Introducing the session, I want to open up some questions about the public culture of science in the past and the present that we can expect to be echoed later. The Science Museum’s public history programme is an enterprise that seeks to bring together research into the public culture of science in the past and the present, asking questions about how lay people think about, understand and incorporate ways of thinking about science, and the part that science’s past plays in these modes of thought. Some aspects of this research programme are historical analyses of the media by which the public have encountered science in the past, such as science on television and in museum displays. Others have been co-production experiments, kinds of research through practice in which lay people have bee enrolled in projects that enable them to articulate their sense of the past of science and technology and its relation to their broader historical sense. Examples include projects on the history of electronic music and with family and local historians. In reflecting on the work so far, I aim to begin to draw some historiographical insights and to prompt further questions for investigation.