Motivations and experiences of museum visitors: The case of the Imperial War Museum, United Kingdom

This study explores motivations of visitors to the Imperial War Museum (North and South), United Kingdom, with a view to understanding why people visit museums associated with conflicts. Though museums are part of the education and leisure industry, the distinction between education and leisure is often blurred. There are a number of reasons why people visit museums. Motives of museum visitors can be grouped into intrinsic and extrinsic factors. This study analysed the extent to which museum visitors are motivated by extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Semi-structured interviews with visitors were conducted w at the Imperial Museum of War (North and South), United Kingdom. The findings do establish that extrinsic motivations are more dominant than the intrinsic ones for visiting the Imperial War Museum. The importance of extrinsic factors in motivating museum visitors would suggest that providing an opportunity for a good day out has more appeal to the visitors than the collections in the museum for the average visitors. The experiencing of museum in its totality is more important than the individual collections or the theme of the museum to the mainstream visitor. This work has made a contribution to understanding visitor motivations, which are multi-facetted, complex and not necessarily fully understood by the visitors themselves

Moving through a dappled world: the aesthetics of shade and shadow in place

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In addressing geography’s neglect of shade and shadow, this paper explores how the dynamic play of shadow and light constitutes an integral part of everyday affective and sensory attunement to place and guides pedestrian movement. First, we identify how particular shadows are shaped by distinctive kinds of solar radiance, material forms, human visual perception and cultural representations. We then consider the different cultural ways in which shade and shadow have been interpreted across space and time and identify diverse shadowy effects in different geographical contexts. Thereafter, we focus on particular key elements of central Melbourne’s shadow aesthetics, discuss how patterns of shade guide urban choreographies, and explore how architects have imaginatively manipulated shadow

Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east London – an area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible

An Interdisciplinary Methodology for the Characterization and Visualization of the Heritage of Roadway Corridors

Roads, particularly since the advent of motorized traffic, have hugely impacted contemporary landscapes. Although their significance was noted in the 1980s, specific roadway-heritage studies are scarce. Research in different disciplines has identified certain features of roads, but an integrated approach to roadway heritage or a consensus on what this constitutes are lacking. This article proposes an interdisciplinary methodology to assess roadway heritage. Roadways are interpreted within the framework of semantic openness that currently characterizes heritage studies, territory being the basic element of interpretation. Rather than a fragmented approach to conservation, the research defines integrated heritage configurations where natural, cultural, and historical features combine to produce a cohesive form of heritage. GIS (Geographical information systems) technology is used with an online database to assess the complexity of roadway heritage. ICT (Information and communications technology) strategies to raise public awareness are outlined. The methodology is applied to assess the historical N-340 Mediterranean roadway corridor in Spain