Nick Gellatly
Why go back?
In the Beginning Was the Word asks visitors to walk through the Sedgwick Museum with their phones and earbuds, guided by Norman Flint, a dusty museum porter, and Crystal Formation, a drag queen made of minerals. That only works if the directions are right. If Crystal says “turn left at the elephant” and there’s no elephant, the spell breaks.
So on Monday 19 October I went back with a one-page checklist, a phone, a microphone and a green carnation, strictly for research purposes. I had four aims:
- walk the route in order and time it
- check every object the script relies on is actually on display
- photograph labels, textures and details for a printed guide
- record the visit as evidence of the research process
What happened
The first surprise came early. The Whewell Mineral Gallery, where Crystal makes her entrance, is further from the front door than I’d assumed. Rather than a problem, it became a gift: Norman now gets a proper walk to fill with dull facts. He passes a plaque recording that Sir David Attenborough reopened a gallery in 2002, and he polishes it on Tuesdays.
The labels turned out to be better than my research. The Bridging Binaries trail card for Jonathan Cutbill says he helped build the museum’s first computer catalogue in the late 1960s, “one of the first museum computer catalogues in the world”. Baron Nopcsa’s trail object is a Megalosaurus bone from a brick pit at Fletton, near Peterborough. Its handwritten label credits Nopcsa with naming it in 1901, question mark included. A panel shows Mary Anning’s letter to Professor Sedgwick of 4 May 1843, with her own sketch of the ichthyosaur she was selling. And William Smith’s great 1815 map, which shows St Neots, was found folded in a box in 2013 before being restored. Folded away, brought out, restored and put on display: I couldn’t have scripted that metaphor better.
The final discovery was in the gift shop: Pride badges, a Pride T. rex and a Trans Pride T. rex. So the play now ends there.
The video
I made a short video of the recce, in chapters that follow the research process: the mission, a reality check, the walk round, the findings and the next steps. The camerawork is rough, but it does its job as evidence. I’d planned to shoot 360-degree photos but decided against it. Ordinary photos and video told the story more clearly, and with less faff.
What changed
The route is now nine stops, ending in the gift shop:
- The entrance
- The Whewell Mineral Gallery
- SUE the T. rex
- Anna Gurney
- Darwin
- Franz Nopcsa
- Mary Anning
- William Smith’s map
- Jonathan Cutbill
I’m now working on Version 3 of the script. The ‘Nopcsa’ scene is rebuilt around the real bone, Anning’s letter becomes her “love letter to rocks”, and the coal story grows into a full stop at the Smith map. Norman’s big reveal moves to the shop, where he buys a rainbow badge before declaring “I’m free!”
The pocket guide
The photos became a zine: A Pocket Guide to the Rocks of the Sedgwick. It’s eight A6 pages. The cover is deliberately dull, grey and typewritten, so anyone glancing over sees a geology enthusiast. Inside it’s a burst of colour: the queer codes, a page for each pair of stops with photos from the visit, and a strip of coloured rock layers along the foot of every page that works as a timeline. Unfold it fully and the back is a poster, We were always here: twenty-five layers of rock and history, from the first minerals 4.5 billion years ago to “Now: You”. It is with the printer now so that I can hand out actual copies when we do the pitching next month.
Between now and 12 November
- Re-record the audio in ElevenLabs to match Version 3.
- Host the audio and add the real QR code to the zine (though as the pitch will be a prototype I may not do this).
- Print the zine and the green carnation stickers.
- Prepare the pitch for the sharing event on 12 November, and finish the dev log.
Three weeks, nine stops, one drag queen. What could possibly go wrong?
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