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Buyers Guide
So you want to buy industrial
heritage. Some may have
started this journey, others
passionate about for
years. Either way please join
the club. We have been
establishing a community
to allow these grand mechanisms
be preserved and made safe
for future generation. We thus
need to involve the next
generation, to hand over
the torch. Failure to do so will
be the end of the purpose and
use of the industrial heritage.
We don’t want to preserve for preservation sake, we want it to have purpose and bring colour and depth to peoples lives. Although its important that these items get saved and stored, this is only the start of the process. Many of the buildings they where in have been reused or demolished. So they wont be going back, but where they can, in visitor centres we should encourage it, if it is in prominent places that make people aware of its existence and purpose in the future.
The most important aspect of buying industrial heritage is to have a clear understanding of the purpose you have for it. Merely displayed all it does is clog up museums and burdens the next generation with the mass of the past. With the right people in the project it can have purpose, in that the simple nature of it can be used to inform how systems work today and how this has progressed.
If you can get involved in this type of project, surely this is better than just buying a huge mechanism and wondering how to tell the better half? So I would say the first step is to contact your local museum to see what they are upto. Onamission and commotions are here to help such project. It just needs a new way of thinking, collecting for collecting sake and display because its old is not enough in the survival of the fittest battle for display space.
It may be you are buying to do such a project with an organisation, my advice is not to donate the item but loan it, then it has two guardians looking after it and unlikely to be cleared out to an auction when space is needed or stored in a box. We need the activity of involvement to be that active.
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