THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWe shouldn’t be, argues Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums

So, when is a museum not a museum? It may be apparent to all who work in them, but it’s not to anyone else. Try explaining to a member of the public why the Tate is a museum, not a gallery. Or the National Portrait Gallery is, well, a museum. Your first attempt at explanation might be to say that a museum has to have a permanent collection. Then you can try and explain why the Royal Academy of Arts isn’t, technically, a museum, despite its collection of Reynolds and Gainsborough upstairs. And why Eureka in Halifax, with no collection at all, is a museum after all. Then there are places with names like the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. What are they? And there’s the National Trust. They have over 200 museums, most disguised as historic homes.

That’s why Kids in Museums decided from the start that if visitors think it’s a museum, it’s a museum. That’s the only way to define it. It’s all to do with the choices a visitor makes. I don’t think someone thinks, “I wonder if I’ll take my family to the Victoria and Albert or Alton Towers today”. I do think they might make a choice between the National Gallery and Kensington Palace. So, as Kids in Museums sees museums from a visitor’s perspective, they’re all part of the big museum family as far as we’re concerned.

But some people are choosing to opt out of the museum fold, feeling, I presume, it’s a word so besmirched that it’s impossible to save. The first thing Vaughan Allen, a former style journalist, did when he took over Urbis in Manchester was change the name. “We banned the word museum. The word museum does mean things in cabinets, and we didn’t have any”he said. He isn’t the only person to shun the M word. A couple of years ago, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York announced it was becoming the Paley Center for Media. In a New York Times article, Pat Mitchell, the president and CEO, said, “Museum was not a word that tests really well with the under-30- and -40-year-olds, especially in the context of radio and television”.

He did not, however, list any positive associations for the title “Center”. Most Centers or Centres I go to are to have bits of me examined by a doctor, and it’s never pleasant. But many places prefer such words to being branded a museum. When I was writing a list of Britain’s best museums recently, I imagined most would want to be on it. But I was warned not to include the Eden Project in Cornwall, as they don’t like being called a museum because of the image it conveys, to some at least. (Eden – do write in and say that’s not the case and I’ll list you immediately!)

I have very mixed feeling on the M word. Museums have transformed dramatically in the last decade, and are often not the glass-cabinet stuffed, unloved, deadly silent places they were not so very long ago. But the word itself undoubtedly still has strong negative connotations, in particular for young people. Mention the M word to my teenager, and she has a tantrum. She’s not going to One of Those. Call it something else – a gallery, even – and she just might consider stepping over its threshold.

So, if we don’t have museums, what do we have? Quentin Blake is currently raising funds for a House of Illustration, to hold much of his work. Note – the word “museum” does not appear in the new building’s title. We could have more Houses of …, which does sound a great deal friendlier. House of Mummies, House of Dinosaurs, House of 19th Century French Porcelain. When the International Spy Museum in Washington DC was being built, the planners commissioned a study to choose a name. They came up with The House on F Street, which they felt conveyed an appropriate sense of intrigue. But when the public were surveyed, they overwhelmingly preferred the straightforward International Spy Museum, which seemed to them to represent what it actually was.

But perhaps we could find a single word to conjure up the spirit of the place, like Urbis, Eden or Fact in Liverpool. Under this poetic scheme, what could we call the British Museum? Conquer? And the National Gallery? Paint? Or, I quite like Frame.

But before any museum rebrands, listen to this cautionary tale. Urbis, no longer called a museum, is closing down, having lost support. It’s being replaced by a wonderful set of objects on popular culture. It will reopen as the Football Museum.

www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk