marvellous miniatures

It’s December. The time of year when British telly gets cosy. Make way for the latest demonstration of the British commitment to crafting and emotional reality TV...

We all know The Great British Bakeoff (or The Great British Baking Show to US audiences). If baking doesn’t butter your crumpet there’s a version for glass-blowers, (Blown Away), dressmakers (Great British Sewing Bee), jewellery-makers (All That Glitters), potters (Great Pottery Throwdown) and, most recently, knitters (Game of Wool).

A variation on the format was introduced by The Repair Shop in 2017. Here members of the public trust their precious heirlooms to a team of expert craftspeople to fix up with an emotional reveal at the end. Restoration and preservation stories culminate in a grand unveiling where presenter, expert craftsperson and camera crew hold their breath, waiting expectantly for approval and joyful weeping from the grateful owner.

The latest version of this winning formula was released on Monday, 1st December: The Marvellous Miniature Workshop (Produced by Nicki Stoker at MGM Alternative UK for the BBC, 2025) in which places beloved by members of the public are remembered and miniaturised, a scale model constructed for the person to take home and treasure. In the first episode, skilled miniature crafter Hannah Lemon uses her creative license to show that miniatures are more about satisfying the dreamy nostalgia, imagination and memory of the person commissioning them than about precise accuracy in reproducing a faithful facsimile of the space.

Leah, who loved her local library, remembers the walls in lemon yellow but when presenter Sara Cox consults a historian in the archives, a contemporary photograph shows the geometric wallpaper was actually a deep mid-century blue. Hannah makes it yellow anyway. She opts for period-appropriate fabric to furnish her tiny chairs whereas local authorities would know better than to supply anything other than a hard-wearing, wipe-clean, plasticated surface for majority seating in public buildings (contemporary photographs confirm shiny plasticated upholstery pads).

Anyone who has ever pushed a library returns trolley for a living (special shout out to Woodston Library, Peterborough) will wonder how on earth Hannah’s 3,000 books could find their way back to the correct shelves without stickers on their spines. My anxiety escalated when I couldn’t find a tiny date stamp on the miniature lending desk.

But as they comment in the show, the details might matter but accuracy compared to the original live-sized room does not. It’s about feeling transported, a sense of a place you can only visit in your memory until it’s rendered in plywood and glue at 1/12 or 1/24 scale so it can sit in your living room. The miniature is then an aide-memoire, a tiny work-of-art you can imagine yourself in, but from the relative scale of an all-seeing giant. Unlike the real thing, it survives the ravages of time and public spending cuts, it’s portable in space because of its relative scale and, unlike a photograph, it’s three-dimensional.

The show references the tangible, touchable, materiality of the miniature as opposed to a digital. remote or screen-based experience like those that dominate our daily lives in the 2020s. It also references the craft revolution that took place when we were stuck in our homes in Covid-19 lockdowns. It touches on issues around grief, racism, austerity, state funding cuts leading to loss of livelihood and communities, cost-free education for the working class being a thing of the past, all in favour of a show with minimal political commentary but big on cosy nostalgia and positive remembering.

I can’t miss this opportunity to segway into crime scene miniatures. They too rely on resemblance, representation and reference rather than existing as independently interpretable objects. A centuries-long history means miniatures provide an excellent case-study or cautionary tale, counselling against assumptions of objectivity, inflated meaning, or an excessive-empirical-effect (like CSI-effect, get it?) for forensic evidence.

In 2025, AI represents the latest in image-manipulation, the technology now sophisticated and accessible enough for anyone to use it to make it appear that someone said or did or wore something they did not, in a place or time they never were, and for anyone subjected to the cameras gaze to be able to claim that footage or photo proves nothing because it could be AI.

I’m not the first to make it, but my argument goes like this: miniatures, photographs, crime scene representations, and other types of evidence - forensic, scientific or otherwise - have never held the objective, ‘see it with your own eyes’ unmediated truth bestowed upon them by twentieth century popular culture.

None has an objective or independent truth to share without drawing on comparisons, referents, human mediation or interpretation and, as we know, these are all fallible, faulty or imperfect.

So this is a cautionary tale for would-be web-sleuths who attempt to ‘solve’ crimes from a distance, authors of true crime non-fiction who try to reconstruct cases from depositions, files or photographs, and consumers of DNA detective stories who use genetic testing and genealogical research to piece together identities... things are not what they seem and we don’t need AI to show us we can’t trust what we see – we’ve always known.

Don’t believe me? Read my next blog post…!