Jonjon explores Leicester... "Mods: Shapping a Generation", New Walk Museum

Glance: "Mods: Shaping a Generation", New Walk Museum

New Walk Museum is one of those "something of everything" places. You'll find dinosaurs, ceramics, Egyptian mummies, a wealth of paintings and an entire hall dedicated just to German expressionism.

That diversity places it on par with other family / school tour-friendly attractions: the Horniman and Ipswich Museum and Norwich Castle. Imagine queues of uniformed kids at nine in the morning.

See yourself: "Mods: Shaping a Generation", New Walk Museum

But now it’s time to find yourself on the first floor – in a hall dedicated to temporary exhibitions, next to all these paintings. And imagine what it would be like to be in the youth culture of booming babies – the Mods, from the 50s and well into the seaside riots of the 60s.

What’s it like to explore a national phenomenon (and London-directed) but with local illumination? Sooner or later, you’ll realize with a few casual discussions on gathering places (e.g. head pubs) throughout the country so that spotlights are repeatedly re-directed, back to Leicester and also Nottingham. You can see how the narrative rollercoasters between a "core" source of cultural fuel and the kind of spatial particularism that the curating is trying to create.

The gallery is divided into these sections each dedicated to a particular oddity. The Mod's weekly-changing fashion cycle. Drug use. Musical tastes, scooters.

Now go downstairs for dino fossils.

(Sister exhibition on a much, much smaller scale: Soft Touch Arts (a thirty-second walk from NWM) is showing young artists' responses to the Mod culture.)

Time is asset: save it for later with 25-min museum tours. Or find yourself in my novel, check out the photo of the day and finish it off with a secret prize.

Tags - in_depth_tourism; museum; London_writer; London_travel; indie_writer; independent_blogger