects over the street on a bracket and its turnpike stair and crow-stepped gable are the real thing rather than a restoration.

That history is not incidental to what is now inside it. A tolbooth was where a burgh’s authority met its population, usually to fine, tax or imprison them, and the people whose lives the museum records are the descendants of the people the building was built to control. Putting a museum of working life inside it is a deliberate reversal, and it works.

The museum opened in 1989, at a point when social history was moving from the margins of the museum world to its centre.

What is actually in it

The collections cover the lives of ordinary Edinburgh residents from roughly the late eighteenth century to the present. Not the lives of the notable, and not the city’s institutional history, which is told elsewhere. The subject is work, home, health, drink, protest and leisure.

Trade banners are a strength. Friendly societies, trade incorporations and later trade unions all carried elaborate painted and embroidered banners, and they survive in numbers because they were treasured objects that a body of people had a collective reason to keep. They are also, for a social historian, unusually rich documents: the imagery on them records how a trade wished to be seen.

Alongside those sit reconstructed interiors, working equipment, and oral history. The reconstructions are the part visitors remember, and they are the part professional opinion is most divided about, because a room recreated is a room interpreted.

Admission is free, which is worth stating because it is central to the argument the museum makes about whose history it is.

Why the model is difficult

Collecting ordinary life has three problems that collecting art does not.

The objects are not kept. A ledger, a work apron, a rent book or a set of tools gets discarded when its use ends, and by the time anyone wants it for a museum the generation that used it has gone. What survives tends to be what was unusual, which biases the collection in exactly the wrong direction.

The objects are not documented. A painting arrives with a provenance. A pair of boots arrives with nothing, and without the name of the person who wore them and the work they did in them, the object is decorative rather than evidential.

And the subject resists a single narrative. A city’s working population is not one thing, and a museum that tries to speak for all of it either flattens the differences or fragments into a series of separate stories with nothing holding them together.

The response, at Edinburgh and elsewhere, has been to lean heavily on recorded testimony. Voices solve the documentation problem directly, and they are the reason oral history moved from a specialism to a standard method within about two decades.

The same problem on the Kent coast

Thanet has the raw material for this kind of museum in quantity. Fishing, boatbuilding, the harbour trades, the whole apparatus of a Victorian and Edwardian resort economy, market gardening on the chalk, wartime evacuation and shelter life, the long decline of the holiday trade and what replaced it.

Much of it is within living memory or one generation beyond it, which is the window in which this sort of collecting is possible at all. Once it closes, the objects are gone and the testimony is second-hand.

Local provision exists in pieces. There are collections at the harbour, a strong local studies holding in the county library system, active local history societies, and the tunnels operation, which is itself a museum of ordinary life in all but name: its subject is what a few thousand people did underground for five years.

What is missing is the connective work. The Edinburgh model is not expensive equipment or a grand building. It is a decision that the lives of the people who lived in a place are the main subject rather than the background, followed by the patient business of collecting before the material disappears.

Free entry, and the argument behind it

Scottish national collections and most local authority museums in Scotland charge nothing for permanent displays, and the position has held through periods when charging was actively debated elsewhere. The reasoning is specific rather than sentimental.

A museum of working life that charges admission excludes a proportion of the people whose history it holds. That is not a soft point about fairness; it changes who walks through the door and therefore whose recollections get offered, whose objects get donated, and whose family stories end up in the collection. Free entry is a collecting strategy as much as an access policy.

The cost falls on the local authority, which makes this kind of museum permanently vulnerable in a way that a charging institution is not. Social history collections are among the first things examined when a council budget is cut, and the case for them has to be made repeatedly.

Volunteers and the recording window

Almost every collection of this kind depends on volunteers, and the dependence is not only financial. Recording testimony requires somebody who knows what to ask, has time to sit with people, and can transcribe afterwards, and that is volunteer work almost everywhere it happens.

The window for it is finite in a way other museum work is not. A building can be surveyed in twenty years’ time. A person cannot be interviewed after they have died, and the generation that can speak first-hand about industrial work, wartime childhood or a vanished trade is always the one currently in their eighties. Every social history museum is therefore running a quiet race that its visitors never see.

What to look for in a museum of this kind

Three questions separate the good ones from the merely well-meaning.

Whose voice narrates the labels? A museum of working life written entirely in the curatorial voice by curators has already lost half of what it was for.

Is conflict included? Work involves disputes, strikes, poverty, drink, and employers behaving badly. A collection that shows only craft pride and community spirit is a version of the past that nobody actually lived in.

And is the recent past there? Social history museums have a tendency to stop somewhere around 1950, which quietly implies that ordinary life ended when the objects stopped being picturesque.

The Royal Mile setting

The building sits partway down the Canongate, which was a separate burgh from Edinburgh until 1856 and had its own council, its own tolbooth and its own character. That independence is why the building exists at all: a burgh needed somewhere to hold its courts and its prisoners.

The stretch around it holds a concentration of survivals unusual even for Edinburgh, and walking it is the cheapest way to understand what the museum is describing. The closes running off the street are the old tenement entries, and the density they imply is the density the collections are about: thousands of people living within a few hundred yards, in buildings stacked higher than anywhere else in Britain at the time.

Reconstructed rooms, and the argument about them

The recreated interiors are the most popular thing in museums of this kind and the most contested within the profession. A prison cell, a wartime kitchen, a tenement room: visitors respond to them far more strongly than to a case of objects, and remember them years later.

The objection is that a reconstruction makes claims a label cannot qualify. Every choice in the room is an interpretation presented as a fact, and the visitor has no way of telling which parts are evidenced and which are plausible filling. A cased object says: here is a thing that survives. A recreated room says this is how it was, and usually cannot prove it.

Good practice has settled on being explicit: saying what the reconstruction is based on, whose account it follows, and where it is a composite. The museums that do that lose none of the emotional force and keep the honesty, which suggests the objection was never really to the method.

Edinburgh also gives the model a specific advantage that a coastal town does not have: the material was concentrated. A single street held the trades, the housing and the courts together, so the collecting had a geography. In Thanet the same century of working life is spread across three towns and a dozen villages, which is one practical reason nobody has yet drawn it into one place.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the People's Story Museum?

In the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a building of 1591 that previously served as a courthouse and prison.

What does it cover?

The lives of ordinary Edinburgh people from around the late eighteenth century to the present, with particular strength in trade and friendly society banners, reconstructed interiors and oral history.

Is there a charge?

No. Free admission is part of the argument the museum makes about whose history is being told.

Why do trade banners survive when work clothing does not?

Because a banner belonged to a group rather than an individual and had a ceremonial function, so somebody was always responsible for keeping it. Everyday working objects had no such custodian.

Does Thanet have an equivalent?

Not as a single institution. The material exists across harbour collections, the county library’s local studies holdings, local history societies and the Ramsgate tunnels, but it has not been drawn together under one roof.