As a film fan coming of age in Bradford in the early Noughties, I found in the cinema a portal to other worlds much more interesting than my own. Alongside my arthouse education, which was the bargain bin of the Blockbusters on Saltaire Road circa 2008 (seemingly the endpoint for all the store’s racier French films), regular trips to Pictureville and Cineworld marked a welcome point of escape from teenage boredom. But perhaps if I’d looked away from the screen more often, and paid more attention to the buildings around me, I would have better appreciated that this city was, in its own quiet way, also a portal. The shuttered mill buildings, the idiosyncratic architecture of Little Germany, the Polish and Hungarian social clubs, the shisha bars and curry restaurants were all evidence of the ways in which Bradford had been shaped by the world.
That Bradford is a city of immigration is something that anyone who takes a brief walk through the centre can sense. The same historical pulses which established Bradford as a thriving industrial hub in the 19th century created the conditions for the arrival of economic migrants, immigrants and refugees from many different countries over the centuries. War, empire, colonial legacies, persecution and economic collapse all played their part in building this modern city, as did the lived experience of those who arrived here seeking home, shelter and a better life. If we dig into these immigrant stories, we find within them a kind of potted global history, a map which reveals much about the shifting trajectories of power across the modern era.
At feminist collective Invisible Women, we use cinema to explore history. Our specialism is archive films made by women and non-binary filmmakers, and we are particularly interested in opening up alternative readings of the past by presenting the world through queer, feminist and otherwise marginalised perspectives. When we were offered the opportunity to curate a programme for Pictureville, as part of 2025’s Year of Culture, we knew that to speak to the history of Bradford is to talk about migration, the rich tapestry of national identity and lived experience which has built this city. We were also inspired by Bradford’s remarkable youth; with over a third of the population now aged under 25, it is often described as the UK’s youngest city. Returning to the city where I grew up also immediately made me think of my own teenage years, and the strong, emotional connection many of us feel towards cinema as young people, at a time when art has an unusual intensity and potential to shape our identities.
A Time and a Place is the result of this collision of personal experience, Bradford’s history and our own love of historic cinema. The programme brings together five films which each bear a connection to a particular moment in Bradford’s migratory past (and, therefore, the city’s present). These films approach coming of age from different angles, through the eyes of children, teenagers and young adults. They explore many familiar coming of age themes—relationships with parents and siblings, formative friendships and first crushes, political awakening and challenging authority—filtered through different historical and national contexts. The films span almost a century, but you might be surprised to see how they speak to one another across time, where they overlap with and depart from one another.
A case in point, and a reminder of the potential of “old movies” to make us see the past with new eyes, is the oldest film in the series, Mädchen in Uniform. Made in Germany in 1931, this lively romantic drama may be approaching its centenary, but it still feels fiercely modern. Directed by Leontine Sagan, a Budapest-born actor and filmmaker of Jewish descent, from a script adapted by queer German writer Christa Winsloe from her own semi-autobiographical novella, Mädchen in Uniform is often seen as one of the first lesbian films. Its depiction of the thrill of forbidden love—portrayed by an all-female cast—remains captivating. Set in a strict Prussian boarding school, the story centres on sensitive new arrival Manuela (Hertha Thiele) whose crush on her teacher, the elegant Fräulein von Bernberg (Dorothea Wieck), becomes the spark for a larger rebellion of the school’s repressed pupils against their oppressive headmistress.
Mädchen in Uniform
Remarkably, this openly queer love story was a box office hit in Germany and abroad, but by the mid-1930s the film had been banned by the Nazis and much of the cast and crew had been forced to flee. By this point Bradford already had a history of German-Jewish migration, which is visible in the distinctive neoclassical architecture of Little Germany, an area largely built by merchants who arrived from mainland Europe from the 1830s onwards. In the 1930s, this small established immigrant community was joined by new refugees, predominantly from Germany and Eastern Europe, who, like the cast and crew of Mädchen in Uniform, were among the millions from persecuted groups who left Germany in the build up to World War II.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the region’s turbulent 20th-century history, Eastern Europe has long had an especially strong connection with Bradford. Aside from refugees displaced by World War II, the city has also seen other significant waves of arrivals. In the aftermath of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which was brutally crushed by a Soviet invasion, around 2,000 Hungarians arrived seeking safety. The city also has a longstanding Ukrainian community, which has its origins in post-war displacement—Bradford at one stage had the largest Ukrainian population in Western Europe—and which has continued to grow today in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the country.
