Jodrell Bank
“Take new and exciting approaches to presenting the wonders of science in a way that engages our visitors emotionally as well as intellectually, evoking wonder, surprise, humour and, above all, curiosity.”
We’ve been coming to Jodrell Bank Discovery Center since we were kids. And now we take our own kids. That sense of awe and wonder that we experienced way back then (even though we went there on school trips which somehow make everything boring), that hasn’t gone away for us, and now it captures our younger generation too.
Since we came in our school uniforms (we won’t say exactly when that was), Jodrell Bank has undergone a bit of a revamp. Our kids get a much nicer café then we ever had, though we get the benefits of that too, as well as majorly remodeled visitor buildings. The striking Planet Pavilion contains the world’s largest clockwork Orrery (a to-scale working model of the solar system) and in the Space Pavilion you now get to hear the Big Bang.
But Jodrell Bank is one of those truly special places for a spectacular, constant, reason. Right here is one of the biggest and most powerful radio telescopes in the world. The giant, Grade-1 listed, Lovell Telescope. This monumental white bowl has been sat in the green fields of Cheshire since 1957. Positioned right beside the Manchester-Crew train line, I’d pass it every day on my way to school, and it has never ceased to blow my mind. Looking out of a train window, the Lovell Telescope would denote an escape from the quotidian, from the banal, from our diminutive human lives. It would signify space and the universe, the capacity for us to know the unknowable, mysteries of an astronomical scale. It would communicate escape.
At a distance, the Lovell Telescope is symbol of authority for what man-made science can do. Much, much closer —you can walk right up to its base—it maintains that sense of awe, but it also conveys our humility, our very much non-man-made place in the universe. As it transcends time, the Lovell Telescope is beginning to show the wear and tear of its own life, it begins to feel fragile. When we last visited, the train-track base was covered in scaffolding, which seemed surprisingly prosaic when you think about what this thing can do. It felt oddly like it might break if moved [sorry all those Uni of Manchester science hearts that just died when I typed that]. And it does move – it’s one of the largest steerable telescopes in the world, with the bowl changing position depending on which part of the sky it needs to track.
Jodrell Bank is a place full of these kind of dichotomies. It’s an analogue escapees dream: while here, you are asked to switch off all devices, so that they don’t interfere with the powerful radio observations. Which is a permission giving of a kind we like. There’s a sense of play, of curiosity, in the exhibits on display, and the grounds that allow free-roaming, but there’s also the weighty responsibilities and ambitions of the science authored here to further our knowledge and capacity to get beyond dreaming. And now there’s even camping, bringing the vast imaginative possibilities of this place to a 4-day annual summer festival, appropriately called bluedot. With an audience of 25,000, science just got way more accessible, as it plays with music, art and culture, and bands like The Chemical Brothers, Flaming Lips and Elbow, as well as Manchester’s own Halle Orchestra, get to drop by. But best of all—we think anyway—bluedot takes place right next to that giant telescope (sometimes incorporating it into the show) and you get to unzip your tent, probably on a frosty Mancunian morning, and be right there with it.
We can majorly lose our minds on that. As we always have done, a bit, just being here with the Lovell Telescope and its universal pull.
Website www.jodrellbank.net/ Twitter @jodrellbank/ Facebook @JodrellBankOberservatory
