After a very nice sandwich lunch in Neilston Bowling Club, fifteen of us visited the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC) in Nitshill for the third time and another one-hour tour. This time round, our guide was called Brian and he took us into the World Cultures pod and the Transportation Models pod and gave us another entertaining tour. Brian has an archaeology background so gave us some really interesting tales connected to lots of the collection pieces, especially the Egyptology-related ones.
Many thanks to Raymond for organizing the visit and John for the fine sandwiches.
Before heading for the World Cultures pod, Brian wanted to show us a painting by French artist Henri Rousseau. It was interesting because we were going to see some Egyptian pieces and, this is the "interesting" bit, some of the the paint used on it contained Mummy Brown, a pigment made using ground up Egyptian mummies. Yeuch!
The World Cultures pod held a goodly mix of sarcophagus lids, ceramics, jewellery, statues, sculptures and weapons from all around the world and Brian had some pretty good stories about quite a few of them. You really do need a guide here as almost nothing is labelled - mostly all they have is a coded tag so, if you're just wandering, it's guesswork.
After that, we visited the Transportation Models pod, where there were lots of scale models of boats, ships, and trains. There were also a fair number of ship hull models, which were used to refine the hydrodynamics of the vessel design. The scale models would also be used for testing in ship tanks like the one in Dumbarton and which is on our visits list.
With over 1.4 million objects in over 15,000 square metres, there's much more to see yet and we'll try and get back to visit some more of the pods in the future. You can find out more about the GMRC here and there are links on there to download a visual storyboard or view a virtual tour:
You can also read all about our earlier visits to the resource centre here:
You can see a few more photos taken on this visit here:
The full set of photos taken on the day are here, with better descriptions: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBrZsb