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Solway Aviation Museum

A visit to the Solway Aviation Museum is a tonic for those jaded with slick, empty “heritage experiences”. It is entertaining, absorbing and enlightening for both tourists and locals, and most age-groups. Setting out to commemorate the recent military history of the area, it focuses chiefly on local WW2 airfields but includes later developments such as Spadeadam. Having parked alongside the outlandish, disembodied nose of a Nimrod, then stepping into the cluttered reception with wartime tunes and sounds; and hints of close encounters with muscular aero engines ahead, you know that you are being invited to share the secret world of enthusiasts.

The first room (“Crosby – The War Years”) is entered through an Anderson Shelter and is packed with genuine wartime memorabilia and military artefacts, imaginatively displayed in recreations of a gun pit, workshop and administrative control hut. These are seamlessly integrated into informative home-made dioramas recreating the wartime appearance of the airfield outside. We have all have seen these sorts of displays before, but the sheer ordinariness and disarray of the contents, and the absence of any attempt to over-dramatise, speaks for the designer’s experience of military drudgery - and an understanding that private peeks into the ordinary of another world is what everyone really wants to see. The military-looking boot-prints on the sandy floor of the gun pit are a masterly touch.

Half an hour after entering the room we still had not made it to the far end, and at that point were collared by a volunteer who expounded upon some of the experimental German aircraft in the glass case of Airfix models; and answered all our questions about the displays in the room with obvious authority, modestly adding that he had painted the dioramas.

The labelling of displays is knowledgeable, if patchy and slightly dyslexic. Normally, I would find typos on museum labels annoying, but here among the homely relics of the decline and fall of The Best of British it seems almost fitting that they should be commemorated thus. The miss-spelling of Douglas Bader’s name in a museum partly dedicated to wartime aviation does, however, require a slap on the wrist. Perhaps its Germanness is problematic ?

The presentation is sometimes so laid-back that opportunities to draw attention to genuinely interesting and quirky highlights are missed. If you take the trouble to read the minute print on the pills (containing what ?) included in the emergency rations: “. . do not give to men who are hysterical or whose minds are wandering, it will make them worse” – the authoritative Home-Counties voice comes through loud and clear, as does the horror of the situations in which that assessment must have been made. The eloquence of the voluptuously twisted Lancaster propeller recovered from the sea off Maryport could be relished in greater depth – many visitors would be fascinated by the forensic information recoverable from such items.

Further on down the corridors are the “Spadeadam Room”, containing the enormous engines of Blue Streak; “The Airport Past and Present”, a 1970s Austin Powers-style control tower mock-up with its Formica fascia brought to life by a live relay from the real control tower; “Aircraft Radios and Escape Equipment”; and the “Oxley Developments Avionics Display”.

Outside are ten aircraft, including classics such as the Vulcan nuclear bomber, Lightning and Phantom. You can walk right up to and even underneath these (and inside three), getting a full appreciation of their size and the really rather basic technology of these supersonic, cutting-edge cold-war machines. (Stop Press - You can now - September 06 - go inside the cockpit of the Vulcan.)

This is truly accessible technology. One of the most attractive aspects of early C20 machines is that the function of every part can be understood by an intelligent 12-year-old. In this museum, “accessible” also means that you can touch many of the exhibits. How refreshing !

The Solway Aviation Museum is a proper museum, a treasure house of inspiring objects, a focus for the study of its subject-matter and a reflection of truly British eccentricity. It is 100% volunteer-run and as always, the bottom line for survival of such places is “bums on seats”, so get out to Crosby and place yours - or even sign up as a volunteer worker.

The museum is at Carlisle Airport. It is only open at weekends, April to October.
 
Museum Website
 
Will Higgs
May 2006