Author: Mark Liebenrood

Postdoctoral Researcher

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

New museums opening during the pandemic

The words Museum Open formed from letterpress type

When we began the Museums in the Pandemic project, we anticipated that some museums might be forced to close permanently as a result of pandemic restrictions. What we didn’t anticipate is that so many new museums would open during this period. As far as we know, fourteen museums have opened between March 2020 and September 2021. Five opened in 2020 and nine new museums have opened so far this year. Two are run by local authorities, while the rest are independent. Most of the museums were at least at the planning stage before the pandemic began, although in some cases we have not been able to determine when their development initially began.

After the pandemic was officially declared, the first new museum to open was forced to close just a few days later with the announcement of the initial nationwide lockdown in the UK. This was the Malton and Norton Heritage Centre in North Yorkshire, which displays the Woodhams Stone Collection. The collection is an amalgamation of two separate collections acquired by Sid Woodhams, a former curator at Beck Isle Museum in Pickering, and John Stone, former Mayor of Norton, who are long-term friends. Work began on refurbishing a bookmakers’ shop to provide accommodation for the heritage centre in Autumn 2019, and it opened briefly in March 2020 before having to shut its doors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the planned openings were delayed by lockdowns. The first museum to be affected was The River Tweed Salmon Fishing Museum.  It was due to open in May 2020, but the pandemic put paid to those plans and it eventually opened four months later. Based in Kelso, Scotland, the museum was in development for three years by a group of volunteers and tells the story of the fishing techniques that developed in the area and their influence on the development of the Eastern Borders. The displays combine items from several private collections.

A single storey wooden clad building at an angle to us, with a door and three windows. A red sign on the end wall that reads Radlett & District Museum
Radlett and District Museum. Photo courtesy of the museum.

The last museum to open in 2020 was also delayed by the pandemic. The Radlett and District Museum in Hertfordshire is run by the Radlett Archives Group, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation. They initially kept their archives in the local library, but now have permanent, purpose-built premises at the rear of the village institute. The building was constructed in January 2020 but fitting out the museum was held up by the first lockdown. Work resumed in the summer and the museum opened in October 2020. In common with other museums, they were forced to close for the second and third lockdowns but are now open two days a week.

No fewer than three museums opened in May 2021 and all of them had been some years in development. In London’s Covent Garden, Bow Street Police Museum occupies part of the former Bow Street Police Station, which closed in 1992. The adjacent magistrate’s court closed in 2006 and a hotel developer purchased the empty building in 2017. As a condition of granting planning permission for the hotel, Westminster City Council stipulated that a museum be created on the site. An independent curator was commissioned in 2019 and the museum, run by a charity, opened less than two years later.

A cell inside the Bow Street Police Museum. Above a narrow dark wooden bench are displays of photographs and text.
A cell display at Bow Street Police Museum. Photo by Matt Brown

Also in London, Southwark Council redisplayed some of the collection formerly on show in the Cuming Museum, which closed in 2013 after a fire, in the new Southwark Heritage Centre & Walworth Library. Objects are displayed in cases throughout the library, but there is also a separate gallery dedicated to the borough’s heritage. Originally intended to be completed in December 2020, the opening was postponed by five months although it is unclear whether the delay was due to the pandemic.

The third museum to open in May was The Great British Car Journey in Derbyshire. The brainchild of Richard Usher, the collection of cars designed and made in Britain began with an offer of a single car and over the course of four years grew to almost 150 vehicles. The cars are displayed chronologically and around thirty-two are available for visitors to drive. The museum was originally scheduled to open in 2020, but two of the founders faced health problems and the pandemic also contributed to the delay.

The following month, a small local authority museum opened in at the town hall in Leigh, Greater Manchester. The town hall houses the archives of Wigan Borough Council and has undergone a major refurbishment. Originally due to be completed in April 2020, the project was significantly delayed by the pandemic and the town hall eventually reopened in June 2021. Objects from the archives are displayed in a new purpose-built exhibition space that illustrates the history and culture of the borough.

Displays at the Archives Exhibition in Leigh Town Hall. Display panels surround a black metal spinning wheel. An old barber's chair can be seen behind.
Leigh Town Hall Archives Exhibition. Photo by Mark Liebenrood

A major new museum in the Scottish Borders also opened in June 2021, after years of planning. The Great Tapestry of Scotland, in Galashiels, displays a 160-panel tapestry that tells a people’s story of Scotland. A thousand stitchers contributed to the project, which was originally the idea of author Alexander McCall Smith. The tapestry itself first went on show in 2013 and toured a number of venues in Scotland. Plans for a permanent home were in development from 2014 and Galashiels was chosen as the site in 2016. The museum is part of plans to regenerate the town and received capital funding from various bodies including the Scottish Government.

Three museums focused on railway heritage opened in August and September, and all of them were in development well before the pandemic began. A new museum inside Glasgow Central railway station opened in August, having been planned since at least 2019. Developed in collaboration with students from the Glasgow School of Art, the museum tells the story of the station from 1879 with a wide range of objects. Unlike the other museums mentioned here, which are all directly open to the public, this one is only accessible during guided tours of the station.

Interior of Glasgow Central Station Museum. On the left wall is a large illuminated station clock, and on the right wall are lamps, signals and other objects.
Glasgow Central Station Museum. Photo courtesy of Network Rail

Along similar lines is the Doncaster Rail Heritage Centre, which opened in September after years of planning by Heritage Doncaster. The Centre is housed in the Danum complex that includes a library and two other museums, and the core of the collection comes from Doncaster Grammar School’s Railway Society, which began collecting in 1948. The National Railway Museum has loaned two locomotives, both built in Doncaster, to complement the other exhibits.

The most recent of these railway museums to open is in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire. The Weighbridge Museum is the result of years of work by the Bishop’s Castle Railway Heritage Society. The project began in 2017 with a derelict weighbridge building, and after sustained effort from a group of volunteers and some professional builders, the museum opened in September 2021. It records the history of the Bishop’s Castle Railway, opened in 1865, that joined the town to Craven Arms, ten miles away.

There are a few museums that opened in this period where we know much less about how long they were in development before opening. One was the first new museum to open after the initial UK lockdown was lifted. It is dedicated to the footballer Duncan Edwards, and opened in Dudley in the West Midlands in August 2020. Situated above a shop and run by a charitable foundation that was founded two years earlier, the museum tells the story of Edwards, who played for Manchester United. He was amongst the team members in the 1958 Munich air crash and died in hospital fifteen days later at the age of twenty-one. The museum includes a display on the Munich disaster and period rooms focussed on Edwards’ life.

