Outstanding European Museums

I visited some outstanding museums in Europe that definitely weren’t your standard, run-of-the-mill affair.

MAS Museum, Antwerp
The MAS Museum is located in Antwerp’s port area and highlights the city’s past, its river, and its port. The first thing you notice is its height. It’s over 10 stories tall with a panorama viewing station on the top floor and walls of windows on every floor. The museum is not only about the port – it’s part of it. Each floor has a different theme and is absolutely jam-packed with material to illustrate that theme – from –in-the-round videos of political leaders to toilets you can sit on (reading material provided).

My favorite floor was Food and the City. Maps showed how food sources had switched from local to global. There were displays of food that had been imported through the port – and of the brawny port workers. And, at the other end of the process, there was a lineup of toilets through the ages. You couldn’t possibly absorb all the information – just browse in amazement.

Very close by is the Red Star Line Museum which recounts the migrants’ journey to a new land. It’s also very well set up.

The Louvre Lens
The Louvre Lens was celebrating its fifth anniversary when I visited. Its collection is sourced from the Louvre in Paris but presented very, very differently. The museum has two long, very wide wings – one for temporary exhibitions and one for its standing collection.

The standing collection is organized chronologically so you proceed from Roman and Greek pieces to European Renaissance. It’s a wonderful jumble of paintings, sculpture, mosaics and the pieces are laid out randomly so you wander back and forth and stumble on something new every time.

When I’m in a museum where the works are divided up by time period and type of work, I tend to focus on certain areas (painting, Renaissance) more than others (sculpture, Greek). The chronological approach opened my eyes to pieces that I would otherwise have missed. And so did the opportunity to wander back and forth rather than proceeding in a straight line through the exhibit.

SS Great Britain, Bristol
A tour of the SS Great Britain includes the sights, sounds, and smells of life aboard ship. It smells bad in the cramped underquarters, you can hear people groaning, and there’s a bowl of bloody water in the cabin where a woman has just given birth. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to have been a passenger on a migrant ship to Canada or Australia, this is your chance to find out.

The ship is set up in a sort of dry dock, so you can also walk around the underside of the ship and view the propeller and hull. Museum displays complete the experience.

See Also 
Lens Art Deco 
Bristol’s Waterways and the SS Great Britain