In A Time and a Place, we’ve sought to honour this story with two standout examples of post-war Eastern European cinema. Ildikó Enyedi’s bewitching My Twentieth Century, may have been made in 1989, just as the Soviet world order was collapsing, but this fable of political and personal awakening feels magically untethered from time. The story of twin sisters, born on the streets of Budapest and separated at birth, whose paths cross again on board the Orient Express on New Year’s Eve 1899, My Twentieth Century offers a captivating counterhistory set in an Eastern Europe on the brink of revolutionary transformation.
A sense of how the political shapes the personal also permeates the work of Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova, whose bold, tonally eccentric films attracted the ire of Soviet censors. The Long Farewell was made in 1971 but only released in 1987, after the reforms of perestroika, which introduced a new openness to Soviet society. Aesthetically playful but intense in its themes, The Long Farewell offers an unusually multi-faceted portrayal of the relationship between a mother and her son who both “come of age” over the course of the film.
The story of Bradford’s Eastern European communities highlights the deep roots and interweaving stories which often lie behind diasporic identities. Migration from Ireland to Bradford is similarly long standing, with origins which extend back to the industrial revolution when, from the mid-19th century onwards, Irish workers and their families began arriving in the city seeking work in the wool mills. Their displacement was partially fuelled by the aftermath of the Great Famine, a national crisis which was exacerbated by the negligence of the British government. While Margo Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989) takes place long after this period, the film reflects those colonial legacies. Set in Derry in 1984, Hush-a-Bye Baby is a witty and hard-hitting story of first love, as well as a fascinating time capsule of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, as the film’s teenage heroine steers between high school, discos and Irish classes, navigating her personal crisis against a backdrop of British soldiers and sectarian tension.
Hush-A-Bye-Baby
Colonialist legacies of course also played a role in the arrival in Bradford of economic migrants from South Asia, particularly Pakistan, from the 1960s onwards. The only new film in our selection, Fawzia Mirza’s The Queen of My Dreams (2023) offers an unusually expansive, intergenerational diasporic story, from the perspective of a young queer Pakistani Canadian woman. Azra (Amrit Kauer) is offered a new insight into her family’s past when a crisis triggers a trip from Toronto to Pakistan. There, Azra tentatively begins to reconnect with her estranged mother, Miriam (Nimra Bucha), and in doing so is transported into Miriam’s memories of falling in love in 1960s Karachi. Vibrant and wonderfully entertaining, The Queen of My Dreams beautifully captures the complex feelings of joy, hope, anticipation, fear and loss, which run through so many diasporic family stories. These emotions are also familiar to the streets of Bradford, written on our buildings, running through our communities, threaded through the sandstone and brick from which this city is built.
One day, your weather app may ping you with a local alert: rain in five minutes.
That is one of the tantalising prospects raised by artificial intelligence, according to Kirstine Dale, the Met Office’s Chief AI Officer and Principal Fellow for Data Science.
Based on a proof-of-concept study done last summer, she believes AI could one day enable ultra-local, real-time forecasts—tailored not just to your town, but to your street or even garden. ‘We are still working it through,” she said, declining to specify when such forecasts might become widely available.
I spoke to Dale last week in Exeter at the unveiling of the Met Office’s new Strategic Plan. There, CEO Penny Endersby introduced the organisation’s 14th supercomputer – a milestone six decades in the making since the Met’s first – which offers the prospect of making detailed 14-day forecasts routine.
A component of the electronic computer, EDSAC 1, that was used to compute the first numerical weather forecast in the UK.
Housed in two southern England data centres (their location has not been disclosed) and accessed via the internet, it is thought to be the world’s first cloud-based supercomputer dedicated to weather and climate science.
It will be around six times more powerful than its 14 petaflop (a quadrillion calculations per second) predecessor and will enable more detailed and accurate weather forecasts together with new capabilities in climate science research, setting new standards for industry.