Also opened in August 2020 was a new museum devoted to Cockney Heritage. It was founded by George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham. It isn’t clear how long George had been planning the museum for, but he began collecting cockney heritage sixty years ago after becoming concerned about that heritage being lost. The museum features a mock-up of a nineteenth-century street and a display of pearly king and queen suits adorned with mother-of-pearl buttons. Traditionally a cockney is anyone born within the sound of London’s Bow Bells, but the Original Cockney Museum is in Epsom, Surrey, a site chosen for its much lower running costs than central London.

Exterior of the National Film and Science Fiction Museum in Milton Keynes. A two-storey building in stone or concrete, with large windows. Through an upstairs window can be seen figures including a dinosaur, Kung Fu Panda and a silver dalek.
The National Film and Science Fiction Museum in Milton Keynes. Photo courtesy of the museum.

Lastly, Milton Keynes gained a new independent museum in August 2021 with the opening of the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum. Building work was underway in December 2020, but we don’t know how long the museum was in development before that. The collection includes costumes, props, and images from film and television productions including Star Wars, James Bond, and Harry Potter. Run by a charity, the museum is also connected to a company that runs events for film and comics fans.

The pandemic has doubtless presented numerous challenges to museums, but it has not prevented many new museum projects from coming to fruition. Some of them had been in development for years, with the collection now on show at the Malton and Norton Heritage Centre being formally established a decade earlier and the Great Tapestry of Scotland first going on show in 2013. Other projects have had shorter timescales, but many of them have been delayed by lockdowns. We began our research into this period expecting it to be marked by permanent closures, so it has been a welcome surprise to see so many museums opening.

Mark Liebenrood

(header image by Leo Reynolds)

Categories
Lab News

Mapping Museums is Dead. Long Live Mapping Museums

The Mapping Museums Team in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore.
The Mapping Museums Team in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore.

(Header image: The Mapping Museums team in an online meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore)

Today marks the official end of the Mapping Museums research project. There were certainly times when I thought that we’d never finish. The process of collecting information on museums open in the UK since 1960 sometimes felt interminable, and I began to regret museums opening almost as much as them closing because it means we had to enter them into the database. Writing the report on data, a statistical analysis of changes within the UK museum sector, seemed to take years, as did my attempts to work out local authority hierarchies across the UK. I could have happily skipped those learning curves. And I think my colleagues felt similarly as they collected and checked museum details, created visualisations of data, discovered and fixed bugs in the system, and coded hundreds of thousands of words of interview transcripts.

It has been a huge and at times trying enterprise. Yet the moments of complaint were utterly outweighed by the pleasures of the research. I’ve learned a lot and seen how quantitative and qualitative research can be mutually informative and how interdisciplinarity can push research in new directions. In developing data and data visualisations, I’ve been forced to think more precisely than before about how museums are defined and classified, and the ethics of doing so. My sense of the UK museum sector has changed. I stopped thinking of it as a relatively bounded and stable territory and started seeing it as a mass of overlapping entities that chopped and churned. I’d never really thought about museums closing before, whereas now they seem to be much more fragile entities. And the interview-based work made me rethink the whole notion of a museum founder: not only the notion of the individual founder beloved of conventional institutional narratives, but the DIY curator that features in popular journalism and grass roots histories.

I am also enormously proud of what we have collectively achieved. If you haven’t already, do please have a look at the website, which provides access to a searchable database of over 4000 museums, the project report, articles, and many other resources including transcripts of interviews at around fifty small museums. The final monograph, provisionally titled ‘The People’s Museums’ is finished pending peer reviews and, fingers crossed, will be published sometime next year.

That work has depended heavily on the interest, input, and forbearance of too many people to name, although I would like to thank three groups and one individual who have been particularly important: the Museum Development Officers who questioned, checked, and contributed to our data; the hundreds of museum volunteers and staff members who explained how and why they set up their own museums; the Advisory Board who helped us negotiate the museum sector; and Phil Gregg made sure the systems were maintained and that we didn’t lose our data. We are very grateful to all of them. And at the risk of lapsing into an Oscars-style speech, I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues in the research team: Andrea Ballatore, Toby Butler, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Nick Larsson, Mark Liebenrood, Jake Watts, and especially the Co-Investigator Alexandra Poulovassilis. It really has been a pleasure to work with such an expert and committed group of people. For me, the project has been more than the sum of its parts: something that only happens when there is genuine collaboration.

Mapping Museums is dead but Mapping Museums lives on. We are working to keep the database up to date for as long as possible. It has been widely used and we want to keep it operational. Doing so depends in part on the ongoing contribution of others, so please carry on sending us updates and edits (contact us here). Several of us are also continuing to work together on the new ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ research project. That will conclude in the summer of 2022 with a report that leads on from the Mapping Museums research. We hope to launch the publication with a seminar and party to make up for the one that we missed in March 2020. You are all invited.

Fiona Candlin

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Micromuseums in the pandemic

A large building covered in scaffolding, the uuper part of which is wrapped in plastic sheeting that reflects the sunlight. A sign for the Heritage Lottery Fund is affixed to the bottom left of the scaffold. A road runs past, leading off to the right.
The Museum of North Craven Life covered in scaffolding.

How have small, independent museums coped during the pandemic? To find out more I talked to the staff at five museums, all of which are led by volunteers. Their experiences were very varied but it was striking that none of them had struggled financially, indeed one had flourished beyond all expectation, and that the main challenges concerned their volunteers.

Brynmawr and District Museum in the South Wales Valleys is a local history museum with a strong focus on furniture made as part of the Brynmawr Experiment, a Quaker scheme aimed at providing employment in the area during the 1920s and 30s. They took the most lo-fi approach to the pandemic of the museums that we visited in that they simply shut the building and remained closed until June 2021. Like other museums in Wales they were automatically awarded a business rates grant and this covered their gas and electricity bills, which were lower than previous years. Volunteers checked the building on a twice-weekly basis and took advantage of closure to repair some faulty lighting, replace the blinds on the windows, and have the carpet deep cleaned. Otherwise they waited for when they could re-open. The museum has a core group of around ninety supporters who pay an annual subscription and meet for coffee every Thursday morning. Vivienne Williams, one of the original founders and the museum secretary said that everyone had missed the museum. ‘It’s a hub, a social hub’, she explained, ‘they just love the place’. Despite being in her eighties, Viv had no concerns about returning to the museum and said that her fellow volunteers felt likewise: when we spoke, Covid rates were low in the area and the group had all been double vaccinated.

Four men wearing long aprons stand in a furniture workshop. Two are sanding and planing wood, another assembling parts, a third appears to be preparing varnish. A chair stands on its back feet in the foreground, its frame held together with long metal clamps.
Workers at the Brynmawr Factory 1939, People’s Collection Wales

When I asked Viv if they had developed the museums online activity during the pandemic, she replied ‘No, no, no, nothing like that, we’re all too old for that, Fiona’. Paul Cowan, one of the co-founders and chair of the Pewsey Heritage Centre in Wiltshire made exactly the same remark. Like Brynmawr Museum, they had more or less mothballed throughout the pandemic with two Local Restrictions Support grants from Wiltshire council enabling them to cover costs. These grants went to business-rate payers to help alleviate loss of income during the pandemic. 

