Bakelite Museum

[squirmelia]

In the car-park of the Bakelite Museum in Williton, Somerset, resides a small brown and white bubble-shaped caravan and its relation, the baby black pod. The Pod is a cute sleeping vessel that can be towed by a car, and also provides cooking, washing, seating and storage facilities.

Bakelite, invented in 1907, was the world's first fully synthetic plastic, and the museum is crammed with examples. Egg-cups, hair-dryers, televisions, radios, plastic knives, dolls, telephones, and hundreds of other objects, many with bright colours or with the Bakelite speckled pattern.
Also in the museum are Victorian pre-Bakelite objects, posters on the walls from around the time when Bakelite was popular, old farming equipment, and a cafe that serves cream teas.

The museum is in an old mill, and when I visited it, seemed eerily quiet, as the only other people visiting appeared when I wandered upstairs. An elderly woman entered the museum and excitedly said that she used to own similar items to those that were on display, and asked whoever she was with if they remembered. Not having been around in the era that most of the plastic came from, the museum was not really much of a nostalgia trip for me, although I recognized a few of the objects. The collection of plastic, which some might consider to be just a clutter of kitsch items that are no longer useful, I found intriguing and somehow pretty.

Comments

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Did the heir to the Bakelite fortune really end his life with a plastic bag?