ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an ambitious plan to ‘rewrite’ the whole Science Museum, to provide, as the briefing document put it, ‘a new vision for the Science Museum as it moves into the 21st century’. It looks at the context in which the Plan was requested and carried out and the various recursions through which it went. The chapter seeks to pay particular attention to the culturing of science – the different and contested ways in which science was conceptualised, mobilised and produced during the struggles which constituted ‘The Gallery Plan’. As with many older and especially public museums, the Science Museum was not created in one fell swoop on the basis of a ‘vision’ or ‘blueprint’, but was largely pieced together from collections inherited from elsewhere. The layout of the Museum which the Gallery Planning Group sought to tackle was predominantly organised in terms of particular collections.