A large stone building with a pitched roof. Large glazed entrance doors with grey frames are topped by an etched sign entitled heritage centre around a line diagram of a wheel. The entrance is flanked by white painted arched windows, two on each side. A small clock is above, just below the angle of the roof.
Pewsey Heritage Centre

When we spoke in May 2021, Paul was worried about having enough volunteers to re-open on a regular basis. The museum, which is housed in a Victorian foundry and concentrates on the local history of the area, usually opens six days a week and they need between 35 and 40 people to keep running. There are two stewards on duty at any time, while other volunteers clean the building, or organise and run events that help generate an income. Most of the volunteers are elderly. Four died during the pandemic (although not from Covid) and many of the others were uneasy about coming back. However, five new volunteers from a different demographic had joined the team. One woman had commuted to London on a daily basis and during the pandemic had started working from home. She suddenly had four extra hours a day at her disposal. Another new volunteer worked at a nearby laboratory and had felt it was time to put something back into the community. In Pewsey restrictions on movement led to residents having greater available time and on focusing their attention on their immediate area, and this resulted in younger volunteers coming forwards. Even so, the museum group still needs more help.

Ingrow Loco

There were no such problems with volunteers returning to Ingrow Loco, a railway museum in Keighley, North Yorkshire. The rolling stock is regularly hired out for use by heritage railways or for special events and so it has to meet modern safety standards and is subject to ongoing testing and maintenance. The museum chairman, Keith Whitmore, explained that ‘a lot of our volunteers are of an age, but nevertheless the engineers were very keen to come back and do some workshop tasks’. The volunteers argued that maintaining the rolling stock was essential work and was therefore permitted under pandemic regulations. The trustees did a risk assessment, took advice from one of their trustees who was also a medic, and then agreed that volunteers could return to work if they socially distanced. Keith said ‘you’ve also got to take wellbeing into account: not just the Covid virus but mental health as well’. For the volunteers, working at the museum was sufficiently important that it overrode their other concerns.

The entrance to Ingrow Loco museum. The building is constructed from large blocks of warm yellow stone and the two doors are painted in burgundy red. A sign above the entrance reads Ingrow Loco in gold on a deep red background. Below is a smaller curved sign that reads Bahamas. A cobbled road leads off to the right where it meets a ramp descending from the side of the building.
Ingrow Loco

Unlike any of the other museums we visited, Ingrow Loco re-opened in the summer and autumn of 2020. The museum is on the Keighley and Worth Valley Heritage Railway and in normal circumstances the steam locomotives stop outside, dropping off potential visitors. However, during the pandemic, the railway decided to run a non-stopping service as having groups of people getting on and off made it difficult to manage social distancing. As a result, potential museum visitors just went steaming past. To make matters worse, the railway normally subsidised a vintage bus tour that enabled visitors to take the train one way and then return by road, stopping off at villages along the way. This had benefits for Ingrow Loco in that it brought more visitors to the door. Under financial pressure, the railway withdrew those funds and the bus service ceased, further reducing the number of museum visitors.

The furlough scheme and business grants helped Ingrow Loco manage its costs when closed. Once they opened they were eligible for a Local Restrictions Support Grant (open) that mitigated reduced income and they successfully applied for National Lottery Heritage Emergency Funds. These helped subsidise the vintage bus tour and thereby increase footfall to both the museum and the railway. It also enabled them to install contactless payment and to promote the 45596 Bahamas locomotive. Careful marketing generated interest in the south of England and for the first time since the 1960s the Bahamas ran on a number of rail tours that departed from London, generating income to help cover the costs of maintaining the engine. This year the museum re-opened in July and had a busy August, with visitors returning in greater numbers, although they are still below the numbers required to break even. 

Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre

Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre was unable to re-open, but used the period of closure to their advantage. Samantha Parker differs from the other volunteer staff we talked to by dint of her youth. Having been a trainee at Norfolk Museums Service, she became a volunteer collections manager and trustee at Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre, and was made vice-chair of trustees this summer. She is also looking for paid employment. She explained that when lockdown started their first concern was for their volunteers. As Sam said ‘we didn’t want them to think they’d been abandoned’ and they duly set up a WhatsApp group and arranged Saturday zoom lunchtimes for when volunteers would usually be on-site. As at Pewsey Heritage Centre, many of the volunteers were vulnerable and were shielding, and others were uneasy about returning. The ensuing lack of stewards meant that the visitor centre was unable to re-open during summer 2020. Others, particularly those involved in maintaining the exhibitions, were keen to come back and in spring 2021, they redecorated the building. The site was originally a World War 2 airbase and the buildings are badly insulated, cold, and expensive to heat, and so are usually kept closed over the winter and for the rest of the year they are open to the public, which makes the timing of any major maintenance work difficult. On this occasion, volunteers could repaint the walls in a socially distanced way and in relative warmth.

A single-storey pink building with two smaller extensions stands at an angle to our viewpoint. A black door at the right-hand end of the building, and small rectangular windows punctuate the length of the buidling just below the roofs. The building is surrounded by grass, with a path running in front of it. Above is a blue sky with light cloud. Telegraph wires run across the image and a pole stands to the left of the building.
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre

Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre was eligible for business grants that covered their basic outgoing, and they got a North Kesteven District Council restart grant that allowed them to redevelop the kitchen and run a café. With the centre’s costs in hand, the trustees started to meet on a weekly basis to plan in the long term. They had been intending to apply for Community Interest Status, and being closed to the public gave them the time to do so. It also prompted them to look more closely at the organisation and they considered each trustee role in detail, how to diversify their trustees, volunteer recruitment, governance, and their other activities. These meetings culminated in a ten-year strategic plan and in recruiting a new trustee who promptly led on a successful bid for Cultural Recovery Funding. This enabled them to purchase PPE, to employ a freelancer to improve their digital presence, and to open an online shop. They re-opened over the summer of 2021. The café has been a hit and they are already planning for next year.

Museum of North Craven Life

Ingrow Loco and Metheringham Airfield Visitor centre both successfully fund raised during the pandemic. The Museum of North Craven Life in Settle, North Yorkshire took that to a different level. The museum occupies a seventeenth-century Grade 1 listed historic house that has variously been a farmhouse, a bakery, warehouse, furniture shop, fish and chip shop, bank, and salvage business. In 2019 Anne Read who had co-founded the museum in 1977 stepped down as its Honorary Curator. The new incumbent Heather Lane, who had previously managed the redevelopment of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, took up the post in autumn of that year, intending it to be a project for her semi-retirement. One of Heather’s first moves was to have the building surveyed by Historic England and unfortunately they found that the building was in worse condition than anyone had previously realised. The roof was leaking badly, some of the timbers were rotten, floors were sagging, there was no insulation, and the windows needed replacing. There were also other problems. The museum café was at the opposite end of the building to the kitchen and catering staff had to walk back and forth through the reception area, tea-trays in hand.

