Looking back and looking forward: the Silver Studio Collection as heritage asset and educational resource, 1968-2018

The focus of this thesis is the Silver Studio Collection, a body of material that originated as the working contents of a commercial design studio and which is now the focal collection of the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA), at Middlesex University. The Silver Studio opened in 1880 and after it closed as a business in the 1960s its remaining contents were given to Hornsey College of Art, becoming known as the Silver Studio Collection. This thesis considers the ways in which this Collection has been understood and interpreted both as a teaching resource within a Higher Education institution, and as a heritage asset – signified by its incorporation into a ‘museum collection’ - in the fifty years between 1968 and 2018. The contents of the Silver Studio Collection have remained the same over this fifty-year period, but the meanings ascribed to them, and the uses to which they have been put as a learning resource, have continued to evolve. The main body of this thesis is structured around five main chapters, which take a broadly chronological approach to the development of the Silver Studio Collection since the late 1960s. Interspersed between these main chapters are a series of ‘intercalary’ chapters in which I go behind the scenes into the museum store, and which serve as a reminder of the physical stuff that makes up the Silver Studio Collection. These intercalary chapters are a way of reflecting on, and making visible, some of the tacit knowledge that I have accumulated through working with the Collection since 1999, and most recently in the role of Head of Collections since 2011. This question of what it means to know the Silver Studio Collection, and the many ways that the Collection supports learning and research, is an ongoing theme throughout this thesis