The River and Rowing Museum at Henley I was lucky enough to be invited to look over the new museum recently. It has been almost ten years in the making; its beginnings can be traced to a meeting of the founders in January, 1988, originally inspired by a temporary exhibition at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at the time of the 1994 Olympics. It is scheduled to open in time for the 1998 Henley Royal Regatta.
It is surprising how close it is to the Regatta course - for those who know the town, it can be found between Hobbs' riverside premises and the station, at the very end of the Mill Meadows car park. The building design has attracted a great deal of admiring attention; I quote from The Architectural Review
"The architecture is established in the choice of traditional pitched-roof forms that recall the wooden barns of Oxfordshire, the riverside boathouses at Henley, and the temporary tents erected to house the boats and spectators at Henley Regatta. This formal decision also proved to be successful in helping the design fit into the planning constraints of a sensitive, conservative and historic town".and Building
"Barefaced use of non-traditional materials- exposed concete, steel and glass - and modernist forms might be expected to raise an eyebrow. Its architect, David Chipperfield, has got away with it by combining natural leanings towards modernism with the traditional building forms of the south of England to produce a curious hybrid that is half Miesian glass box, halk oak-panelled rustic barn"From a layman's view, I can report that the galleries are tall, light and airy, and would offer a huge potential for almost any form of display - the rowing world is fortunate to have such a building to itself.
The exhibition can be summarised as approximately one third each covering Henley-on-Thames, the Thames from source to mouth, and the History of Rowing. It is in the latter gallery - at the very beginning - that the trireme is presented in the form of a life-size triad.
The Museum has worked hard to attract specimens of every development in boat construction over the last century; I was particularly struck by a prototype German shell from the 1970's, comprising a thin hull over a completely rigid and non-adjustable metal, ladder-like interior frame. They are also fortunate in having acquired an excellent library.
The Museum has an informative web-site at http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums/rowing.html, which includes a number of interesting pictures.
I am deeply grateful to Christopher Dodd, Rowing Historian and Curator, for his kind invitation to view the museum. He has been one of our longest-standing supporters, and the first trials of Olympias in 1987 were a cover story for Regatta magazine, of which he is Editor.
The River and Rowing Museum at Henley
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