Describe an attraction as “an exhibition about inflation”, and you can probably kiss goodbye to Waterlilies-style queues round the block. But the Bank of England has never been about crowd-pleasing, and the exhibition now on at its museum, The Pound in your Pocket, is a noble attempt to make an important concept interesting and accessible.

For those of us of a certain disposition, there is a geekish thrill in gazing on the bound proceedings of the Bretton Woods conference, or inspecting the original letter by which Gordon Brown gave independence to the Bank of England. We can also marvel at his oddly childish handwriting, as if he has scrawled his signature hurriedly in crayon during a lunchbreak. The most hawk-eyed will note that, on this historic document, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer managed to get the Bank’s address wrong (it’s EC2, not EC1).

The exhibition opens with a display of historic coins, and five silver pennies spanning the reigns of William the Conqueror to Charles II display the cause of inflation in the clearest way, by getting progressively smaller. As governments tried to make their money go farther by reducing the precious metal content of the coins, prices rose. Britain’s currency might have got a bit more sophisticated since then, the exhibition seems to suggest, but the tendency of politicians to fiscal indiscipline have remained the same.

Banknotes emerged in England in the 17th century, always carrying the promise of repayment in gold or silver. The first big inflationary crisis broke during the Revolutionary wars against France, when Pitt the Younger, as the Government ran out of money, suspended the convertibility of Bank of England notes into gold. As prices soared, this proved highly unpopular. A wonderfully angry James Gillray cartoon depicts a bloated Pitt, his stomach bulging with gold coins, as an inverted Midas — gorging on gold and excreting it as paper.

During this crisis, the Bank issued ever smaller-denomination notes, and here is an example of the first £1 note, issued in 1798. But just as this note was issued because of inflation, so it was withdrawn for the same reason, as £1 became ever less valuable; not far away sits the last “Isaac Newton” £1 note of 1984, next to a barbed Peter Brookes cartoon of a forlorn Newton joining a queue at the Jobcentre.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, though, is an interactive exhibit in the shape of a hot-air balloon. Standing in a wicker basket, visitors are instructed to pull one handle to add hot air and another to let it out, so mimicking the Bank’s use of interest rates to control inflation. A digital balloon must then be guided across a landscape of looming thunderstorms and sudden updrafts, keeping steady to its two per cent target.

It’s a tricky task and seems designed to boost one’s appreciation of the job done by the Monetary Policy Committee. A touch of verisimilitude is added by the balloon’s delayed response time to the pilot’s commands — just as interest rate changes take many months to affect the economy.

Sadly, Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor, has not yet tried his hand at the game. But the exhibition seems quietly pleased with the Bank’s real-life record. Near by sit two photographs showing the perils of ignoring inflation: a child uses bundles of worthless German marks as toy building blocks during the 1920s hyperinflation, and a street cleaner in postwar Hungary sweeps away flurries of pengo notes, with money no longer worth the effort of picking it up from the pavement.

On a recent visit to the museum, a party of schoolchildren do not seem to have grasped the message. They are rather mystified by the experience and confessed to having learnt little about inflation. Some of their number seem entirely unconcerned with the general rise of prices and more interested in trying to steal a model cat that, for some reason, sits in the gallery.

Such indifference might pain the curators, but the central bankers themselves do not usually mind if their work is far from the forefront of the public mind. In the good times people can get away with caring little for the mysteries of inflation. As the economic storm clouds gather, however, the Bank’s pilots are going to need all their hot-air ballooning skills to get us through smoothly. If they get it wrong, those children will find they have no choice but to start paying attention.

The Pound in your Pocket, Bank of England Museum, London EC2, until October 31. Admission free

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