Industrial strength
Britain is in a unique position as the home of the industrial revolution, but far more could be done to interpret this story for modern audiences. Geraldine Kendall reports
“It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.”
So wrote JRR Tolkien of Mordor, the hellish land into which he sends his two hapless hobbits in the final instalment of the Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien always said his writing was not allegorical, but the author’s descriptions evoke more than a hint of his childhood home on the edge of the heavily industrialised Black Country region in the West Midlands, which is said to have got its name from the clouds of smoke and soot that shrouded its skies day and night.
To paraphrase another literary giant, Charles Dickens, the industrial revolution was both the best and worst of times: an age of astonishing technological invention and economic success that saw millions of people lifted out of poverty; but also an age that ushered in appalling working conditions, colonialism and industrialised warfare, and laid the ground for the ecological crisis facing the planet today.
No other epoch of history has shaped the modern world quite like it and the UK, as the birthplace and epicentre of the revolution, has the mammoth task of bringing together those disparate strands of the story while preserving its unrivalled industrial heritage for future generations.
It’s a duty that some heritage professionals feel is not being met to its full potential. As industry began to decline from the 1960s onwards, hundreds of small, site-specific museums were established across the UK to preserve the empty mills, mines and factories left behind, often set up as independent trusts and run by volunteers with a direct link to the industries they represented.
Their efforts to preserve this often-challenging material, which included large, dangerous buildings and heavy machinery, were heroic. But although many industrial heritage sites across the UK are thriving – Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire and the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Wales to name just two – there is a feeling that others are now stagnating, attracting only niche enthusiasts and failing to transmit the vitally important stories they hold to wider audiences.
“Some industrial museums have re-mained in a timewarp,” says Oliver Green, a research fellow at the London Transport Museum. “They’ve aged as the people running them have. They’ve got all the stuff but they haven’t found a way to make what they do relevant and exciting for people today – they’re dull.”
Many have not moved beyond the era in which they were established, he adds, offering interpretation that reflects a “rather old-fashioned, male-dominated approach to industry” which is off-putting to today’s more diverse audiences.
This concern about the sector’s narrow approach to interpretation is echoed by Neil Cossons, a former director of London’s Science Museum and a leading authority on industrial heritage.
Knowledge erosion
“There is a failure among museums to place their material in historical context – to make it a part of our wider social and economic history,” Cossons says. “The material is seen as a bit ‘techie’. It’s difficult to explain and so we push it to the back of the shelf. This failure diminishes the value of collections in terms of public understanding.”
Cossons also believes that the UK is underplaying the internationally significant legacy it has inherited, and failing to tap into the growing global interest in the subject found in more recently industrialised countries such as China and Brazil.
“Industrial history is more valued and recognised abroad than in Britain,” Cossons says. “We don’t give enough credence to our World Heritage Sites. We have absolutely outstanding sites and we’ve diminished them. The bit that’s missing is the wider national and international significance of what you’re looking at: you’re looking at something that was actually part of a changing world.”
The UK’s failure to maximise its heritage is also a big loss in economic terms; more visitors could make a huge impact in the UK’s often-deprived former industrial towns and cities.
Another “endemic” issue facing the sector, says Cossons, is the erosion of specialist curatorial expertise, particularly the skills needed to operate obsolete machinery – a loss that is placing some sites and collections in a precarious position.
“A lot of knowledge about the material has ebbed away,” says Cossons. “That material is then written off in the minds of people who don’t understand it.”
Efforts have been made to capture and pass on collections expertise – subject specialist groups such as the Scottish Transport and Industrial Collections network do important work to preserve knowledge – but Cossons says that much broader initiatives are needed to share skills and embed specialist training across the UK sector.
It is an issue that is becoming increasingly pertinent; a 2009 survey by English Heritage found that listed industrial sites in England were more at risk than almost any other heritage building, and that situation is unlikely to have improved after six years of funding cuts across the sector.
Snibston Discovery Museum, which depicts Leicestershire’s coalmining heritage, and the Yorkshire Dales Mining Museum in Earby are facing imminent closure, while a number of other museums are under threat.
But in spite of these challenges, there is a new sense of opportunity in the air. After being somewhat disregarded by successive governments for years, industry is once again becoming fashionable, championed by politicians as a driver of economic growth.
