Off the Shelf: When Brands Come to Life at the Museum of Brands
Here at the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill, celebrating arts, heritage, and culture is an interactive experience.
Living Brands is a multi-sensory outreach programme designed to encourage reminiscing through creative activities and narratives. As a Chartered Dementia Friendly Venue, all visitors have access to over 200 years of consumer culture from toys, fashion, foods, and all the things found in your mother’s kitchen or laundry closet. Some of the best reactions have been participants standing and dancing to jingles from commercials. Objects, sounds, and smells trigger reactions.
We structure our programs to be replicable so that multiple groups can use them, and hopefully more and more museums as well. However, the reactions, stories, and memories shared make each event stand alone. It is a valuable experience for everyone involved and we look forward to growing it further and providing resources for all involved with this very diverse community.
Living Brands is a specialised programme offering outreach sessions in care homes, day centres, community hubs, memory cafes, and more. Using our carefully curated Memory Boxes full of replica packaging and products from the 20th century, we can recreate memories while encouraging creative discussions and art activities using our multi-sensory approach which has been proven to benefit mental and social wellbeing.
Our new multi-sensory experience will be available for all new and returning visitors to the Museum this autumn capturing the sights and sounds of the 20th century. Launching 8 October 2022 is a new temporary display entitled Aide-Mémoire: Shopping Lists which showcases the wacky and wild shopping habits of people across the UK Our new display shows the collection of over 200 discarded shopping lists compiled since 2016 by collector Lucy Ireland Gray in Hertfordshire. Since then, friends and family have donated lists from around the globe – although the collecting stalled slightly during the national lockdowns when supermarket cleanliness went into overdrive and Lucy was reluctant to collect any discarded lists. What makes the shopping lists so special is not so much the content, but how they are written, what they are written on, and the personal notes sent to the shopper. Reading them is a personal and emotional insight into the person behind the list.
Enjoy walking down memory lane this autumn at the Museum of Brands.
By: Abby Pendlebury, Community Development Project Manager for Living Brands
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