A large building covered in scaffolding, the uuper part of which is wrapped in plastic sheeting that reflects the sunlight. A sign for the Heritage Lottery Fund is affixed to the bottom left of the scaffold. A road runs past, leading off to the right.
The Museum of North Craven Life covered in scaffolding.

They were also short of volunteers. There were particular conditions at the Museum of North Craven Life that underpinned this problem. In 2018 a new heritage development officer had introduced a more professional approach to curating and while this raised standards it also marginalised some of the volunteers. As Heather explained, the volunteers previously had total responsibility for exhibitions. Now, feeling that someone else could do the work they stepped back. The sense that they had to step up or no-one else would had been a strong motivating force for the group, and that was now lost. The change in process loosely coincided with Anne stepping down. Recognising that it was the end of an era several other long-term volunteers decided to do likewise. Heather wanted to go back to the original model and for the volunteers to be ‘completely engaged in the research so they feel like there’s something really worthwhile in coming in and working. There might need to be a bit of steering, but we’re not there to say this is how you do an exhibition’.

And then the pandemic started. Heather started applying for funding and was awarded substantial grants from the National Lottery Heritage Emergency Fund and both rounds of Cultural Recovery Funding, as well as smaller grants from the East Riding council and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She also recruited a recently retired chartered accountant, Richard Greenhalgh as trustee and treasurer. Like Heather he was slightly taken aback by the magnitude of the task in hand, commenting that ‘I didn’t expect to be running a small company with hundreds of thousands pounds worth of grants going through it. I thought it was going to be a “on the back of an envelope” type of post’. 

The accrued funding covered the refurbishment of the building in line with heritage standards. Window frames and timbers were replaced, and the building was replastered using traditional techniques that allow the structure to breathe. The wood ash and horse hair required for lime mortar and plaster was supplied by local residents who left it in large bins outside the museum. An old garage immediately next to the café was converted into a convenient and good-sized kitchen, and the previous kitchen was transformed into an archive, providing space for a recently acquired collection of around one thousand glass negatives and numerous prints. The pictures were taken by the Horners, a local photography firm run by three generations of the same family between 1860 and 1960 and depict Settle and its residents, often showing the same people over a number of decades.

The funding also paid for new IT systems and for two heritage development officers to be appointed. Kirsty Mitchell was hired for six months and she overhauled recruitment for the volunteers and trustees, surveyed the volunteers and worked on ways to keep them involved during the pandemic. She set up a Tuesday tea break with mini-lectures on what was happening behind the scenes at the museum. Caitlin Greenwood re-organised the museum shop and commissioned a new website, working closely with the designers to put existing exhibitions online. She also began planning and co-curating new exhibitions with volunteers and a group of local historians. A freelancer was hired to develop online resources for schoolchildren at Key Stages 2 and 3, and a new group of dedicated volunteers are digitising the Horner collection. As Heather said, ‘it’s been really extraordinary to have a pause and to put the museum back on its feet. The museum had to be made sound, we needed to have good infrastructure, to rebuild our relationship with volunteers, and do some business planning. Those were the essentials and with the grant funding we’ve been able to do pretty much all of that’. 

A large building constructed from varying sizes of stone blocks. Numerous windows of different shapes and sizes punctuate the frontage. Two black entrance doors with steps in front are to the left and centre.
The Folly, home to the Museum of North Craven Life, in June 2021

Then, in May 2021, just as the museum was preparing to re-open to the public, a huge crack appeared in the tower housing the central staircase. While it is free to go into the downstairs spaces, there is an admissions charge for the main exhibitions, which are housed upstairs. The crack meant that the upper floors could not be re-opened, which had serious implications for their income, as Heather said, ‘We’re looking at a black hole in our revenue’. Fortunately the café had did extremely well over the summer, generating just enough income to tide the museum through a few more months, and Heather is now in the process of applying for further grants, both to have structural work done on the tower, and to cover the ongoing shortfall in income.

Benefits and difficulties

During the pandemic, small independent museums had the advantage of being able to easily close. Their running costs are generally quite low and the Local Restrictions Support Grant was sufficient to pay their immediate bills. Ingrow Loco and the Museum of North Craven Life furloughed their paid cleaning, catering, front of house and project staff, but in both cases the senior management roles are held by volunteers who were able to carry on working during lockdown. Thus, the strategic work necessary for re-development and re-opening could continue without incurring cost, as was also the case at Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre.

Ingrow Loco struggled the most because they re-opened and actively worked to attract an audience, which proved difficult due to circumstances beyond their control. For both Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre and the Museum of North Craven Life, the pandemic gave the staff time to recalibrate, to rethink their organisation, and to apply for grants. Although it was personally demanding for many of those involved, on a whole range of levels, the closure of the museums proved an opportunity rather than a disaster.

Volunteers and trustees

For me, the most consistent theme to emerge across the five conversations was that of the volunteers. It was clear that the museums often played a central role in the lives of the volunteers, particularly at Brynmawr Museum and Ingrow Loco, and that during lockdown they had felt the loss of the social interaction and practical activity that it usually offered. It was also noticeable that participation differed considerably depending on the volunteers’ roles. At Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre, the people who usually stewarded the exhibitions did not generally participate in the zoom lunchtimes and were reluctant to return to the museum whereas those who had a curatorial role were ‘champing at the bit’ to return to work. A similar situation obtained at Pewsey Heritage Centre. They also struggled to find enough people to supervise the museum during opening hours, but simultaneously had new volunteers coming forwards to take on the more complicated tasks of accessioning the collections. It may be that the more committed and enthusiastic volunteers are those that have the more complex roles. Alternatively, having a challenge and responsibility may create and reinforce commitment. All the people we spoke to are themselves examples of highly committed volunteers undertaking complex and responsible work, particularly Sam and Heather.

Almost all the museums wanted or needed to recruit new and younger volunteers. This was particularly urgent in Settle where a core group of long-standing volunteers had all simultaneously retired. Again one of the issues here was that they had less responsibility than previously and were feeling a little disenfranchised. But it was also noticeable that a combination of strategic recruiting and the effects of the pandemic meant that museums were able to attract new people and a wider range of people than previously. And finally, it was clear that the trustees, who are also volunteers, and especially new trustees with particular specialisms were key to improving the museums’ capacities and offer during the pandemic.

