Things we kept

It would be easy to walk straight past the Harrow Street Museum, a low brick building squeezed between a bakery and a bank. That would be a mistake, at least until the end of March, when its new exhibition, Things We Kept, is on. The show brings together some three hundred ordinary objects lent by local residents: a tin of odd buttons, a bus pass from 1987, a wedding photograph with the groom's face cut out. It fills two rooms on the ground floor and takes about an hour to see. Nothing here is valuable. Almost everything is touching.

The idea is simple and, to its credit, executed with restraint. Instead of asking curators to explain each object, the museum asked the owners to write the labels themselves, in their own words and limited to fifty. The result is a gallery of tiny, uneven voices. One reads, in full: "My father's razor. He shaved every morning, even on the day he died." Another, beside a battered football, says only: "We lost 9-0. Best afternoon of my life." It is hard to imagine a professional writer improving on either, and the visitors around me were reading them aloud to one another.

The strongest room is devoted to objects people carried when they moved. A child's shoe sits next to a suitcase with a broken lock, which belonged to a woman who arrived from the coast in 1962 and never went back. The label does not appeal to the visitor's sympathy. It lists what she packed, and what she left behind. In moments like this, the show achieves what grander institutions often fail to do: it makes history feel like something that happened to somebody you could meet.

The exhibition is not without faults. The rooms are small, and on a Saturday afternoon the cases are so crowded that it is hard to read a label without leaning on a stranger. The lighting, kept dim to protect the paper and cloth, makes the older photographs almost impossible to see. More seriously, the show is short on context. A reader who knows nothing about the town will wonder why so many of the stories mention the same factory, and no wall text explains that it closed in 1994. A single timeline on the wall would have helped enormously.

Even so, these are quibbles, and they are easily forgiven. Things We Kept is not a polished production, and it is better for that. It sends visitors home looking at the contents of their own drawers with new interest, and it is hard to pay a museum a bigger compliment. Entry is free, though there is a donation box by the door, and it would be a shame to leave it empty. Go on a weekday morning, take your time, and bring someone you can tell about the things you kept.