The cloud-based supercomputer took four years to implement. Ben Fitzpatrick, Head of Science IT Data Management and Processing, called it the dawn of a new era—especially in the integration of AI into forecasting.
These ingest up to 300 terabytes of data daily—more than 50 billion observations from satellites, sensors, and weather stations—to simulate the atmosphere’s behaviour.
AI models, such as the FastNet model developed through a partnership between the Met Office and the Alan Turing Institute, can perform to a similar level when compared with physics-based models and reality, based on pooled data from national European forecasters, explained Steve Ramsdale, one of the Met Office’s Chief Operational Meteorologists.
Rather than simulating from first principles, AIs learn from torrents of historical and real-time data, detecting patterns and generating forecasts with remarkable speed.
Astronomical Diagram of Meteorology, displaying the various phenomena of the Atmosphere. Drawn and engraved by John Emslie. Published by James Reynolds, 174 Strand, Sep 20, 1846
To create the AI requires computer chips called GPUs, graphic processing units, and can take tens of thousands of GPU hours to trains. But once trained, the AI can run on modest hardware—democratising access to advanced forecasting.
However, machine learning has its limits. AI can struggle with rare or unprecedented events – for instance, the climate disruption caused by the Pinatubo volcanic eruption of 1991 – and can often not extrapolate beyond what it has already seen. For such extremes, physics-based forecasting still rules.
Moreover, said Ramsdale, while AI provides answers, it lacks ‘explainability’—the ability to show how it reached its conclusions. Physics-based models, by contrast, offer transparency. ‘I have huge trust in them—I need that from AI models as well,’ he said.
That is why the Met Office is pursuing a hybrid strategy—melding the statistical muscle of AI with the theoretical rigour of physics-based models, notably in ensemble forecasts, created by slightly varying the initial conditions of a weather model to weigh up the probability of different weather events.
However, Ramsdale emphasised that the experience of human meteorologists remains central to forecasting for the near future.
Prototype of Met Office windspeed & direction indicator no.40154, now part of the Science Museum Group Collection.
The stakes are more than meteorological, however. Met Office forecasts guide aviation, defence, shipping, infrastructure, and even Sunday cricket. By one estimate, by London Economics, the value of the Met Office to the UK economy will reach £56 billion over the next decade.
Unlike the UK’s high performance computer strategy, which is back on track after being thrown into disarray last year, the Met Office is already planning the next generation of the supercomputer in 2027, which will require exabyte-scale storage.
‘Imagine something like 40 million Blu-ray discs, enough to fill every bit of a very large house from floor to attic,’ commented Ben Fitzpatrick, adding that that both AI and physics-based modelling have benefited from improved hardware, software, and datasets in recent years.
‘One strength of the Met Office is that our physical modelling can create new and higher resolution training data, so we can keep pushing the frontiers of what AI can learn from.’
In their 80th year, the Moomins (or Moomintroll, in the original Swedish) are enduringly beloved. Alongside other legends of children’s illustration, such as Dick Bruna’s Miffy, and Charles M Schulz’s Snoopy, the Moomins can be found on keyrings, mugs and t-shirts in gift shops all around the world. But this aestheticisation of the Moomin image is a relatively modern development. Tove Jansson’s original series has nine books, in addition to several picture books and comic strips, and in the years since, there have been a number of animated TV and film iterations of the Moomin story, including 2014’s Moomins on The Riviera (dir. Xavier Picard).
The simplicity of the Moomins’ design (they don’t have mouths or noses!), and the apparent quaintness of their stories, might deceive the casual observer into believing there is little depth in Jansson’s work, but a closer look reveals a great complexity in her storytelling, with none more perceptive to this complexity than Jansson’s child reader.
After Pictureville’s screening of Moomins on The Riviera on 23 May, a panel of Moomin experts from The Conversation discussed the cultural significance of Tove Jansson’s stories, and what they referred to as their ‘quietly radical’ politics. In particular, the panel explored what the Moomin stories tell us about displacement and the refugee experience—a discussion made all the more significant by its taking place in Bradford, a city whose past and present is inextricably tied to migration.