Fiona Candlin

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Funding for UK museums during the pandemic

Looking down into a circular maze made of tall green hedges. The centre of the maze can be seen at the upper left.

When the pandemic first broke, commentators forecasted large-scale closures in the UK museum sector.  In fact, as we discussed in our previous blog, there have been very few permanent closures.

Emergency funding has had a direct bearing on how museums have weathered the past year. Given that our project ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ examines risk, closure, and resilience in the UK museum sector during the COVID crisis, it is important for us to understand what emergency funding was on offer and to whom. In particular, we wanted to know whether there had been any gaps in the funding – if certain types of museums had been ineligible for funding – and so we duly embarked on compiling a list of the funding streams available to museums. We noted the source of funding, who administered it, the aims of each funding stream, total money allocated, the maximum and minimum amounts on offer to each institution, and the eligibility criteria. The list grew and grew.

In this blog we make our spreadsheet available for general use. Please let us know if you can fill in any of the blanks or if you can add to, clarify, or correct the information we present here. 

Download the data (Excel file in xlsx format; last updated 16 July 2021)

Initial Observations

In order to help us make sense of our expanding list we spoke to people who had been involved in organising or allocating the funding. Here we make some brief, preliminary observations on funding during the pandemic. This is work in progress so, again, we welcome any comments.

In total, over fifty new funding streams were open to museums. Some organisations re-allocated existing funding, and new funds were made available, principally through the Cultural Recovery Fund.

Large numbers of organisations were involved in allocating and administering funding to museums. These include: Arts Council England; Arts Council Northern Ireland; Art Fund; Business Wales; CADW; Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy; Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; Federation of Museums and Galleries in Wales; Garfield Weston Foundation; HM Revenue and Customs; Historic England; Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government; Museums Archives, Libraries Division Wales; Museums Development Network; Museums Galleries Scotland; National Lottery Heritage Fund; Northern Ireland Museums Council; HM Treasury; Visit Wales; and around 400 local authorities. Some of these organisations administered several funding streams and some organisations collaborated on providing grants. In some cases one organisation provided the funding and another oversaw its allocation, for example National Lottery Heritage Funds provided bulk of the funding for the Emergency Recovery Funds, but it was administered by Arts Council England. 

Some funding was available to museums across the UK, other streams were particular to England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or combinations thereof. The grants had different criteria including governance, accreditation status, and the museums’ financial position.

The Emergency and Cultural Recovery Funds were open to museums at risk. In the first instance, this meant that they had less than three months operating costs. However, there was a lack of clarity about the status of financial reserves that had been earmarked for specific projects. Arts Council England report that they were strict about insisting on the use of reserves, apart from when they were legally restricted to a designated use, whereas the National Lottery Heritage Fund took a more lenient view. 

Museums were also been eligible for a number of grants and other support schemes that were aimed at businesses more generally. These included the job retention scheme, Statutory Sick Pay rebates, VAT deferral, various government-backed loans, and rate relief. As was the case for the targeted grants, this business support has been administered by a range of different bodies.

The number of funding streams and the variety of their remits makes it extremely difficult to establish whether particular types of museums fell through the gaps. However, there do seem to have been some pinch points:

  • Small museums often only required small amounts of funding, for instance for PPE or to help staff work from home. The first major grant, the Emergency Response fund had a minimum of £35,000. Thus in the first instance, there was no available funding for small museums.
  • England used the same £35,000 threshold for the Cultural Recovery Fund funding stream. Other national bodies had a much lower threshold for grants. In Wales there was no minimum. The Treasury discouraged Arts Council England from offering lower grants because of the amount of administration involved, and as things stood, they processed more than 6,000 applications in the first six months of the pandemic.
  • Accredited museums were directed to apply for funding to ACE, MALD and Museums Galleries Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Museums Council as appropriate, with non-accredited museums being directed to the National Lottery Heritage Fund. As the National Lottery Heritage Fund had a minimum threshold of £3,000, non-accredited museums could usefully access smaller grants whereas accredited museums could not. In practice, however, there was a degree of blur between the two schemes with some accredited museums also gaining funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Small grants with no minimum threshold were later made available across the UK by the Museums Development Network and Art Fund.
  • The National Lottery Heritage Fund specified that applicants had to already be in receipt of public money. That is, they had already received funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund or an arms-length body. Museums that had never received funding were ineligible to apply.
  • Local Authority museums have to go through internal council procedures in order to gain permission to apply for external funding. In these cases, much depended on the responsiveness, capacity and flexibility of the individual council. Similar conditions apply to many University museums.

Plotting the different funding streams and their remits is a challenge and in a few cases it has not been clear to us whether museums were eligible. We were unsurprised to hear that some museums also struggled to negotiate this complex terrain and that staff from the Museums Development Network had to act as translators and guides for some of the smaller museums. Yet, despite the complexity of emergency funding, the lack of closures indicates that the schemes were collectively successful in helping museums through this difficult period.

Over the next few months, we will be reporting in more detail on how the different types of museums have fared during the pandemic, and the specific challenges they have managed and continue to face.

Fiona Candlin and Mark Liebenrood. July 2021.

(Image by Adam Heath on Flickr)

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum closure during the pandemic

black and white photo of a metal gate. A chain is wrapped several times around the bars and locked with a padlock.

When museums first closed to visitors in March 2020 as a result of the national lockdown, their prospects seemed poor. Andrew Lovett, Chair of the Association of Independent Museums thought that the impact of the pandemic made it inevitable some museums would ‘just run out of cash and go to the wall’, with collections potentially being lost. Likewise, the director of Arts Council England was concerned that major arts organisations would be put in real jeopardy by the crisis and that some might not survive, and other commentators similarly forecasted mass closures. In fact, only nine museums in the UK have permanently closed over the past year, significantly less than in previous years (there were 26 permanent closures in 2017 and 16 in 2018), and only one of those closures can be linked to the COVID crisis. In this blog we briefly review the reasons why they closed their doors.

A circular dark green sign for the Pembrokeshire Candle Centre hangs in front a building with mauve flowers below.
Pembrokeshire Candle Centre

In two cases the museum closed when the owner retired. In September 2020, Inger John, who had run the Pembrokeshire Candle Makers Centre in Wales, announced that she had used up her remaining wax, was stopping production, and that she would be closing the associated museum. The museum exhibits were offered for sale. A military museum at Fort Paull, a Napoleonic fortress in Yorkshire, announced that it was closing in early 2020. At the age of eighty, the owner and director had decided to sell the site and retire. He was keen to find a buyer who would preserve the attraction, and a group of enthusiasts formed a company with a view to bidding for the property, but they were unable to raise sufficient funds. The contents of the museum were sold at auction in early 2021.

