In March 2025, MESSAGE supported UCD researchers Verity Burke and Josh Jewell to travel to Iceland. They report on their travels in this blog post.
In the late 19th century, Norwegian and Danish “entrepreneurs” set up a vast fishing infrastructure in Iceland. Upon its independence in 1944, the island inherited what we might call an ecological monoculture—where a region is dependent on one particular form of extraction. In 1968 the herring stocks—which the Icelandic economy was now dependent upon—failed to materialise and a sharp crisis ensued. A crisis not only in the sense that the natural world was being depleted, but a crisis of the region’s colonially-structured economy. This unique entanglement of social and ecological forces, of histories of colonisation, extractive industry, and coastal ecologies, is precisely what we set out to investigate when MESSAGE generously funded our trip to northern Iceland to visit the town of Siglufjörður to investigate the transition of this small but significant fishing town from a hub of the herring industry between the 1890s and 1960s, to a fascinating tourist attraction today. In this blog we record our trip, and discuss the impact of a common transition—from industry to tourism; extractive industry to service industry—of one small town just a few miles south of the arctic circle.
Photo of Siglufjörður by Brett6781, image reproduced under (opens in a new window)license CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Siglufjörður was once the most significant of the herring towns dotted along the north coast of Iceland. The town began life as a whaling station established by Norwegians in the late 1800s, and gradually expanded to become a contact zone for young people across the country. For a nation with a small population, Iceland has long placed emphasis on young people leaving their small towns and meeting each other—through the first half of the twentieth century people flocked to Siglufjörður to work summers as ‘herring girls’, living in the barrack-style accommodation sheds and salting and barrelling the herring catch down on the docks by day. Young men too worked repairing nets and boats, and went out to fish in the frigid waters between Iceland and Greenland. One of the preserved accommodation sheds now houses the Síldarminjasafnið á Siglufirði or Herring Era Museum, a privately-run institution dedicated to the preservation of life during the ‘herring boom’. This was our destination, and would serve as our principal text for analysing how the transition from fishing to tourism is mediated in heritage.
We landed in Reykjavik on a windy, sunny day on 2nd April; the subarctic spring light intensely white as the snow still covered the landscape. Most towns and villages in Iceland are coastal, from the major cities of Reykjavik in the south, Akureyri in the north, and Egilstadir in the east, to the small towns huddled deep in the dramatic fjords that define the country’s watery edge. Most (with the exception of the isolated and beautiful Westfjords) are joined by the ring road—evocatively named “The 1”. It was this road we took north to Akureyri on our first day, taking a small detour to Akranes about an hour away from Reykjavik to see an abandoned herring dock.
At various sites around Iceland the wooden herring boats that swept the fishing grounds have been hauled onto land and serve as informal monuments to the once mighty industry. The surrounding area is littered with plastic waste, scrap metal, shattered propellers, and animal bones. The actual industrial docks which would have hauled the catch in for freezing have been concreted over and the winching sheds boarded up, with rust eating away at the metal stanchions visible within. Walking further along the coast towards the twin Akranes lighthouses there is public art dedicated to cod. Cod occupies a curious place in the local ecological imaginary: it is often framed as a reliable and trustworthy fish whose stocks remain more stable and predictable, while the herring is seen as mercurial and illusive.
The old fishing infrastructure at Akranes is a compelling sight but we did wonder how much longer it would survive if no formal attempts were made to preserve it. Concern over the complete loss of the material artefacts of an old way of life motivated the collection practice at the Herring Era Museum in Siglufurður. First we had to get there, and as we crossed a wide valley south of Tröllaskagi peninsula a snow storm set in, slowing our progress to Akureyri.
Siglufjörður is an hour or so away from Akureyri, the major Northern city and ‘second capital’ of Iceland. We reached our destination by driving through a tunnel which pierced directly through a mountain range. On arrival, the buildings which house the Herring Era Museum are amongst the first that you encounter. We parked our car near Róaldsbrakki, a building original to the era which was saved from destruction and conserved specifically to house the museum’s displays and collections. In the summer months, the museum is open for tourists, but in the off season in which we visited, it can only be seen by appointment. Museum staff generously met with us to answer our initial questions, and to provide access to the multiple buildings in which the collections are housed. They described many of the exhibitions as ‘scenes’ from the era, a sense that was consolidated in entering the Söltunarstöðin (Salting Station), in which the first gallery followed a classic exhibition structure pairing objects and explanatory labels, grounding visitors in the history of the ‘Great Herring Adventure’ more broadly. We then ascended to the upper floor, which has been curated to look like the ‘herring girls’ lodgings. There is a sense that the women have ‘just stepped away’ from their quarters. The curation of the scenes enable visitors to make an imaginative leap of engagement with the workers and their lived context. 
The next building we visit is the Verksmiðjan (Factory), arranged for visitors to experience what a herring processing factory would be like, from cooking to grinding. We brace ourselves for the scent of fish as we enter, but to our surprise, are greeted more with the smell of grease, oil and metal from the machinery within. This is because although it looks “authentic”, much like the herring girl’s quarters, it is a thoughtfully curated recreation. The machines used here were collected from across the country, housed not in a factory but in a large building that was modelled on the original Grána fishmeal and oil factory which operated in the town between 1919 and 1950. While we can hear the oppressive whir and clank of machinery, it is played as a soundscape to orient visitors in the experience of processing. The Herring Era Museum validates Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s argument that ‘while it looks old, heritage is actually something new’: it is ‘a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past’, even (or perhaps especially) when it ‘fails to function as the perfect time machine’.[1]
Our final stop takes us to the Boathouse, which houses - unsurprisingly - a collection of fishing boats, which figure some of the museum’s largest objects. The eerie emptiness and stillness of the boats, “floating” in a dock which contains no water, are compelling not just as a means of remembering (a curated version of) the herring era, but as a means of memorialising it. Like the scene depicting the herring girl’s quarters, one thing that affects us in these spaces is a sense of absence: of the herring and the employment which the herring era provided. What mostly drives visitors to the town now has shifted from its fisheries to its heritage. A shift borne out in tourism now surpassing fishing as Iceland’s main export industry, where remembering the ecological monocultures on which its industry was previously built also requires reconstructing their absence for visiting publics.[2] Our research visit wouldn’t have been possible without MESSAGE’s support, and we’re excited to write our research visit up as part of an invited chapter for an upcoming edited collection connecting museums with environmental history.
[1] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p.7 and p.10.
[2] Forbes, ‘Iceland’, Forbes Website n.d.(opens in a new window) https://www.forbes.com/places/iceland/ Accessed 19 May 2025.