LONDON, 12 June 2003 — Given that it contains the traces and treasures of all our millennia, a year might not seem a very long time for the British Museum. It’s long enough for its story to have been quietly transformed, however. Twelve months ago, the tales coming out of the world’s greatest theater of memory were of strikes and redundancies and funding crises; of keepers of ethnography and curators of Sumerian artefacts somewhere near the end of their considerable wits. A year on, as the museum celebrates its 250th anniversary — and wraps itself in a jaunty red bow — the narrative seems to promise happier plot twists: there is realistic talk of the institution being debt free by next spring; of its avoiding compulsory redundancies; and of a reaffirmation of its unique place as “not simply a world heritage site, but as the site of world heritage”.
The man who has begun to effect these changes, and who confidently makes these claims, is Neil MacGregor, who came here with a stunning reputation from the National Gallery last September. In his office to the west of the museum’s great pediment he sits on the edge of a sofa, and talks with almost palpable intellectual excitement about the challenges of his new role. Listening to him you begin to wonder what all the fuss might have been about in the first place “You have to remember,” he says, “the context of the original discontent. Partly it arose from a very human sense of loss. The British Library and the British Museum had been joined for 248 years, and it was like splitting Siamese twins to move the books to (the library’s new site at nearby) St Pancras.”
Added to that was the fact that the Pounds sterling 120 million work on Sir Norman Foster’s magnificent covered Great Court had been going on while the museum stayed open. “It was rather like having plasterers in your house, among your most precious things, for five years,” he suggests, wincing in sympathy. “The emotional and physical energy of just coping with all of that change left the place exhausted, and because of that exhaustion it is, in effect, only now that we are beginning to understand what has been achieved. The tremendous possibilities that the Great Court gives us. The fact that for the first time we have the chance to reorganize and expand into the new spaces. People here are just realizing the opportunity and the liberation of that.”
This renaissance will be set in stone later this year with the opening of the new Wellcome Galleries in September; and the restored King’s Library in November, which will place “probably the most perfect neo-classical space in the country alongside perhaps the most perfect twenty-first century space in the country”.
And while the sense of purpose within the halls and vaults of the museum has been steadily nurtured over the winter, mixing memory and desire, MacGregor has also seized an opportunity to remind everyone on the outside what the Museum is capable of; its place “at the very center of our understanding of the world”.
From the very beginning of the looting and desecration of historical sites in Iraq he realized that the museum, which had maintained exceptionally close links with Iraqi archaeologists and curators through the years of dictatorship and embargo, should have a key part to play in any eventual restoration and recovery operation.
He is unerringly modest about his own role in the post war emergency and realistic about the enormity of the task involved. Still, it was partly his sense of urgency that moved the subject of antiquities up the political agenda; his furious phone call to Tony Blair’s office that argued the need to put tanks at key historical sites, and his energy that has formed — Security Council take note — a properly multinational task force (including the experts from the Louvre and the Hermitage) to attempt to preserve the remnants of the ravaged sites.
That sense of boyish wonder has stayed with him, and it is a formidable ally in his ability to convey the special magic of his institution.
He says he tries to spend a good part of each day just looking at the museum’s exhibits, ideally in the company of the relevant expert. “Even without explanation, though, there is enormous affective potential in the objects themselves. You may know nothing about Ramesses II,” he says giggling, “— and I, in fact, do know nothing about Ramesses II — but you do know when you are face to face with that great head that you are face to face with the real thing, and there is considerable, possibly life-changing power in that.”
I wonder if his ambition was always to have this job, and he laughs and suggests it was way beyond his wildest dreams. He is here only, he insists, through a series of happy accidents. The first of these saw him studying in Paris in 1968, when he not only realized that “everything, all aspects of culture, everything that was said or written or made had a wider significance, a political significance”, but also that the life mapped out for him by his background — he was called to the bar at the age of 27 - was not the life he wanted. How close to the barricades was he? “Oh, quite close,” he says, “there was no other choice.”
His rebellion thereafter was mostly confined to his study of the history of art at the Courtauld, which led him into teaching, and to the editorship of the Burlington art magazine.
In this capacity, so the story goes, he was invited by the board of trustees of the National Gallery to give an opinion on suitable candidates for the vacant post of director. So charmed were they by his conviction and erudition, however, that, though he had never worked a day in a museum, or even bought a painting, he was offered the job himself.
I wonder if it was more or less daunting than that experience to come here to the British Museum.
“Much more to come here,” he says quickly, “because intellectually it is so overwhelming. If you think of all the scholarship you are responsible for, it could certainly keep you awake at night.”
You doubt that it does, however, and the reason for this is that MacGregor, now 58, seems so clear in his understanding not only of his own role, but also of the pressing need to apply the principles on which the museum was founded a quarter of a century ago: namely that its riches were not the province of princes or politicians but freely available to all the people of the world.