Think's awakening (Thinktank)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Thinktank
Date:	18/02/02 (188 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good interactive displays, not too crowded

Disadvantages: far too many broken exhibits, little of the charm of the old place, rather expensive

Introduction
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The late and much lamented Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry had a special place in my heart. It was, for me, what a museum should be. Spacious yet packed with all manner of interesting exhibits. Arranged with just enough care to make things easy to find, yet with just enough idiosyncrasy to allow one to stumble unknowingly upon some thitherto unappreciated fact of the City of a Thousand Trades. And, not least, free of charge.

That is all now a memory, as, for reasons that were never really clear to me, it was closed a couple of years ago, and its major exhibits moved to the balmy topical climes of deepest Digbeth. Rather disappointingly, this doesn't mean that "Britain's barmy boffins" have managed to find a way to make Digbeth Coach Station habitable (some things are just too unlikely) - instead, we are now promised an all-singing, all-dancing new palace of the scientific varieties, described on the advertising leaflet as: "thinktank: the birmingham museum of science and discovery", which leads one to speculate that, however impressive its displays, it isn't going to do an enormous amount for the country's standards of literacy.

Winning people over will be a tough task for Thinktank, especially given the high entrance charges. £6.50 does look rather steep - especially now that the London Science Museum is free - though I suppose it's not bad for three or four hours. A family ticket is £18.00 - with a maximum of 2 children, which seems unnecessarily mean. (There is also a one-year season-ticket, which costs £14.00 for an adult or £35.00 for a family.)

And, of course, that's without considering the cost of parking. The adjoining car park costs £2.80 flat rate on Sundays; otherwise it's roughly £1.50 an hour. Originally, those parking but not using the Millennium Point complex (in which Thinktank is situated, along with the IMAX cinema, which I h
aven't yet seen) had to pay double, but this policy was not being implemented when I visited. If you come by train, you'll have nearly a mile to walk - though it's reasonably well signposted - from New Street Station. Chiltern Railways do joint train/Thinktank tickets into Snow Hill from some locations, and bus no. 77 stops nearby.

Outside
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From the outside, the building is pleasant to look at, though not particularly impressive - basically a large glass box. (Which, incidentally, means that you can have a bit of a gawp before you go in!) Inside, things are more interesting - you come into a spacious entrance hall, lit with a slightly odd purplish light, with a few basic facilities scattered about - toilets, an information centre, telephones, a (too) small café-bar, and so on. There's also what looks like an unfinished restaurant - I remember reading somewhere that it was late opening because - and I'm not making this up - "the kitchen had been put in the wrong way around". A little worrying for a science museum, I must say!

This is probably the best place to explain Millennium Point's rather odd method of labelling floors. The ground floor, where you enter, is referred to as G2. The next floor up is G1, then G0. Above that is L1, then L2 (which Thinktank doesn't reach). I don't really know what the planners hoped to achieve by doing this, but personally I think it's rather confusing and completely unnecessary.

To enter Thinktank, you need to go up the shiny new escalators to floor G0. There you may find an absolutely enormous queue (the first time I attempted to visit the place, the end was just past the "2 hours from here" marker!). If you have a pre-booked ticket (which costs £1 extra) you can sail up to the front looking smug: if not, you can do what I did and go to the city centre Art Gallery instead! When I had another go, though, I carefully shelled out the
quid, and arrived to find hardly anyone there, despite it being a Sunday in half term, so I rather wasted my money!

G0: Thinknow
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Through the turnstiles (your ticket allows one re-entry in the day), past the gift shop (clipboards made from recycled circuit boards!), you enter the museum proper. G0"s section is entitled "Thinknow" (all the levels, regrettably, have these somewhat illiterate names - perhaps "Thicknow" would be a more appropriate title!), and the first section is "The Street", of which the most obvious constituent is... er... a (working) pelican crossing. This section, gushes the blurb, helps people "discover the science behind things we all take for granted" - cars and mobile phones, for example. (And, it seems, signs saying "I need fixing! Please come back another time", or the like, of which there were too many.)

Here you'll also find the first of several yellow booths, looking rather like the ones evening newspaper sellers use, at which you can listen to various points of view on a topic (eg "Should we spend more on alternative energy?"), vote, and see how previous visitors have voted. Rather ironically, the "Communications" booth was broken!

Sadly, the "Kids in the City" playroom with its water park is off-limits to all but accompanied under-7s (curses!), so let's move on to the "Medicine Matters" displays. As would be expected from a new museum, there's lots of stuff about DNA and genetics - the obligatory scrolling display of the human genome, a "be the detective" section where you solve a burglary with the aid of DNA screening, etc - but perhaps the most talked-about part is likely to be the vaccination and public health display (and not just because of the fun though difficult "zap the germs" computer game). In the light of the current hysteria over the MMR vaccine, i
t was interesting to see that almost 90% of people voting at the yellow booth still agreed that children should have all their vaccinations.

Then, there's "Things About Me", advertised as "great for under-11s", but worthwhile for the rest of us as well. As the blurb says, "voyage through veins and ventricles in an amazing exploration of your own body". Except that the centrepiece of this section, the "cell railway", was not working. Never mind - anyone who likes Turing Test-style computer programs can have a good guffaw at the example here - a truly appalling version, which purports to be able to converse with you about the weather. It might be worth persevering with if only there wasn't a five-second delay on everything you typed, and if only the keyboard wasn't so worn as to be almost illegible already.