A renewed focus on science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects has taken root in politics. During the coalition government’s time in office, it developed an industrial strategy and allocated a protected budget of £1.1bn a year until 2021 towards developing Stem research and infrastructure across the UK.
Some of this money is funding education and skills development from primary school upwards, and Oliver Green, along with many others in the sector, believes it represents a golden opportunity for industrial museums to tie in with the Stem agenda and use the creative legacy they hold to inspire future innovation.
“Five years ago, no one wanted to be seen at industry – it was all about cosying up to bankers. The UK was seen as a post-industrial society,” says Green. “But recently many politicians are increasingly likely to be seen wearing hard hats on sites. This would be quite a good time for industrial museums to start looking at a new approach.”
One industrial museum that is putting itself at the heart of the Stem agenda is the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi) in Manchester. Cossons cites the city as one of those industrial heartlands that has not yet done enough to capitalise on the global impact of its industrial heritage – but that could be about to change.
In the past year, government funding has flooded in to establish Manchester as a “northern powerhouse” of science and innovation, and Mosi is making a serious effort to maximise the contribution it can make to that agenda.
The museum holds the Stemnet contract for the north-west, coordinating a schools programme that promotes Stem subjects to children and young people. Late last year, it was awarded £3.8m from the government to build a space for contemporary science exhibitions in the museum’s Grade I-listed 19th-century railway warehouse – the first warehouse of its kind in the world.
With an additional capital award of £1.8m from the Wellcome Trust, Mosi is now very close to the £6m it needs for the build. The project is an ideal opportunity to link the city’s status as the birthplace of the industrial revolution with its emerging goal of becoming an international centre for technological innovation, says Mosi’s director, Sally MacDonald.
“It is a symbolic site where we can talk about not only past industrial greatness, but also about a renaissance,” she says. “That’s a powerful thing to convey to visitors.”
Senses and emotions
The exhibition space is one part of Mosi’s wider masterplan to redevelop five listed buildings, create a narrative gallery to tell the story of the museum’s historic setting and bring an operational steam railway back to the site.
This use of working collections never fails to inspire wonder in visitors and is a key advantage that industrial museums possess, says MacDonald, particularly in terms of education.
“If you can demonstrate the processes through working machinery, the fact that you can see things moving illustrates how something works in a way that no picture can,” she says. “Trying to educate people on the scientific principle is not enough. What we can do is work on a range of senses and emotions as a way into learning.”
Another strategy for Mosi is rehabilitating its old industrial buildings, giving them a working role in the modern world while retaining a strong sense of their history.
Andrew Lovett, the director of the recently Designated Black Country Living Museum (just outside Tolkien’s home city of Birmingham), agrees that it is essential for industrial museums to contextualise their collections and demonstrate the links between past and present.
“The stories we tell here can be made relevant in new ways,” Lovett says. “Their legacy is shown in our continued manufacturing and engineering success – it’s all part of a continuum.
“What we’re not about to do is be one step behind the modern world. One of the things on our radar is to develop a space at the site to showcase the best of modern manufacturing and engineering.”
The open-air museum has moved beyond merely explaining how things work and aims to “spark an emotional reaction from the public”, says Lovett. “As memories die, nostalgia for the past needs to be replaced by curiosity and imagination.”
The museum is also broadening its educational resources. Following changes to England’s history curriculum, which now takes a more chronological approach, the site faced being cut off from younger school groups and has expanded its learning programmes to focus not just on history, but on Stem and arts subjects too (somewhat aptly known as the Steam agenda).
“There are lots of links, whether through chemistry, design, maths – there’s a route into the stories we tell through those subjects,” says Lovett.
But not every museum is able to take advantage of the same opportunities, says Ian Bapty, the Historic England-funded industrial heritage support officer for England, who is based at Ironbridge. At the moment, the sector is divided into a “two-tier” system in which many smaller museums are struggling to diversify their audiences and income.
“There’s a distinction between bigger sites and the smaller ones,” says Bapty. “All museums need to get more with it in terms of attracting more sources of income and getting new skills in, but it’s not easy if you’re a volunteer group with just five or six trustees – you might not be set up in a way to accommodate that.
There’s a need for bigger, more sophisticated sites to pass on some of their learning to the smaller sites.” One contemporary agenda that holds significant potential for many former industrial sites is the environmental movement.