Entrance gates at Fort Paull. Brick walls stand either side of black gates hung with heraldic shields. Two lifesize soldiers stand on the walls above, either side of a large Fort Paull sign.
Fort Paull

Four museums closed due to the loss of their premises, although why this happened varies. The Commando Museum opened in 1993 at the Spean Bridge Hotel near Fort William. The property later changed hands and with redevelopment pending, the volunteers started looking for alternative accommodation. When that proved unsuccessful, they put the exhibits into storage until such time that a new venue could be found. Staff at the Maritime Museum in Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex found themselves in a similar situation. The museum was housed in a historic lifeboat house owned by Tendring council who in 2015 announced a rent hike, to be introduced in steps. The volunteers were keen to relocate since the building was cold, damp and situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, so footfall was low, but two attempts at relocation fell through, and the museum had to close. The collections are in storage.

Inside the Commando Museum. In the foreground is a mannequin dressed in commando uniform in a glass case.
The Commando Museum
Walton-on-the-Naze Maritime Museum. A building with a blue-painted lower storey and a brick and tile upper storey with a pitched roof and a white-painted oriel window. A red and white sign reads The Old Lifeboat House..
Walton-on-the-Naze Maritime Museum

The Metropolitan Police Service Museum Heritage Centre also found itself out of a home, in this case, when the building changed use. Run by the police, and part of that service, the building was moved to secure level operational status, making it off limits to the general public, and the Heritage Centre was duly closed. It is being relocated to a new space in Woolwich, which will open later this year, but it does not have a dedicated exhibition area. Although the Heritage Centre will continue to function as an archive and repository, and although it has objects on loan to other museums, it is no longer a museum in its own right. And the Bruntingthorpe Aircraft Museum in Leicestershire closed in the summer of 2020 when the site was sold. According to an enthusiasts’ forum the land was owned by the Walton family and while David Walton had supported the museum over many years, other family members had opted to sell the land for redevelopment as a massive carpark. The owners of the aircraft were given until the October of that year to vacate the site.

  • A large aeroplane stands on grass. It is emblazoned with the words Airbus Skylink.
    Bruntinghthorpe Aircraft Museum
  • The forecourt of a military building. Jeeps in camouflage are parked and a Union jack flies from a flagpole in the background.
    Ashworth Barracks

Elsewhere, finances were an issue. The Victoria Cross Trust opened the Ashworth Barracks Museum in Doncaster in 2014 to house their collection of military artefacts. In 2020 they announced its closure, commenting that running a museum had never been among its core objectives, rather they had been established to maintain war graves. No reasons for the closure were given but the lease on the premises was due to expire in June 2020 and the trust had been struggling to generate enough income to cover the museum’s overheads. Parts of their collection were loaned to Sheffield with other exhibits going into storage.

All the museums we have mentioned so far were small, unaccredited, and with the exception of the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre, run by private owners or voluntary groups. The Falconer Museum in Forres on the North East coast of Scotland was an accredited local authority museum, and indeed the only museum in the Moray area that was funded by the local council, two others having been closed in the previous six years. Faced with budget cuts of around £10m, in 2019, the council decided to close the museum service with estimated savings of around £87,000 per year. The museum was established in 1871 and exhibited artefacts belonging to the Victorian geologist and botanist Hugh Falconer and his brother Alexander, as well as social history, archaeology and world heritage collections of national and international significance. Attempts to find a third party to run the museum were unsuccessful, not least because the building is in need of repair, and the museum remains mothballed.

General view of the Falconer Museum. Objects can be seen in glass cases on a gallery and the ground floor. Above a staircase is a mounted stags head.
The Falconer Museum

The closure of these museums was a subject of regret for the volunteers who had run them, and the groups and local residents who campaigned for their survival. The exception is the Jack the Ripper Museum in London, where news of its imminent closure was met with some delight. The museum was controversial because its founder originally applied for and was granted planning permission for a Museum that focused on women’s history, whereas it actually concentrated on the murder of five East End women. In September the feminist historian Dr Louse Raw discovered that the company had declared insolvency. In their blog ‘F Yeah History’, Natasha Tidd and Helen Antrobus pointed out that the museum suffered from a lack of local trust, that it had responded to controversy by closing down communication, which would have an impact on its public profile, and that with poorly executed exhibits there was little enticement for visitors to return, factors that may have had an impact on its closure. Given that it was a commercial venue reliant on ticket sales, and (so far as we know) did not receive any emergency funding, it is also likely that its insolvency was linked to the pandemic and the consequent lack of income. The building failed to sell at auction in May 2021.

It is likely that the impact of COVID may have been the final nail in the coffin of the Jack the Ripper Museum. Otherwise, what is striking about these closures is that they have little relation to the pandemic and instead are due to other more usual factors such as retirement, the loss of a site, the difficulty of finding new accommodation or changed accommodation, lack of income, and government cuts to local authority budgets, often in combination. As we will discuss in our next blog the availability of emergency funding has made it possible for most museums to survive the past year, although often with considerable human cost since there have been significant cuts to the workforce. The question is whether and how the situation will change over the next year or more. The research team will be monitoring the UK museum sector until 2022 and so do subscribe to our blogs if you would like to receive regular updates.

We would like to thank the Museums Development Network; Museums Galleries Scotland; and Museums and Archives Division, Wales for their help in compiling this information. All our data can be consulted on the Mapping Museums website. Please get in touch if you know of any other museums in the UK that have permanently closed over the past year.

Fiona Candlin May 2021

(Header image by tma)

Categories
Events

New Activist Museums

Four images show, clockwise from top left: a red lipstick with an attached label that reads: "This lipstick was from my wonderful sister who was the first family member to accept and support my transition"; a street installation by the Museum of Homelessness with objects on tall white plinths on a pavement; Matt and Jess Turtle, founders of the Museum of Homelessness, standing in front of the steps of a church - the steps are lined with hundreds of small lights; E-J Scott, founder of the Museum of Transology, who holds a large label with the museum's name on it.
Clockwise from top left: Museum of Transology Object Number: MOT/122. Photo by Katy Davies, courtesy of Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion; Museum of Homelessness street museum installation, London 2020, photograph by Daniela Sbrisny; Matt and Jess Turtle; E-J Scott, photograph courtesy of Sharon Kilgannon @Alonglines Photography.

Please join us for an online event featuring the founders of two new activist museums.

Thursday 6 May, 6pm. Book here.

How do museums respond to the changing world around them? Featuring  the founders of two of these new museums, the Museum of Transology and the Museum of Homelessness, this panel explores the current flowering of museums which focus on social issues. New museums do not always follow established forms and may instead stage temporary exhibitions or pop-up street displays. Listen to a discussion of these new museums and tell us more about your thoughts and ideas on these innovative practices. 

Museum of Homelessness is a social justice museum. They carry out events, exhibitions and research that tackle homelessness and housing inequality. They also campaign and carry out direct practical actions. Jess and Matt Turtle founded Museum of Homelessness in 2015. 

