Introducing Rooney Vision
Seeing the world as a museum, one object at a time
Hello! I’m David Rooney, a British writer and museum curator. For the last 30-or-so years I’ve been working in, and with, museums. I spent eighteen years at the London Science Museum, starting as a 21-year-old trainee and ending up as Keeper of Technology and Engineering. For five years I escaped to the National Maritime Museum as Curator of Timekeeping. For six years and counting I’ve been freelance, working with museums around the world on content and vision.
This curatorial career has shaped my outlook on life. I see fascinating artefacts everywhere I look: in city streets, in the countryside, in houses and shops, in factories, workshops, airports, and stations, above ground and under its surface. At least, I think they’re fascinating. They certainly deserve our attention, because our history is embedded in the objects which surround us in our daily lives, even if we don’t always look closely at them. Hence the strapline for this newsletter: Seeing the world as a museum, one object at a time. I enjoy writing the captions for the artefacts that catch my eye.
Nowadays, alongside museum work, I spend my time writing books. My latest, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, came out in 2021. Next up is The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future, which comes out in June 2025 and I’m excited about it. A few years ago I wrote a monograph about city traffic and how it works (or doesn’t), and a long time ago I wrote a biography of Ruth Belville, a horological celebrity of her day known by journalists variously as the “Greenwich time lady” or the “Clockwoman of Greenwich.”
Time, transport, technology, and engineering: this is what fascinates me, and its history is all around us, ready to be explored.
But book-writing runs slow. I wanted a way to writer shorter works more frequently and with more opportunities for feedback from readers. I also wanted an outlet for work I’d done in the past but which is still relevant today (sometimes more so). Substack seems to provide an answer – at least, it will be fun to try it out. Rooney Vision is a newsletter for anybody interested in how the world works and why humans have materially shaped it the ways they have. I know you’re interested in that as much as I am, because who isn’t?
I’ll try to post every week or two. Sometimes these will be short notes. It could be something that’s caught my eye or been on my mind. Other times I’ll post longer articles – often multi-part.
Expect anything from the poetry of power pylons to what traffic signals owe to Benny Hill. There’ll be anti-fascist 1930s flyovers. I’ll tell you how I thought I saw Ford Madox Brown in Rotherhithe one time. We’ll explore the airport runway in Croydon that once led to Australia but now sits in a park next to a suburban industrial estate, and the power station on the banks of the River Thames that runs off the jet engines Concorde used to have. Chicago will feature quite a bit in my posts – I’ve only been once but it was enough to get me obsessed with the place. And there will likely be numerous visits to clock towers. I’m afraid this is unavoidable. If you’ve read About Time you’ll understand and, I hope, sympathize.
Subscribing is free and I hope you’ll consider doing so. You’ll get my newsletters straight to your inbox. And if you like what you read (or, at least, some of it), please spread the word among your friends and followers.
Right. Enough preamble. With pay-per-mile motoring back in the news, we’re going to kick off with a deep-dive two-parter on the history of road pricing in Britain. You’ll enjoy it. Expect to meet Alan Walters and Margaret Thatcher, Frank Knight and Milton Friedman, Chicago versus Yale, grumpy mathematicians and frustrated neoliberals, 1950s New York buses, the IEA, the IPPR, John Prescott and Red Ken... lovely stuff.
Cheers!