Folk Work: Growing Up in the Past

This essay playfully takes Patrick Geddes's categories of work, place and folk to frame an autobiographical account in which I describe my origins and development as a historian and museum curator at the Science Museum, London. My parents George and Diana Boon, both classicists by education, created a home imbued with a deep respect for the past, history and archaeology. This created the thesis for a dialectic whose antithesis was my fascination with modernity, technology and science; synthesis came with my discovery at university of the academic study of history of science. The dialectic has remained in play as my career has flowered at the Science Museum, an institution whose success may in large part be put down to the creative tension created between its roles in representing the past and present of science. In my account, I highlight key individuals and books – including Anthony Bertram's Design, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Foucault's The Order of Things, and De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life – that have had a particularly profound impact on how I think as a historian and curator.