[sarreph]

I recall comments about this last week on the BBC website where people made the points that:

1. Surely the long term plan is to not keep these relics in a gargantuan warehouse but instead to put them in a museum(s) — with free entry no less — so that the tax paying public can enjoy them.

2. Further, collections of relics that relate to the site of each station on the line could be displayed in each.

[pjc50]

> museum(s) — with free entry no less

The tax paying public aren't going to pay for that.

The existing collections can just about barely justify free entry. Most museums have a vast secondary collection that's not on display already. These items are going in a warehouse because there isn't enough money to do archaeology on them any time soon, let alone prep them for display.

[Angostura]

Or do what the V&A has done in Docklands - make its warehouse available for the public to visit. Pretty cool day out.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/east/storehouse/visit

[OJFord]

Second that, it's really good. You can only really see a small fraction of it still, just because of the nature of it (it's like a central viewing space completely surrounded by warehouse shelving) but really interesting, from the meta perspective of seeing how they store and tend to pieces too.

For example, there's a bunch of swords 'on display' (such as it is) and then you can sort of just about see an entire sword storage/curation room off to one side, with many times more than are actually visible in some detail.

[notahacker]

Science Museum opens its warehouse in Swindon to the public too

Highly recommended for people with an interest in vehicles, but there's a lot of other stuff from twentieth century consumer goods to the contents of Stephen Hawkings office on shelves there and document archives too.

[whywhywhywhy]

London already has free museums and galleries fyi

[Arbortheus]

London has loads of exceptional museums that are completely free. If you ever have the chance to visit the city, do try to take advantage!

[Reason077]

Entry to the main/permanent collections is free, but there are usually one or more special exhibitions at each museum that are paid entry.

[N_Lens]

Sadly we’re in the era where everything has a price but nothing is valued.

[victorbjorklund]

Out of 450 000 pieces I bet 440 000 pieces are just pottery shards and other ”boring” things. Important for history etc but no one wants to go to a museum with 400 000 almost identical pieces of pottery shards and similar. Only a tiny amount will be things the public wanna see in a museum.

[JasonADrury]

> Out of 450 000 pieces I bet 440 000 pieces are just pottery shards and other ”boring” things

That's certainly super optimistic of you.

[cucumber3732842]

Yeah, it's probably more like 449,000 are pottery/ceramics.

Be kinda cool if they made wall mosaics at the respective stations out of them or something.

[JoeAltmaier]

So true. Folks used pots for tens of thousands of years, and used them mostly like disposable dinnerware. They broke, daily, and got tossed out the window. A settlement of a dozen roundhouses might have a million sherds, depending on how long it persisted.

[seanhunter]

Probably that's what will happen.

1. The permanent collections of just about all museums in the UK are free so if they go to a museum they will be free to see (after an initial exhibition if they were to host that)

2. This is not uncommon for things like Roman ruins in the UK. For example, near the Tower of London, there is a glass window in a random pedestrian underpass where you can see part of the original Roman wall around London, or in Cirencester and St Albans there are big parks where you can see all the Roman ruins. Where relics are smaller or more valuable, something like a railway station isn't really set up to keep them secure and on display so they would sometimes show casts or photographs of items, and have the original in an actual dedicated exhibition in a museum. For example if you go to Orkney you can see some viking relics in situ (eg the "viking grafitti" runes on the stones in maes howe) and some (like the scar boat burial) you need to go to an actual museum to see.