‘Massive potential’
“There’s massive potential to explore environmental concerns and look at how technology can help,” says Bapty. Given the link between the industrial revolution and issues such as climate change, some experts have raised the possibility that former industrial sites could be reinterpreted as places of “environmental conscience” that educate people about the ecological impact of industry.
Exploring the negative effects of something that is a strong source of local pride can be a sensitive issue, but Bapty believes this could be mitigated by drawing a clear line between the achievements of the past and the development of cleaner, more efficient technology – demonstrating how “the ingenuity of industrial heritage” can help find solutions to today’s environmental problems.
One smaller museum that is already doing many of these things successfully, says Bapty, is the former Kew Bridge Steam Museum in London, which was recently relaunched as the London Museum of Water & Steam after a £2.4m Heritage Lottery Fund revamp.
Among its new displays, the museum tells a positive environmental story of how water technology was used to solve sewage problems and improve public health.
Its interpretation combines human narratives with working displays of its restored steam pumping engines, retaining a sense of the wonder and power of the technology of old; an approach that has brought the museum a significant increase in new visitors.
The landscape may have changed im-measurably since the days when the Black Country inspired Tolkien’s apocalyptic vision, but those industrial sites that can spark in modern visitors the same visceral emotional reaction that the author once felt should have a bright future ahead of them.
The Museums Association annual conference and exhibition takes place in Birmingham on 5-6 November. See p65 for booking details
One of the unique strengths that industrial museums have is their ability to tap into community pride. This advantage came to the fore during a recent £500,000 restoration project, jointly supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and Barnsley Council, to bring the Newcomen Beam Engine at Elsecar, Yorkshire, back to working order.
As the oldest steam engine still in its original position anywhere in the world, the 1795 structure, which was used to pump water from local collieries, is an internationally significant piece of industrial heritage.
But the local village – which was devastated by the pit closures of the 1980s – had lost a sense of the engine’s huge importance, according to John Tanner, Barnsley’s project development manager, and in 2010 the pump was placed on English Heritage’s At Risk register.
The restoration project aimed to reinstate the engine’s status, mobilising local volunteers and students to assist with the archaeological excavation, restoration and subsequent interpretation scheme.
This gave the wider community a strong sense of investment in the project – so much so that when the restored engine was relaunched on a rainy night last November, with a firework display and an honour guard of locomotives in steam, 2,000 local people turned up to witness it in action.
So wrote JRR Tolkien of Mordor, the hellish land into which he sends his two hapless hobbits in the final instalment of the Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien always said his writing was not allegorical, but the author’s descriptions evoke more than a hint of his childhood home on the edge of the heavily industrialised Black Country region in the West Midlands, which is said to have got its name from the clouds of smoke and soot that shrouded its skies day and night.
To paraphrase another literary giant, Charles Dickens, the industrial revolution was both the best and worst of times: an age of astonishing technological invention and economic success that saw millions of people lifted out of poverty; but also an age that ushered in appalling working conditions, colonialism and industrialised warfare, and laid the ground for the ecological crisis facing the planet today.
No other epoch of history has shaped the modern world quite like it and the UK, as the birthplace and epicentre of the revolution, has the mammoth task of bringing together those disparate strands of the story while preserving its unrivalled industrial heritage for future generations.
It’s a duty that some heritage professionals feel is not being met to its full potential. As industry began to decline from the 1960s onwards, hundreds of small, site-specific museums were established across the UK to preserve the empty mills, mines and factories left behind, often set up as independent trusts and run by volunteers with a direct link to the industries they represented.
Their efforts to preserve this often-challenging material, which included large, dangerous buildings and heavy machinery, were heroic. But although many industrial heritage sites across the UK are thriving – Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire and the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Wales to name just two – there is a feeling that others are now stagnating, attracting only niche enthusiasts and failing to transmit the vitally important stories they hold to wider audiences.
“Some industrial museums have re-mained in a timewarp,” says Oliver Green, a research fellow at the London Transport Museum. “They’ve aged as the people running them have. They’ve got all the stuff but they haven’t found a way to make what they do relevant and exciting for people today – they’re dull.”
Many have not moved beyond the era in which they were established, he adds, offering interpretation that reflects a “rather old-fashioned, male-dominated approach to industry” which is off-putting to today’s more diverse audiences.
This concern about the sector’s narrow approach to interpretation is echoed by Neil Cossons, a former director of London’s Science Museum and a leading authority on industrial heritage.