The Museum of Transology is the UK’s most significant collection of material culture surrounding trans, non-binary and intersex lives. It aims to halt the erasure of trans lives from history by enabling trans people to curate their own stories. The MoT was awarded an Activist Museum Award for 2020–21.

This event is part of Birkbeck’s Arts Weeks 2021.

Image: (clockwise from top left) Museum of Transology Object Number: MOT/122. Photo by Katy Davies, courtesy of Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion; Museum of Homelessness street museum installation, London 2020, photograph by Daniela Sbrisny; Matt and Jess Turtle; E-J Scott, photograph courtesy of Sharon Kilgannon @Alonglines Photography.

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museums in the Pandemic: Risk, closure, and resilience

The Museum of the Home in East London viewed through its closed gates. A red and white sign fixed to the gates says 'Reopening early 2021'. The gates are closed with a heavy chain.

The Mapping Museums research team has been awarded £190,000 to investigate and analyse risk, closure, and resilience in the UK museum sector during the pandemic.

Our regular readers will know that we launched the Mapping Museums website and database on 17th March 2020, the first day that museums closed in the UK. We had inadvertently produced a database and a report that could easily have been titled ‘Museums Before the Pandemic’. This new project can be thought of as ‘UK Museums During the Pandemic’ and, we hope, ‘After the Pandemic’. 

Over the next eighteen months we will be keeping track of museum closures and entering that information into the database so that we can see how the shape of the sector changes. Documenting closure can present a challenge. None of the organisations with responsibility for museums have kept records of closure and museums often fade away without fanfare. This means that identifying closure can be slow, partial, and reliant on local knowledge. Likewise, it can be hard to establish which museums may be at risk during the pandemic since that relies on museums reporting on their situation to Arts Council England or the Association of Independent Museums, or other bodies.

In this project we will try to digitally capture change within the sector. Political and market research regularly uses software that scrapes and analyses large swaths of information from websites and social media, and we are adopting this approach to studying the museum sector, developing new text analytics and web mining capabilities. This will enable us to see if museums have recently updated or changed their websites and Facebook pages or if they remain in hibernation. We will also analyse the content of that material – whether they are organising outdoor events, digital exhibitions, or planning for re-opening – and we will be able to slice and analyse digital traffic according to the information on governance, size, subject matter and location that we gathered in the Mapping Museums database. For example, we will be able to assess patterns of response in university museums versus those among independent museums, or analyse how medium-sized local authority museums in Scotland differ from those in the South East.

Data always requires interpretation, and the significance of a response or lack of response may vary depending on the type of museum in question. Thus, we need to understand how museums are behaving and what constitutes risk or resilience across the sector. Are risks of closure different depending on the museums’ location, governance, size or subject matter?  Are risk and resilience always dictated by financial circumstances or do other factors come into play, and if so what? Can we identify museums that are resilient to the pandemic and learn from them?  We will attempt to answer these questions through interview-based research with museum staff, and other museum professionals, and read the data accordingly.

We will be posting monthly updates on research and findings on our blog. Please subscribe if you would like to have those reports delivered automatically by email.  The research is funded by the UKRI AHRC rapid response scheme: Grant Ref: AH/V015028/1.

(Subscribe to email updates using the box at top right on desktop browsers, or below this post on mobile)

Categories
Research Process

Opening a Museum

A display case of numerous old light bulbs with four circled and highlighted in red.

How many people does it take to set up a museum?

Conventional histories of museum founders usually concentrate on individuals – the collector whose artefacts provide the basis for a new institution, and heroic directors or curators who single-handedly drive forward their vision of a museum. In our experience, establishing a museum is a collaborative process.

Eileen Burgess listed the people she worked with in setting up Nidderdale Museum in 1976. There was Jack, her husband, and their son Mark, then a teenager; Muriel Swires, who taught at the same junior school as Eileen; Geoffrey Townley who was headmaster and who brought his sixteen year old son Richard; Richard Jackson, also sixteen, and Richard Townley’s friend; Joan Knightson, a geography teacher; and Joyce Swires a cousin of Muriel’s. She worked as a cashier in a Harrogate department store and negotiated with the managers for the purchase of secondhand display cases and mannequins that were used in the museum; Heather Swires was distantly related to Muriel. She came from a farming family and they gave the museum a collection of redundant agricultural machinery and tools. Eileen said ‘Heather spent most of her time with her sleeves rolled up, very old clothes … rubbing down rusty old equipment and black leading it.  Whenever I think of black leading, I think of Heather, who went home with her hands and arms absolutely black’. Heather came with her husband Dayne and they brought their two daughters, Deborah and Helen, who were fourteen and twelve. Like the teenagers they were also given jobs to do. Elsy Moss kept the Shaw Mills post office & shop with her husband and was the museums’ costume expert. She was also knowledgeable about the lower dale.  Mary Barley was a housewife with a small part-time job in a local firm distributing books to libraries, and complemented Elsy’s knowledge by specialising in the mid-dale & its industries. Tommy Garth was a labourer who had worked on the construction of Scar Reservoir. He had amassed a huge collection of photographs of the waterworks and the dale in general. Joanna Dawson ‘was a pedigree cattle farmer, at a time when being a woman pedigree farmer was quite rare’ and a Methodist preacher. She gave a collection of Methodist ceramics to the museum and curated its exhibition. I asked Eileen if they all had distinct roles. Not really, she said, everyone just turned their hand to whatever was needed, although we were the only people with an estate car so we did a lot of fetching and carrying.

Founders of Nidderdale Museum in 1999, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the museums' opening. Geoffrey Townley, Muriel Swires, Eileen Burgess, Elsy Moss, Mary Barley
Founders of Nidderdale Museum in 1999, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the museums’ opening. Geoffrey Townley, Muriel Swires, Eileen Burgess, Elsy Moss, Mary Barley.
Two mannequins wearing girl guide and brownie uniforms at Nidderdale Museum. A woolen shawl hangs behind them decorated with various cloth badges.
Guide and Brownie costumes on display at Nidderdale Museum

The idea of establishing a new museum, especially local history museums, often arises within an existing group. The possibility of opening a museum in Nidderdale was first mentioned in the tea break at a meeting of the Nidderdale Local History Society. In other cases, the idea of opening a museum was sparked by an event and in Aldbourne, the catalyst was an archaeological dig at the village football field. The ground was about to be refurbished and so local metal detectorists took the opportunity to explore the area. They found all manner of things including a medieval brooch, a small bell, and objects from the American military base that had been in Aldbourne during the Second World War. Terry Gilligan, Alan Heasman, and John Dymond explained that there had been talk in the village of starting a museum for a number of years but finding the objects prompted them to form a heritage group. Over one hundred and twenty people joined. The local council allowed them to use a stone building that had once been a stable, had been converted into public toilets, converted again for use as a youth club, and had since been left empty. Aldbourne Heritage Centre opened in 2016 and they now welcome fans of Dr Who keen to see where the series ‘The Daemons’ was filmed, Americans interested in finding where the Band of Brothers were stationed, and parties of schoolchildren who come to find out about the Great Fire of Aldbourne.

