The cathedral we know as St Paul’s rose from the ashes of the Great
Fire of London in 1666, and was intended to be as much a symbol of national
pride as a place of worship. Christopher Wren was brought in as architect
before the fire, in 1661, to consult on the renovation of the old, medieval
St Paul’s. He spent the next 40 years working on his masterpiece and battling
against both administrators and religious sensibilities. Wren was much inspired
by visits to Catholic Europe, and his earlier designs were seen to smack
of popery by Anglican clergy. Luckily, his fundamental concept of a great
dome survived.

This not an ideal exhibition for the ignorant, nor for the penny-pinching.
If St Paul’s and Wren are little more than names to you, and you baulk at
doubling the cost of your visit by buying the slim catalogue which accompanies
the exhibition, you will miss a great deal, because background information
is thin on the ground. The exhibition, sponsored by Reed International and
Paternoster Associates, is primarily a collection of original architectural
drawings, which detail the development of the final design. It is fascinating
to see the various proposals for the cathedral. Four designs were presented
before the definitive one was accepted in 1675, and major details were still
being altered throughout the construction phase. Wren was clearly actively
involved in the design process, rather than leaving detail to his assistants,
and many sketches are his own.

Wooden models, rather than working drawings, were used to instruct the
craftsmen. Although the fate of many of these was to provide firewood for
the architect’s office, some have thankfully survived and can be seen here.

The exhibition’s major draw is the ‘Great Model’, a wooden model which
Wren had built, for the cost of a three-storey house, on the instructions
of Charles II. Nearly 6 metres long, its dark bulk dominates the final room.
Although at first sight it seems familiar, close inspection reveals the
design to be very different from the final version, bolder and more clearly
classical in form. The model looks in remarkably good shape, but it is apparently
in urgent need of conservation, as the glue has become seriously weakened.

I would like to have known a great deal more about this model than the
brief historical sketch given in the exhibition. Indeed, I would like to
have been told much more about Wren himself and the philosophy that informed
his design. While the elegantly written essays and notes in the catalogue
contain some illuminating insights, there is little to help the uninformed
in the exhibition itself. Only after I had left, and settled down to read,
did I begin to understand and appreciate something of what I had seen.

The exhibition succeeded in one important respect. It made me want to
visit the cathedral itself, to look at it with fresh eyes. Ideally, it should
be sited at the cathedral, so one could move from one to the other with
ease. Perhaps, when the model can be shown again in St Paul’s, a smaller
scale version of the exhibition can appear with it.

Deirdre Janson-Smith is a freelance writer and museum consultant, currently
working on a museum of medical science.

Global Ecology by Colin Tudge, Natural History Museum Publications/BP,
pp 173, £6.95 pbk

Even before you enter the new Ecology gallery at London’s Natural History
Museum, it is obviously different from previous exhibitions. A vast canyon
of frosted glass, crossed by suspended bridges, stretches out before you;
at the far end, a giant video wall beckons. So dominant are these images
that the small ‘rainforest’ at the entrance, which is the start to the exhibition,
pales into insignificance.

Throughout the exhibition, sound, light and movement flood the senses.
It would be quite easy to review this gallery with little or no reference
to its content.

The museum’s decision to go for a hard selling design approach is a
deliberate one, growing not only out of the commercial reality of having
to attract paying customers, but also from a long-term commitment to reach
the museum’s main public, not the eager seekers after knowledge that curators
might hope for, but the far greater numbers of daytrippers who ‘do’ a museum
in two hours-including stops for refuelling.

Roger Miles, who instigated the radical design says: ‘Learning about
how visitors use museums, one thing is clear: for most of them the focus
of attention is not the indivi-dual exhibits but the whole exhibition. You
have to try and communicate with them while they are on the move.’

A survey done before developing the gallery revealed that although most
people were fam-iliar with the word ‘ecology’, they had only vague notions
of what the subject entailed. For such visitors, the new gallery offers
a simple entertaining guide to some basic principles. Beginning in the chasm
with a look at the Earth’s basic elements and the relationship between animals,
plants and the physical environment, the story of the water cycle is told
in a spect-acular, mirrored video wall, the ‘quadrascope’. Climbing from
here, you pass exhibits on the communities of water and land, and the forces
that shape them.

