Three floors · 412 objects out

The five rooms

The rooms run in the order the island was built: the materials that came out of the ground, the hands that worked them, the concrete that replaced them, the paper that recorded them, and the machines. Thirty people to a room is our limit, which is why a school class moves through one at a time.

A steel stair running between two white-walled gallery floors, works hung on the far wall

A trowelled lime-plaster wall, the marks of the float running across it

Ground floor · room 1 of 5

Brick, lime and timber

The first room, and the oldest material in the museum. Coral stone cut soft and hardened in air, lime burnt in a kiln and slaked on site, cedar split rather than sawn, pitch pine shipped in and used for everything that had to span.

The Falmouth window head is in here, and the Spanish Town shingle, and a door from the huts that went up after 1907. Eighty-four objects on the floor, and about nine hundred more of the same kind upstairs.

84 objects in this room Find one in the register

Hand tools, chain and coiled rope hanging on the boarded wall of a workshop

Ground floor · room 2 of 5

Ironwork and hand tools

Cast iron came off three Kingston foundries in patterns you can still read on verandahs across the city. Vale Royal's fern pattern is on the wall at the height it would have been on the house.

The other half of the room is hand tools: a cooper's croze, a trowel worn back fifteen millimetres, a cotta made out of a flour sack. They are together because the same hands used both.

97 objects in this room Find one in the register

Concrete floor slabs stepping out over a colonnade, photographed from below

First floor · room 3 of 5

Concrete and the louvre

Between 1944 and about 1975 the way Jamaica built changed completely, and this room is that change in objects. A hand mould for hollow block. A pierced screen block in the star pattern. An aluminium louvre with its crank still turning.

The test cube from the pour outside this building is not in here, because it is in bay 9. Ask and it comes up.

68 objects in this room Find one in the register

Engineering drawings with a steel set square and a brass protractor lying across them

First floor · room 4 of 5

Print, paper and drawings

The iron hand press from Harbour Street is in the middle of the room and we run it twice a year. Around it: type, a composing stick, playbills, shipping notices and funeral programmes.

Drawings are the other half. Most are in the plan chests upstairs because linen and light do not agree, so this room shows six and the register lists the rest.

73 objects in this room Find one in the register

A pillar drill, a vice and paint buckets on a timber bench against a bare brick wall

Second floor · room 5 of 5

The machine floor

The heaviest room and the one that needed the floor strengthened in 1979. A sixty-gallon boiling copper from St Ann, a still head raised over a stake, mill gearing with two teeth replaced in wood.

At the far end, a valve amplifier chassis wired by hand on Beeston Street, because a sound system is machinery too and it was made here.

90 objects in this room Find one in the register

The other eleven thousand

What is not in these five rooms

A room holds what a room can hold. Everything else is upstairs, and upstairs is open to you by appointment.

Bays 1 to 5Large fabric: bedsteads, shutters, window frames, fence panels, gearing. Shelved flat or on edge. Most of this needs two people to move, which is why it needs notice.
Bays 6 to 8Textiles, small metalwork, tools, ceramics, and the boxes of things accessioned this year that have not been given a home yet.
Bay 9Samples and test pieces: concrete cubes, brick, mortar, roofing. The least looked-at bay in the building and the one a conservation architect asks for first.
Plan chests 1 to 4Drawings, plans, playbills and photographs, flat, in the dark. These come out onto the study-room table and not into the rooms, because linen and light do not agree.

Ask for something from a bay Search the register