The final main section of Thinknow is "Wild Life". A good section, this one, with plenty of information, some ideas I haven't seen before (be a bat and catch the moths with your sonar!) and - slightly surprisingly - an old-fashioned glass case containing a range of stuffed animals, from peacocks to polar bears. Still, there's also a great big ammonite ("wake up in the mornin' wantin' a fossil...), and anywhere with one of those can't be all bad.

L1: Thinkahead
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Up the stairs from G0 (or use the glass-fronted lift), and you reach the "Thinkahead" gallery. This is where the hi-tech exhibits live. The main room has some fun interactive displays, such as a voice-controlled radio from a Jaguar (which has trouble understanding anything other than adult males, incidentally), and a Jaguar F1 car (yes, you're right, Jaguar are a sponsor of the gallery!). For motorsport fans, though, more interesting than the car (an R2, if you need to know) is the accompanying video of driver Pedro de la Rosa whinging about the increasin
g influence of technology in F1, and expressing the view that, 20 years hence, the cars will be effectively remote controlled, and the driver will be - quote - "a monkey".

Another part of this level contains some interesting interactive displays on space travel - the deep-space information, in particular, is worth exploring in some detail - and there's also a fair amount concerning robotics. L1 also contains "Thinkspace", where temporary exhibitions are placed.

G1: Thinkhere
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Down to G0, and down again, is the excellent "Thinkhere" level. As the name implies, this concerns itself with the city of Birmingham itself from its earliest foundations to the present day. Although there is a great deal of information and a large number of exhibits from early times, my personal favourites are the cases containing nick-nacks from more recent years - the waistcoat covered with union badges from the miners' strike (the brand name of the waistcoat - "Wildcat", of course!); the Tatung Einstein microcomputer; the 1949 television set (what? no Neighbours?); the programme for the much-missed Birmingham Superprix (the Pershore Road roundabout is still full of gravel from those days!)...

This floor is perhaps the closest of any to a traditional museum, in that there is a collection of objects in glass cases, but it's no less interesting for all that (though rather too many lightbulbs had gone). Two exhibits that stick in my mind are an extraordinary collection of pen nibs (I remember this from the old museum) and some fascinating jewellery made from cut steel. It's not a material one might think of for making rings and bracelets, but it turns out very well indeed.

G2: Thinkback
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If you're looking for the City of Birmingham locomotive, John Cobb's 400mph Land Speed Record car or the Spitfire, here they are. Here, also, are the big clunk
y steam engines of blessed memory. Unfortunately, while a number of the machines had a big green button labelled "Start", not a single one of those appeared to do anything, which does rather defeat the object of a "hands on" museum! Still, the display of robotic spot-welding by on an S-Type shell (yep, it's that Jaguar sponsorship again!) is highly impressive, and the robots are, in an odd way, almost balletic in their movements.

The interactive displays on this level are generally well done and interesting - the cargo game, for example, wherein you have to transport goods from Birmingham to Liverpool within a time limit, making use of road, rail or water transport as appropriate, is really rather addictive.

More problems with broken exhibits here - most notably the pen-nib making machine ("how many nibs can you make in 60 seconds?"), which looked like a lot of fun. And, as elsewhere in the museum, the speakers for the videos were often badly placed, meaning that it was very hard to hear the commentary against the background noise of the steam engines (the American newsreel of John Cobb's run at Bonneville is a case in point).

Also on G2 is the café bar, the only one you can get to without going out of Thinktank proper. Surprisingly, this doesn't mean it charges absurd prices - they're expensive, of course, but £2.00 or so for a packet of sandwiches is about par for the course. As well as the sarnies, you can also choose from pizza, pasta and baguettes, and - before 11:30 - "a range of breakfast items" (the menu explains no further). One tip I would pass on is to get there early - at 11:30 or so there's plenty of space; an hour later you'll have trouble finding space to stand, let alone sit down.

Conclusion
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There are three major problems with Thinktank. Firstly, the reduction in space from the old Museum of Science and Industry means that ther
e are only specimen exhibits of some items - there is nothing like the old building's Aircraft Hall or the display of gramophones through the ages. Second, far too many displays were broken or wearing out - inexcusable in such a new museum. This alone downgrades my rating from 4 to 3 stars. And third, and to me the most disappointing aspect, we've lost all those wonderful old wooden-cased computers from the 1950s and 60s - they might have only consisted of a few circuits and an eight-segment LED, but I loved them. The same goes for the spectroscope cabinet with its rotating fork. I do hope they're being stored somewhere safely, as destroying them would be a disgraceful act of technological vandalism.

Despite these complaints, Thinktank is a good museum; let me say that much here and now. It's less crowded than you might expect (anyone who has been to "@Bristol" or its predecessor, "The Exploratory" will appreciate this!). The interactive exhibits are generally engaging and well thought out, the staff are helpful and there is a good deal of genuinely useful information to be gleaned. In short, then, a visit to Thinktank is recommended, provided you don't balk too much at the cost of getting in. It's not, in my view, close to the standard of the old museum in terms of sheer charm (or space), but it could be a great deal worse. Just get those damn steam engines fixed!

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Opening hours: 10am - 5pm Saturday - Thursday.
Warning: CLOSED on Fridays!

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