Now the NHM is arguably the most successfully made-over museum anywhere. Dry old bones long ago gave way to the animatronic displays of its dinosaur gallery. Cases of pinned beetles were junked in favour of the hyper-jolly "Creepy-Crawlies" section. Even the Earth Galleries themselves are introduced with an indulgent, space-consuming entrance escalator ride through a slowly revolving, creaking symbolic globe. Since that was built, there seems to have been something of a swing back in favour of an old idea - real specimens. The museum collection.
The rocks in the "Earth's Treasury" - from lumps of coal to (fake) diamonds the size of crystalline plums - are much the same rocks that were there to be found before, in those old cases. The only real difference is the new theatricality of the presentation. Instead of looking at lumps of coloured rock in open, unfocused galleries, you are looking at lumps of coloured rock in a dark Aladdin's Cave which stimulates your consumerist interest: this stuff looks as if it's for sale, so it must be worth taking a look. Certainly the party of schoolgirls which ambled through while I was there acted as if they were out window-shopping in Bond Street. The irony is that the shovelfuls of real diamonds on loan from De Beers look dull indeed compared with some of the extraordinary less valuable mineral formations - such as a chunk of pyrite or Fool's Gold that is virtually identical to Daniel Libeskind's proposed "Spiral" extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum opposite.
The V&A may or may not ever build its Libeskind - there is fighting talk of raising all the money privately, if the Lottery distributors unaccountably fail to see its merits - but in the meantime, the museum has just bagged £15m from the Heritage Lottery Fund or another purpose. This is to help rebuild the lost world of its British Galleries, home of the Great Bed of Ware, which have remained largely untouched since the 1950s. True, they have something of a dusty Miss Havisham quality to them - they have become a museum of a museum - but on the whole this vast and neglected corner of the V&A, covering design in Britain from 1500 to 1900, needs some radical treatment, which the designer Dinah Casson is providing. The whole exercise will cost £31m - as much as an entirely new, sizeable, museums anywhere else.
So while its neighbour over the road is opening new galleries, this summer the V&A is shutting down an awful lot. You have only this week to see the old British Galleries - they close on July 31 and will not re-open until 2001. However, some of the 3,000 or so objects involved will resurface in a temporary gallery from the start of November.
The Heritage Lottery Fund is moving into overdrive on museums. Last week it also forked out £24m for three of them on Merseyside, including the magnificent Walker Art Gallery, the all-purpose Liverpool Museum, and the Museum of Liverpool Life. As with the V&A, the money is to update the displays for the year 2001 and after. And although all the usual obeisance is made to "innovative displays" and "new information technology", it is notable that part of the Liverpool strategy is to bring much more of the collections out of storage. This is becoming a central feature of museum revamps nationally: what the curators are really doing, behind the glitzy façade of education masquerading as entertainment, is buying space.
