City Hall, Perth
This is how to reinvent a local museum, with inspiring, fun exhibits from the Stone of Scone to a salmon boat celebrating a proud and unique history
It takes balls to transform a local collection of archaeology, art and stuffed salmon into a museum with ambitions on an international scale. And it so happens that balls are one of the new Perth Museum’s highlights, albeit prehistoric stone ones. Decorated with nodules large and small, these carved rocky spheres were a speciality of neolithic artists in Scotland. What do they mean? Nobody knows, but their carefully designed patterns evidently meant a lot to the people who lived in what is now called Scotland about 5,000 years ago.
A stone can say so much. Even a blank one. Compared with these intricately hewn prehistoric artefacts, the stone that is the centrepiece of this museum is visually dull indeed – but it is enlivened by a spectacular setting. The museum has been fashioned out of an old Edwardian city hall with an imposing classical exterior and a huge, galleried central chamber. Right in the middle rises a tall wooden tower inside which, after a dramatic build-up in a darkened antechamber, you are admitted to see Scotland’s Stone of Destiny.
