The People’s Story Museum is located on the Royal Mile at 163 Canongate, Edinburgh. It is housed in the old historic Canongate Tollbooth. The museum houses a number of fascinating exhibits about the lives of the Edinburgh working class from the 18th century through modern times.
The People’s Story Museum
entrance
There are a number of exhibits and photographs showing different occupations and life during the various times. There are exhibits showing aspects of law and “disorder”
People involved in the printers trade
And those wainwrights, whose wagon making and related crafts like blacksmithing have, alas, decreased in numbers. Many skilled jobs have of course been taken over by more industrialized processes.
Certainly one of the things that has been largely ignored is what is referred to as “social history”. Most history tends to involve itself with major political events while the life of the average citizen is ignored.
Sometime ago at a showing of the 1945 film And Then There were None, one college age viewer described the opening sequences saying “An elderly gentleman listens to his I-Pod”. The “elderly gentleman” in question was C Aubrey Smith whose character was inserting the earpiece of a hearing aid. Similarly, it is a rare person today who was born after WWII who knows about ration books for food, gas and other things.
What was life like for the everyday person back in the 1800’s and 1900’s? This material is rarely talked about or discussed, as time rushes by at an ever-increasing speed. It is encouraging to find a museum that specializes in the kinds of events that had a daily impact on life in those bygone days – a museum that specializes perhaps in the days of auld lang syne.
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