Knowledge erosion
“There is a failure among museums to place their material in historical context – to make it a part of our wider social and economic history,” Cossons says. “The material is seen as a bit ‘techie’. It’s difficult to explain and so we push it to the back of the shelf. This failure diminishes the value of collections in terms of public understanding.”
Cossons also believes that the UK is underplaying the internationally significant legacy it has inherited, and failing to tap into the growing global interest in the subject found in more recently industrialised countries such as China and Brazil.
“Industrial history is more valued and recognised abroad than in Britain,” Cossons says. “We don’t give enough credence to our World Heritage Sites. We have absolutely outstanding sites and we’ve diminished them. The bit that’s missing is the wider national and international significance of what you’re looking at: you’re looking at something that was actually part of a changing world.”
The UK’s failure to maximise its heritage is also a big loss in economic terms; more visitors could make a huge impact in the UK’s often-deprived former industrial towns and cities.
Another “endemic” issue facing the sector, says Cossons, is the erosion of specialist curatorial expertise, particularly the skills needed to operate obsolete machinery – a loss that is placing some sites and collections in a precarious position.
“A lot of knowledge about the material has ebbed away,” says Cossons. “That material is then written off in the minds of people who don’t understand it.”
Efforts have been made to capture and pass on collections expertise – subject specialist groups such as the Scottish Transport and Industrial Collections network do important work to preserve knowledge – but Cossons says that much broader initiatives are needed to share skills and embed specialist training across the UK sector.
It is an issue that is becoming increasingly pertinent; a 2009 survey by English Heritage found that listed industrial sites in England were more at risk than almost any other heritage building, and that situation is unlikely to have improved after six years of funding cuts across the sector.
Snibston Discovery Museum, which depicts Leicestershire’s coalmining heritage, and the Yorkshire Dales Mining Museum in Earby are facing imminent closure, while a number of other museums are under threat.
But in spite of these challenges, there is a new sense of opportunity in the air. After being somewhat disregarded by successive governments for years, industry is once again becoming fashionable, championed by politicians as a driver of economic growth.
A renewed focus on science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects has taken root in politics. During the coalition government’s time in office, it developed an industrial strategy and allocated a protected budget of £1.1bn a year until 2021 towards developing Stem research and infrastructure across the UK.
Some of this money is funding education and skills development from primary school upwards, and Oliver Green, along with many others in the sector, believes it represents a golden opportunity for industrial museums to tie in with the Stem agenda and use the creative legacy they hold to inspire future innovation.
“Five years ago, no one wanted to be seen at industry – it was all about cosying up to bankers. The UK was seen as a post-industrial society,” says Green. “But recently many politicians are increasingly likely to be seen wearing hard hats on sites. This would be quite a good time for industrial museums to start looking at a new approach.”
One industrial museum that is putting itself at the heart of the Stem agenda is the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi) in Manchester. Cossons cites the city as one of those industrial heartlands that has not yet done enough to capitalise on the global impact of its industrial heritage – but that could be about to change.
In the past year, government funding has flooded in to establish Manchester as a “northern powerhouse” of science and innovation, and Mosi is making a serious effort to maximise the contribution it can make to that agenda.
The museum holds the Stemnet contract for the north-west, coordinating a schools programme that promotes Stem subjects to children and young people. Late last year, it was awarded £3.8m from the government to build a space for contemporary science exhibitions in the museum’s Grade I-listed 19th-century railway warehouse – the first warehouse of its kind in the world.
With an additional capital award of £1.8m from the Wellcome Trust, Mosi is now very close to the £6m it needs for the build. The project is an ideal opportunity to link the city’s status as the birthplace of the industrial revolution with its emerging goal of becoming an international centre for technological innovation, says Mosi’s director, Sally MacDonald.
“It is a symbolic site where we can talk about not only past industrial greatness, but also about a renaissance,” she says. “That’s a powerful thing to convey to visitors.”
Senses and emotions
The exhibition space is one part of Mosi’s wider masterplan to redevelop five listed buildings, create a narrative gallery to tell the story of the museum’s historic setting and bring an operational steam railway back to the site.
This use of working collections never fails to inspire wonder in visitors and is a key advantage that industrial museums possess, says MacDonald, particularly in terms of education.
“If you can demonstrate the processes through working machinery, the fact that you can see things moving illustrates how something works in a way that no picture can,” she says. “Trying to educate people on the scientific principle is not enough. What we can do is work on a range of senses and emotions as a way into learning.”