Tove Jansson in 1954. CC BY 4.0
The Moomins came into being in 1945, with Moomins and The Great Flood. It was the story of a mother (Moominmama) taking her child on the long and treacherous road to reunite with his father. By the end of World War Two, this was, of course, a familiar experience for many, with people all across Europe rendered refugees, and this was very much a part of Jansson’s own lived experience.
It seems that the Moomins’ story of displacement continues to find a resonance among modern refugee experiences. The young Moomin’s story allows children in 2025 to engage with the refugee experience as much as children in 1945. In this vein, Moomin artwork by Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa is being displayed in Bowling Park in Bradford throughout June, as part of Refugee Week.
At Pictureville’s panel, Professor Melanie Ramdarshan Bold emphasised what separates Moomins and The Great Flood from other children’s stories of displacement. She argued that Jansson’s storytelling decentres trauma and doesn’t expect ‘resilience’ of its child protagonist.
The panel felt that this story acknowledges the role of the mother in crisis, whose job is often to protect and safely transport a child, whilst the father is already in the new place, preparing their home (whatever that might look like). Dr Isabel Joley Black discussed how Moominmama’s incredible resourcefulness across all of the Moomin stories (and her seemingly Tardis-like handbag) is in equal parts a powerful, recognisable and hilarious image of motherhood.
Dr Steve Nash praised Jansson’s aversion to a neatly tied-up plot. This tendency—alongside an illustration style that asks for so much to be interpreted with just the eyes, as discussed by Amelia Huw Morgan—respects the intelligence of child readers, and asks them to meet the story halfway. They can think actively, as they read and laugh, and perhaps learn something along the way.
Though reviewers of Moomins on The Riviera debate how well the film serves the spirit of Jansson’s original stories, there are hints of these quietly radical politics within its farcical plot. We see Moominmama creating gardens wherever she can (including the sea!), in the hopes they can be enjoyed by any- and everyone, and at no monetary cost, which speaks to how she values nature and community.
Moomins on The Riviera presents a running joke in which the Moomins don’t understand that they are expected to produce money in exchange for the lavish things they’re offered. Their inability to understand money is endearing, but also quite representative of their way of life in Moominvalley—where community, kindness and sharing make such things redundant.
At the panel, Amelia Huw Morgan drew attention to the moment Moominmama and Moominpapa are asked, “You are not rich?” to which Moominmama replies “Not in the way you understand it.” She believed this tapped into the heart of what the Moomins are about. They’ve known struggle, and their lives are simple, but they are rich in happiness, rich in family and community, and rich in love.
My name is Martha, and I am a conservator at the National Collections Centre, which houses the majority of the Science Museum Group’s collection. I have worked on a wide range of objects for the National Science and Media Museum’s new Sound and Vision galleries, and while each of them is interesting and engaging, I can’t deny that I have a strong favourite: the Mad March Hare, an animatronic from Jim Henson’s Creature Studio. Isn’t he a beauty!
The conserved March Hare head.Martha and the hare on their first meeting.
For this installment of Blog from the Basement, I am going to discuss the history of the March Hare and share the treatment process I undertook to ensure that he was ready to be displayed. Come down the conservation rabbit hole with me into a world of adhesives, colour-matching, and custom-made eyewear…
Martha at work conserving the head.
The March Hare was made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for the 1999 movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. The fully animatronic head was worn by actor Francis Wright during the tea party scene, in which the hare is seen sharing a cup of tea with the Mad Hatter. The hare’s features were controlled in real time by an operator behind the camera. Sensors attached to the eyes and lips would respond to commands from a control panel, allowing the operator to react to Wright’s movements and vocal cues. The result is intriguing but also somewhat terrifying – admittedly perfect for Alice in Wonderland.
A still from the the film featuring the March Hare.
The head itself is composed of a fibreglass frame which is covered in a latex-like foam and genuine rabbit fur. My favourite aspect is the strip of textile holding the hare’s ears back and the stalks of wheat pinned into the material; it is a small detail, but it contributes greatly to the uniqueness and visual impact of the head. During my initial assessment of the hare, I determined that while the object was in good condition overall, there were several tears and losses in the latex foam which would require treatment. The areas of concern included the lower lip, left nostril, and the thin foam of the hare’s eyelids.