The first of the upper galleries, and one of the most successful, deals
with solar energy and the Earth’s atmosphere. The topics of global warming
and the ozone layer are clearly (if obviously) explained, and benefit from
being set in a scientific rather than a political context.

The exhibition moves on to consider how plants trap solar energy and
how energy and matter moves through food webs. Here the museum appears to
show a commitment to conservation by recycling exhibits from the old ecology
exhibition.

Change is the theme of the next section, where you learn about the dynamic
nature of populations, and see how ecosystems grow in complexity through
time. The end of this section is poor: a model volcano and some dramatic
architectural structures do little to disguise the fact that what is on
offer is a series of boring graphics panels.

Luckily, things pick up in the final section, which looks at the impact
of our species on the world. As you enter this area, a giant bulldozer blade
looms out towards you. Across its rusty surface run the kind of shock headlines
made commonplace by our newly ‘green’ media. Several short films tackle
aspects of pollution, and the relationship of humans to nature. In a grand
finale, a giant Green Man emerges from a treasure chest to tower above you,
his body built from other living things. It is an image to ponder on as
you descend.

Dramatic as this section is, it is also familiar, because this is how
ecology is most often presented to us. When the Ecology gallery was first
planned more than two years ago, the green wagon was hardly under way-now
every newspaper has environmental ‘street cred’. Nevertheless, it is good
to see the Natural History Museum openly championing conservation at last.

For someone who knows nothing of the science of ecology, there is ample
food for thought in this exhibition, although the meal will seem meagre
to those with some knowledge of the subject. There is much to excite and
entertain, and you leave with powerful images imprinted on your mind. For
me the compelling sensation of standing in semi-darkness by the giant quadrascope,
wrapped around by images and sounds of water, still lingers.

In this, the exhibition is likely to succeed in its main aim, which
is not primarily to educate but to raise visitors’ consciousness. As Miles
says: ‘We’re trying to say, look how interesting and important this subject
is’, so visitors will pay more attention to the subject when it crops up
from day to day.’

But I suspect that the memory of the messenger will override that of
the message. Throughout the exhibition, very heavy use of film and sound
commentaries grabs attention but, in a crowded and noisy gallery, it is
difficult to image that their content will remain in visitors’ minds.

The answer, according to the museum, is to read the book. Global Ecology,
written by Colin Tudge, complements and extends the themes of the exhibition.
I would, however, hesitate to recommend it to daytrippers, however much
they been enthused by the gallery. Although always well written and interesting,
and peppered with colour photographs and graphics, there is something formal
about the book, despite its claim to be an ‘informal introduction to the
main principles of ecology’.

While following the path of the exhibition, Tudge takes the opportunity
to explore the subject in far greater depth, not only in his main narrative,
but in a series of special topics. Differentiated from the body text, these
range across such themes as the nature of life, the biogeo-graphy of islands
to acid rain,the ozone layer and ecological disasters, such as the collapse
of Lake Victoria. Of these, I was surprised to find the section on the greenhouse
effect pitched at such a high level, particularly from an author as skilled
in writing for a general audience as he is. Some of the topics are too long-stretching
over two or three pages, they interrupt the flow of the main narrative.

One of the main strengths of the book is the integration of conservation
themes within each chapter, rather than confining the impact of human activities
to the end. In this way, the relationship between the theory and practice
of conservation is made much clearer. Positive examples of successful environmental
proj-ects reinforce the message that much can be done to help to restore
the balance of nature. In his final chapter, however, Tudge reminds us of
the over-whelming problem that con-fronts us: our own reproductive success.

Global Ecology can be recommended as an excellent primer for those with
a serious interest in the subject-and a bargain for £6.95. Covering
a remarkable range of topics in an accessible manner, it is likely to be
popular with schools, but is in no way a textbook. It does seem rather too
removed from the simplicity of the exhibition to satisfy the needs of complete
novices. I would suggest that the museum considers publishing a simpler
digest of the exhibition as well-and changing the awful cover of this book.

*Admission to the Natural History Museum costs £3 for an adult,
£1.50 for children over 5 years old.

Deidre Janson-Smith is a freelance writer and museum consultant, currently
working on a museum of medical science.