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.
Barn raising in Lansing (now North York City Centre). Toronto, Canada. Photo: Alexander Galbraith
Over the last few years the Mapping Museums team has collected information on all the UK museums that had been opened since 1960. You can read a detailed analysis of the data in the linked report or see the key findings on the website, but there are five points that we found particularly interesting. These are:
Over 3,000 new museums have opened since 1960.
The museum sector grew continuously from 1960 until 2015,
although growth was concentrated in the 1970s and 1980s.
Most of the museums were small, which is to say they
attracted less than 10,000 visitors a year.
Most of the new museums were independent and were
established by special interest or community groups.
In short, there was a massive boom in the number of small
independent museums, or micromuseums, and this growth was largely propelled by
the work of ordinary people, and not by the foundation of local authority
museums.
Another point that also arrested our interest was that:
Among small independent museums the most popular subject matter was local history, war and conflict, and transport.
For the research team, then, the questions were why did
so many people decide to establish their own museums, why did they do so during
the late-twentieth century, and why the focus on these subject areas?
Dr Toby Butler, one of the post-doctoral researchers on the project, set out to find some answers by conducting a series of interviews with people who had founded micromuseums (See blogs: ‘On the road with the Mapping Museums project’ and ‘Finding museum founders’). The transcripts of those monographs are on the project website. At the same, time, Dr Jake Watts investigated some of the wider socio-economic factors that underpinned the foundation of particular types of museums. The three of us then read through that material, discussed their findings, and planned a co-authored monograph, which I am now writing. We did discuss the possibility of us all writing individual sections but decided that it would be a better read if it has a consistent style and presented a synthesis of our research.
Toby’s interview transcripts run to some 250,000 words of
rich material about the early histories of thirty-eight micromuseums, and Jake
generated extensive material on changes to the railways, car ownership, the
structure of the British army, local history societies and many other topics
that all informed our investigation. Together, they provided me with enough
material for several books, not just one. We can’t decide whether to call it The
Micromuseums Boom or Why thousands of ordinary people decided to open
their own museums, or if it should have a different title entirely. Perhaps
you can let us know what you think.
Guy Farage, co-founder of the Kent and Yeomanry Sharpshooters Museum (opened 1965)
So how do you find a founder of a museum, sometimes years or even decades after they have left or retired? The starting point for me – and the thing that made the task much easier than expected – was the Mapping Museums project database (this will be freely available to the public online next year). After a bit of experimentation, it soon became easy to view the museum distribution on a map and run off lists of them in a certain area, topic or geo-demographic neighbourhood. These were the main attributes we used to ensure that we spoke to a good range of museums across the UK.
For example, when looking for military museums in
Lincolnshire (an easy search on our database, selecting area and topic), there
were more than a dozen that looked promising. I downloaded the data into an
Excel spreadsheet so I could sort them by attributes – this meant I could try
and get a spread of opening dates across the period (1960 to present) and check
their size and governance.
This gave me my shortlist; now the time-consuming part began
– trying to identify the founder(s), figure out if they were still alive and if
they were, attempt to get their contact details.
Calling and emailing the museum was the next step – but
surprisingly this was not always fruitful. Smaller museums are often open
seasonally on a couple of days a week, so timing the approach was essential.
Even then existing staff (or more commonly volunteers) might have started work long
the founder had left the scene. At more recently established museums the
founder was usually still involved, and colleagues were usually happy to make
the introduction. I always offered to share the eventual interview transcript
with the interviewee and the museum, so they could have something for their
help which might contribute to their institutional archive.
Eileen Burgess, co-founder of Nidderdale Museum, Yorkshire (opened 1975)
Inevitably many prospective emails and answerphone messages went unanswered. Then the internet was invaluable– searching current (or old, using web.archive.org) museum websites; online annual reports, the Charity Commission register, newsletters, local press coverage and even obituaries to help piece things together. Usually I could find a name, personal email address or direct phone number of someone involved, gleaned from an old press release or an old appeal for volunteers.
The sixty-year period we were dealing with on the Mapping
Museum project also meant that many founders had died. This made it much more
difficult to find interviewees that set up museums in the 1960s and 70s; mining
industrial museums could also be tricky, perhaps due to the diseases relating
to the industry concerned. In these situations co-founders, colleagues or
curators that had been involved in the early years could sometimes be found
instead.
One thing that surprised me was that few museums had a personal
written account, or interview recording with the founder(s). Occasionally an article,
booklet or press interview would cover something of the founding story, and
some museums have excellent organisational histories on their websites. But detailed
founding accounts of small museums are rare and recorded interviews with museum
founders even rarer.
Once a founder has died, we are left with minutes of early meetings, press cuttings and whatever can be gleaned from the memories of those that experienced the earliest years, if they can be found. I hope this project will encourage staff and founders of independent museums to spend an afternoon recording (or writing) an account of how the museum came about, covering some of the key decisions and turning points in its development. Records like this can really help new staff and volunteers appreciate what they have inherited and help explain the context of the museum to the public.