Another strategy for Mosi is rehabilitating its old industrial buildings, giving them a working role in the modern world while retaining a strong sense of their history.
Andrew Lovett, the director of the recently Designated Black Country Living Museum (just outside Tolkien’s home city of Birmingham), agrees that it is essential for industrial museums to contextualise their collections and demonstrate the links between past and present.
“The stories we tell here can be made relevant in new ways,” Lovett says. “Their legacy is shown in our continued manufacturing and engineering success – it’s all part of a continuum.
“What we’re not about to do is be one step behind the modern world. One of the things on our radar is to develop a space at the site to showcase the best of modern manufacturing and engineering.”
The open-air museum has moved beyond merely explaining how things work and aims to “spark an emotional reaction from the public”, says Lovett. “As memories die, nostalgia for the past needs to be replaced by curiosity and imagination.”
The museum is also broadening its educational resources. Following changes to England’s history curriculum, which now takes a more chronological approach, the site faced being cut off from younger school groups and has expanded its learning programmes to focus not just on history, but on Stem and arts subjects too (somewhat aptly known as the Steam agenda).
“There are lots of links, whether through chemistry, design, maths – there’s a route into the stories we tell through those subjects,” says Lovett.
But not every museum is able to take advantage of the same opportunities, says Ian Bapty, the Historic England-funded industrial heritage support officer for England, who is based at Ironbridge. At the moment, the sector is divided into a “two-tier” system in which many smaller museums are struggling to diversify their audiences and income.
“There’s a distinction between bigger sites and the smaller ones,” says Bapty. “All museums need to get more with it in terms of attracting more sources of income and getting new skills in, but it’s not easy if you’re a volunteer group with just five or six trustees – you might not be set up in a way to accommodate that.
There’s a need for bigger, more sophisticated sites to pass on some of their learning to the smaller sites.” One contemporary agenda that holds significant potential for many former industrial sites is the environmental movement.
‘Massive potential’
“There’s massive potential to explore environmental concerns and look at how technology can help,” says Bapty. Given the link between the industrial revolution and issues such as climate change, some experts have raised the possibility that former industrial sites could be reinterpreted as places of “environmental conscience” that educate people about the ecological impact of industry.
Exploring the negative effects of something that is a strong source of local pride can be a sensitive issue, but Bapty believes this could be mitigated by drawing a clear line between the achievements of the past and the development of cleaner, more efficient technology – demonstrating how “the ingenuity of industrial heritage” can help find solutions to today’s environmental problems.
One smaller museum that is already doing many of these things successfully, says Bapty, is the former Kew Bridge Steam Museum in London, which was recently relaunched as the London Museum of Water & Steam after a £2.4m Heritage Lottery Fund revamp.
Among its new displays, the museum tells a positive environmental story of how water technology was used to solve sewage problems and improve public health.
Its interpretation combines human narratives with working displays of its restored steam pumping engines, retaining a sense of the wonder and power of the technology of old; an approach that has brought the museum a significant increase in new visitors.
The landscape may have changed im-measurably since the days when the Black Country inspired Tolkien’s apocalyptic vision, but those industrial sites that can spark in modern visitors the same visceral emotional reaction that the author once felt should have a bright future ahead of them.
The Museums Association annual conference and exhibition takes place in Birmingham on 5-6 November. See p65 for booking details
Community pride in Elsecar
One of the unique strengths that industrial museums have is their ability to tap into community pride. This advantage came to the fore during a recent £500,000 restoration project, jointly supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and Barnsley Council, to bring the Newcomen Beam Engine at Elsecar, Yorkshire, back to working order.
As the oldest steam engine still in its original position anywhere in the world, the 1795 structure, which was used to pump water from local collieries, is an internationally significant piece of industrial heritage.
But the local village – which was devastated by the pit closures of the 1980s – had lost a sense of the engine’s huge importance, according to John Tanner, Barnsley’s project development manager, and in 2010 the pump was placed on English Heritage’s At Risk register.
The restoration project aimed to reinstate the engine’s status, mobilising local volunteers and students to assist with the archaeological excavation, restoration and subsequent interpretation scheme.
This gave the wider community a strong sense of investment in the project – so much so that when the restored engine was relaunched on a rainy night last November, with a firework display and an honour guard of locomotives in steam, 2,000 local people turned up to witness it in action.