The hare’s head in the conservation lab.The hare’s lip before any conservation treatmentThe hare’s nose before Martha’s conservation work.
I began the treatment process with a quick surface clean using a brush and museum vacuum. While the hare’s fur was in great condition (and, importantly, very soft to the touch), he was shedding hair everywhere! Following this, I conducted numerous tests to establish the best method of repair for the latex foam. In conservation, we aim to use the same or similar materials when treating an object. As such, my initial plan was to coat the areas of loss with liquid latex and then colour match the repair to the surrounding area through the application of powder pigment or acrylic paint. My aim was to replicate the texture and colour of the latex foam, so that my repair matches seamlessly with the original material.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t happy with the initial results and decided to take a different approach. I made a paste using finely ripped Japanese tissue and Lascaux 498, a non-tacky adhesive with a long setting time. When ripped, Japanese tissue will become fibrous along its edges; this provided the textured appearance I was aiming for. I applied a layer of the paste over the damaged areas and infilled the patches on the nose and lower lip with acrylic paint. Colour matching can be a conservator’s worst nightmare, but it is an amazing feeling when you finally mix the perfect colour for your object.
The lip area post-conservation.The result of conservation treatment to the nose area.
I have greatly enjoyed treating the March Hare head – when viewed in person, the care and attention to detail that went into its creation is evident. I am glad to have contributed to its history and ongoing future. It was also great to have the head in our lab space at the NCC – staff and visitors alike were very enamoured by him! I did receive several complaints about his eyes, however, which are slightly alarming when viewed head-on. To combat this, I made the hare a pair of sunglasses out of conservation grade foam, which hid his eyes and had the added benefit of making him look super cool (in my opinion at least).
The hare with his sunnies.
The Mad March Hare head will be displayed in the new Sound and Vision galleries, which open at the National Science and Media Museum in summer 2025. See you there!
For centuries, people have called out to the universe looking for answers—in Disney and Pixar’s all-new feature film Elio, the universe calls back! The cosmic misadventure introduces Elio, a space fanatic with an active imagination and a huge alien obsession. So, when he’s beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide, Elio’s all in for the epic undertaking. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s leader, he must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, navigate a crisis of intergalactic proportions, and somehow discover who and where he is truly meant to be.
To celebrate the final weeks of our iconic Exploring Space gallery on 2 June and to mark the release of Disney and Pixar’s all-new feature film Elio, we’ve put together an exciting free trail, inspired by the film, which celebrates the power of friendship and imagination.
Visitors will be able to pick up a trail from the entrance to our Exploring Space gallery and find game-changing space objects across both this iconic gallery and around the rest of the museum.
In Exploring Space, you can pass beneath suspended rockets and walk around a full-sized replica of Eagle—the lander that took astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon in 1969 – or discover how we are able to live in space, to breathe, eat, drink and even go to the toilet.
Visitors can also study a suspended model of the Hubble Space Telescope full-size replicas of the Beagle 2 Mars lander and the Huygens Titan spacecraft – which will remain on display in the gallery until 2 June.
Go on a cosmic adventure in our Exploring Space gallery before it closes on 2 June
Having encountered breath-taking objects across the museum, visitors can shoot for the stars and submit a completed trail for a chance to win a glamping adventure under the skies in a space-inspired geodome, plus a goody bag full of Science Museum gifts.
After inspiring tens of millions of visitors for almost forty years, our Exploring Space gallery closed partially on 15 May and will fully close on 2 June 2025. But there is still plenty of time to visit so don’t miss your last chance to see this stellar gallery. Channel your inner space explorer and join us for a trail that’s truly out of this world.
The free Exploring Space Trail, inspired by Disney and Pixar’s Elio, will be available from Friday 16 May – Sunday 2 June 2025 from the Exploring Space gallery.
The undisputed granddaddy of gaming mascots turns 45 this month so here’s a look at why we’ve all been in the throes of Pac-Mania for the past four decades.
