Removing the rough edges? Nostalgia and storytelling at a UK museum

Abstract

This paper offers a practitioner's viewpoint of the new Riverside Museum in Glasgow and discusses its successful transition to a new building and location. The role of nostalgia in the museum's appeal through storytelling and collective memory is discussed and shown to be an important element in this success. This paper also highlights the museum's efforts to avoid sanitisation of the past in how it presents this history and argues that the use of nostalgia should not be to just present a rose-tinted selective version of what was past, but rather to present as complete and truthful a representation as possible.

Keywords:

• nostalgia
• storytelling
• museum
• engagement