A small city, a decommissioned customs house

The founder’s idea was straightforward and, at the time, thought slightly sentimental. There would be a museum for the originals that representations had displaced: the actual objects, kept in cases, so that people could go and see what the pictures had been pictures of.

The acquisitions committee worked for nine years and the museum opened on schedule with forty-one rooms.

Room 3 was to hold the coastline that appears on the ten-note. The coastline had been reprofiled for the harbour in 1911 and the note had not been redrawn. There was nothing to put in the case. The case was installed anyway, with the label.

Room 12 was to hold the recipe as it was cooked before the printed version standardised it. Every family consulted produced the printed version and was certain it was their grandmother’s.

Room 27 was to hold the birdsong that the field recordings are recordings of. The species had adjusted its song upward by roughly a third of an octave to clear the traffic, over about forty years, and the recordings were from before that. The birds outside the window disagreed with the archive and the archive was catalogued as authentic.

Of the forty-one rooms, thirty-eight opened empty. The three exceptions were later found to contain reproductions acquired in good faith.

It is the best-attended museum in the region. Visitors describe the experience as unexpectedly moving. The guidebook — which is excellent, and which most people read on the train home instead of in the rooms — has gone through six editions.