My love for the little yellow circle started in a very analogue fashion playing the MB Games boardgame spin-off at the age of five with my cousin in 1990. Ten years earlier in May 1980 Namco began public testing of its new arcade game Puck Man. Initial feedback was positive and so later that year Namco took its new title to trade shows around the world. After a quick name change (courtesy of American Execs at Midway fearing what vandals might change the title to) Pac-Man hit the arcades.
The US welcomed this new title and Pac-Man became a huge success in the growing number of arcades around the country. Within a year more than 100,000 arcade units had been sold grossing more than $1 billion in quarters. Part of the reason for this success was the universal appeal. Creator Toru Iwatani felt that arcade games at the time were often violent and appealed mainly to men. He wanted to create a non-violent game, hoping that his game would attract women and couples to the arcades. The then-revolutionary RGB colour displays allowed Iwatani and his team to create attractive characters with bright colours which helped bring new fans to gaming.
Atari adapted the Namco arcade game ‘Pac-Man’ for its Atari 2600, a console originally released in October 1977. The player uses a joystick to control the circular character, moving it around a maze and eating wafers whilst avoiding an encounter with one of four ghosts.
Pac-Man is joined on screen by a collection of ghosts who chase him around the maze as he tries to gobble up dots. Familiar to Western audiences by their nicknames the four main ghosts are Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde. These ghosts were each programmed with a different personality and their Japanese names were hints to their behaviour. While Oikaké (chaser) always chases Pac-Man around the maze, Kimaguré (fickle) is fickle, chasing or ambushing Pac-Man and sometimes just wandering off.
One of many Pac-Man clones released in the 1980s – a video game ‘Gobbledegook’, by Jupiter Cantab, England, 1983. Image credit: Science Museum Group.
After his arcade success, Pac-Man was converted to consoles for home video game audiences. Over the following 45 years, there has been a host of sequels, spin-offs, rip-offs and remakes. Pac-Man has featured in over 80 games selling upwards of 43 million units, worth over $14 billion. Along the way he has entered the 3D world, featured in all number of game genres and introduced us to his family Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man. His impact has taken him outside of the world of games to star in cartoons, have hit singles, feature in films and get his own playable Google Doodle.
It hasn’t always been a story of success for Pac-Man, however. At the height of popularity in 1982 the Atari 2600 conversion was criticised for its bad-quality and odd design choices. Atari had produced 12 million cartridges but only managed to sell 7 million. This in part led to Atari’s demise, the videogames crash of 1983 and the rumoured burial of thousands of unsold cartridges in a secret landfill site.
An Atari 2600 console. Image credit: Science Museum Group.
Perhaps the biggest challenge out there for fans of Pac-Man remains the achievement of a perfect score on the original game. The game’s 256th level has a glitch making it unplayable, meaning it’s possible to hit a high score of 3,333,360 points by eating all the dots, fruits and ghosts. Fewer than ten people have achieved this on an original arcade unit, the fastest entering the record books in 3 hours, 28 minutes and 49 seconds.
With several Guinness World Records and dozens of games to his name the impact of Pac-Man, partially designed to look like a pizza with a slice missing, is huge. The sequel Ms. Pac-Man is one of the first video games to feature a female lead character and the franchise’s non-violent, colourful puzzles have made gaming accessible to people the world round. Pac-Man has served as the inspiration for games and games designers for 45 years and looks likely to continue for many years to come.
You might like to test your own skills at playing and creating a Pac-Man game. The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is an online resource where you can design your own maze and play on mazes created by others. With over half a million mazes to play on, users have so far eaten over 263 million ghosts and over 20 billion dots.
Come play through the history of Pac-Man at Power Up, the Science Museum’s hands-on gaming experience. You can find the little yellow circle and its chasing ghosts on the Atari 2600, or in one of our arcade tops if you’d like to play it 1980s style. You can also play on a contemporary Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship DX, an extra-large, unique take on Pac-Man where up to 8 people can go head to head to survive the maze and be the last Pac-Man standing.
Ten years earlier in May 1980 Namco began public testing of its new arcade game Puck Man. Initial feedback was positive and so later that year Namco took its new title to trade shows around the world. After a quick name change (courtesy of American Execs at Midway fearing what vandals might change the title to) Pac-Man hit the arcades.