Pub sign The Cloven Hoof on the grass outside The Blue Boar pub in Aldbourne.
The Cloven Hoof pub sign, Aldbourne
A display of Dr Who memorabilia at Aldbourne Heritage Centre. A grey demon with horns, the Master in an embrodered red robe, a soldier wearing Khaki and binoculars. Behind them is a copy of Dr Who magazine commemorating the making of the series The Daemons.
Dr Who display at Aldbourne Heritage Centre

Private museums may involve fewer people and are often the work of a couple. The Micromuseum in Ramsgate that exhibits small computing equipment, the Internal Fire: Museum of Power in West Wales, which is a collection of generators, and Cobbaton Combat Museum in Devon were all set up by husband and wife teams, and in the latter case the couple’s siblings, parents, and later children were also co-opted to help. And even those museums that are ostensibly the work of one or two people usually rely on input from others. Partners, neighbours, friends, and family members may variously help build the museum, make financial loans, pay the mortgage while their spouse devotes their time to the museum, donate objects, hold fund-raising events, take tickets at the door, museum-sit, give guided tours, make cakes for a café and so on.

Setting up a museum almost always depends on the contributions of many people. The work of inspiring founders is inevitably underpinned by the labour of others. Their lower key but essential work is occluded if we concentrate on that of individuals. More significantly, the model of the brilliant leader is not always appropriate. In our experience many micromuseums come out of conversations and of other projects; they are the product of shared ideas and collective effort

Fiona Candlin

Categories
Events

Meet the founders and archive launch

Geoff Burton (RAF Ingham Heritage Centre), Anne Read (Museum of North Craven Life), Steve Allsop (Ingrow Loco Museum and Workshop).

Why would you open a museum? How would you do it? Enjoy an evening of interviews with the founders of small independent museums, hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute. Interviewees will include: Steve Allsop (Ingrow Loco Museum and Workshop), Geoff Burton (RAF Ingham Heritage Centre), and Anne Read (Museum of North Craven Life).

This online event also marks the launch of the Micromuseums Archive. The Mapping Museums project has conducted extensive interview-based research to find out how and why people set up their own museums. The recordings, transcripts, and other materials are all available from the Archives at the Bishopsgate Institute, and the evening will include a glimpse into this archive.

The event is free and will take place on Zoom. Book here: https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/whats-on/activity/archive-launch-mapping-museums

Categories
Research Process

A week in the life

Illustration of a man sitting in an attic room at a desk. The desk is piled high with books and he is reading one of them. A window is open behind him.

What does the Mapping Museums research assistant do all day? I sometimes wonder where all the time goes. Although the vast majority of the four thousand-odd museums listed in the database were added before I really began work on the project, I’ve added well over a hundred new museums and made corrections to the entries for hundreds more. But how do we find out about museums that were not already in the database, and where do all the amendments come from? Here I offer a peek into a ‘typical’ week.

Monday

A friend of the project reports on Twitter a possible new museum she’s spotted while on a bike ride. It turns out that it is not new, but the small private museum has slipped under the Mapping Museums radar, so I add it to the database. Another contact has suggested we check a directory of railway preservation sites to make sure we haven’t missed any railway museums during our searches. I order it from the British Library for my next visit.

Tuesday

I have Google news alerts set up in the hope of spotting museums closing and opening, and I open my email this morning to find an alert for a new museum. All too often these alerts don’t produce anything useful, but on this occasion they have. A new private museum dedicated to the footballer Duncan Edwards has opened above a shop in Dudley, in the West Midlands, so I make a note to add it to the database.

The Mapping Museums database is constantly being updated. When we receive new information for museums currently open, we update our records accordingly. Today I find that a curator has supplied updated details for their museum using the form for editing data, and process the update so that the details are added to the database.

Wednesday

At the British Library for my own PhD research, I also look at the railway preservation directory. At first sight it looks somewhat daunting, as it lists hundreds of railway preservation sites in Britain opened from the 1950s onwards, classified into thirteen types. Each one of these will potentially need to be checked against the database to see whether museums need to be added. I copy the pages I need for processing later.

Looking through copies of Museums Journal I see mention of another museum that I’m not familiar with. It’s in the database, but the news item gives extra information about the museum’s governance that we didn’t have, so I make a note for later.

Sometimes we need to contact museums directly to confirm information, and recently I have been trying to get hold of the administrator of a small military museum in Scotland (the museum came to our attention as part of a list supplied by a liaison officer for regimental museums). The administrator is only on site occasionally, and so far I have missed him each time I’ve called. I miss a call while sitting in the library’s reading room, and when I return it later I have just missed him, but his colleague supplies his email address. By email he confirms the nature of the collection, but does not know when the museum was first opened – he has been in the post for less than two years. One thing I’ve discovered doing this research is that it is quite common for the opening date of museum not to be known by those who run it. A museum’s foundation date is often tacit knowledge, which can easily be lost as staff change. The database currently contains almost five hundred museums for which we do not have a certain opening date, and we record them as date ranges instead based on the best information available.

Thursday

I resume work on a list of museums that another contact has provided us with. They are all in North East England. Not all of them qualify as museums in the way that the project defines them but many do, and for whatever reason some have been overlooked. Small private museums are easily missed, and it would not be possible for the project to have compiled as comprehensive a list as it has without the benefit of local knowledge. One example is the Ferryman’s Hut Museum in Alnmouth, which I add to the database.

Friday

The opening date of a museum is proving elusive. My enquiry to the owners remains unanswered, so I resume searching online. Eventually I track it down in the Gloucestershire volumes of the Victoria County History, an incredibly valuable local history resource.

It’s fortunate that that museum was recorded, but what do you do when a museum has long closed and there are no references to be found online, no matter how hard you search? Well, you might descend the archive.org rabbit hole. As anyone who has followed references in Wikipedia may have noticed, website links stop working all the time – a phenomenon colloquially known as ‘link rot’. The Wayback Machine preserves websites for posterity, keeping copies of those still online as well as many that have long since vanished. In this case we knew that the museum had closed thanks to an estate agent’s website, but when did it open? The website for the tower in the Scottish Borders had fortunately been captured by the wayback machine, and while there was no definitive information about the museum, there was enough to allow a range of dates for the museum’s opening to be recorded.

It’s the end of another week of data collection and checking. That list of hundreds of railway preservation sites will have to wait until another time …

Mark Liebenrood