Perth’s new Museum is stunning. Ignore the doubters. You should all go. There, I’ve said it.
The £27 million new home of the Stone of Destiny opens to the public on Saturday. But groups of locals have been enjoying tours of the former Perth City Hall all week. And on Thursday it was the turn of the media.
There’s been loads of interest in the project. The BBC sent a crew up from London. The national papers and overseas media are all planning travel features.
There are coach tours booked in through to November; predictions of 160,000 visitors and much-needed economic boosts.
It’s putting me in mind of the buzz around Dundee when the V&A opened.
But for me, this is personal.
I was born in Perth. I grew up a few miles outside the city. Some might say it’s not the place it used to be. But there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
I’ve watched the story of Perth Museum unfold – the grumbles over the cost, and the cafe, and the uniforms.
And I so wanted this to be a place that would lift the spirits of my home city above all of that.
And now I think it could.
Stone makes for moving centrepiece of Perth Museum
The Stone of Destiny is the big draw of course.
It’s the reason we’re attracting all this global interest in the opening of a museum in a wee Scottish city at the cold end of the year.
This ancient crowning stone of Kings and Queens (or is it??) is housed in its own oak-lined space in the centre of the museum’s ground floor.
It’s free to view but you’ll have to book a ticket. Slots for the opening weekend sold out in minutes and they’re allocating places well into April now.
Is it worth the wait?
Yes. The experience is unexpectedly moving, the stone surprisingly sparkly.
And that’s not even the half of it.
Perth Museum filled with memories of lives like ours
We had a Perth Museum and Art Gallery before. It’s now solely an art gallery.
But the refurbished City Hall has given Perth so much more room to display all its stuff.
All our stuff.
So much stuff.
This is not one of those museums filled up with empty space.
I’m barely scratching the surface here. But there are Pictish stones and Roman treasures; elaborate costumes, weapons and skulls.
There’s the Carpow logboat – excavated from the Tay near Abernethy and dating back to 1000BC.
A replica of Georgina Ballantine’s big fish hangs on a wall. A fragment of the Strathmore meteorite sits behind glass. Beneath it is a drawer containing Beatrix Potter’s pencil drawings of the natural history around her childhood holiday home near Dunkeld.
Then there are the wartime gas masks and memories of Errol station. A street sign from Ainslie Place in Perth’s Muirton housing scheme. Familiar names like Pullars, McEwens and Dewars. The taxidermy menagerie beloved of generations of children at the old Perth Museum. Toys, games, memories of football matches and nights on the town.
All these mementoes of lives like mine. And all of them free to view, right slap bang in the middle of Perth.
Which brings us to the building itself.
City Hall at heart of Perth life again
Things could have turned out very differently for the old City Hall.
It found itself surplus to requirements after the new Perth Concert Hall opened in 2005.
Demolition was a serious prospect until the Perth Museum plans were approved in 2016. And there are plenty who maintain it should have been knocked down.
But Helen Smout, chief executive of Culture Perth and Kinross, has spent the week watching people step through the doors of the grand old place they remember from school prize-givings and dances and speeches and brass band concerts.
And it’s given her a sense of what its restoration means for people here.
“You see them just take a moment when they breathe and remember what this building meant to them,” she said.
“There’s such a sense of familiarity and warmth for it already. And it’s lovely to think it’s going to be a part of Perth’s present and future, as well as its past.”
Perth’s not one of those gallus cities.
We’re not known for making a fuss, or blowing our own trumpets.
But maybe it’s time we were.
The new Perth Museum has given us a place to put our pride in. I can’t wait for folk to see it.
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