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Lake views

Sue Mackay tells Eleanor Mills about the her wide-ranging role running Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria
“The minute I got here I was interviewed for the local paper,” says Sue Mackay, the curator of Keswick Museum and Art Gallery (KMag), in the Lake District.“The thing about this job in a small community is that everybody knows about you.”

Mackay started in 2014 at a time when no one could actually visit the museum. “There was a capital project to extend the building, renovate it, improve accessibility, and to give us new stores and a cafe,” says Mackay.

“But, most importantly, it gave us heating so that we could open all through the year and our superb volunteers wouldn’t have to freeze to death through the winter.”

Mackay’s official title is curator, although she is also the director and manager. Is there anything else thrown in for good measure?
 
“Well, yeah, everything,” Mackay says. “I do all the marketing and social media. In terms of paid staff there’s just me, an administrator and an apprentice.”

Little had been done to the museum since it opened in 1898, so the 2014 renovation, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), was very necessary, says Mackay, who has recently been elected as a board member of the Museums Association.

The museum was reconfigured too, so now when visitors walk in, they see straight out onto the undulating landscape of the Lake District.
 
“I really appreciate the connection between the landscape outside and the museum inside, and that’s what’s reflected in our manifesto,” Mackay says. “It’s all about helping people share their love of the Lake District, and putting their experience of the area into context.”

The museum has introduced an entry charge of £4.25, but Mackay says that this hasn’t stopped visitor figures growing. KMag isn’t a huge site, and it operates on a similarly not-so-huge budget, so Mackay works hard to make any expenditure go as far as possible.
 
“We only have a small marketing pot, and I find entering awards is a good way of spending it, because if you get shortlisted or become a finalist, then you can use the accolade to market the museum with.”

Championing Cumbria

In 2015, a year after the reopening, the museum won the Cumbria Small Visitor Attraction of the Year award at the Cumbria Tourism Awards.

“It was fantastic because tourism folk understand what that means as a standard of quality.”

The museum also won the Museum of the Year Award at the Cumbria Culture Awards in the same year. KMag is a Victorian museum with a modern twist – the main historic gallery is decked out with old wooden cases with curiosities inside, from a horseshoe encased in a tree to lots of beetles.

Antique bikes hang above, the Musical Stones of Skiddaw sit in the corner, with visitors occasionally playing them tunefully, and there is a section on the local pencil manufacturing industry. Many objects have handwritten labels – a novelty in this day and age.

In the adjacent, newer, space, there’s a gallery that houses temporary exhibitions about the area – currently showing is Life of a Mountain: Blencathra, which runs until 4 January 2018.

Mackay organises and curates these shows with the help of volunteers and she also creates the displays in the main space, such as Keswick and 100 Curious Objects, which tells the history of the area through various artefacts. And if visitors have questions about objects on display, Mackay is often the one that’s called on to answer them.

“There was a visitor the other day who wanted to know more detail about each object, and I kept getting called down to the front desk to answer his queries – he was going methodically from number one to 100 and wanted to know lots.”

Mackay has worked in learning for much of her time in the museum sector – she was the learning manager at Ripon Museum Trust, and held a learning post at the Museum of North Craven Life, Settle, as well as spending some time as a teacher while she had children – so finds the element of teaching in her job very rewarding.
 
“It was always the plan to combine curatorial and teaching in order to go into learning. It has to be the most exciting part of museum work – that’s where the spark happens, when people come together with the objects.”

Teaching by nature

“Ripon was very much like Keswick; a small staff base with a very big volunteer body,” she says. “And learning how to cope with that and make the best out of it was something that I learned there.”

Mackay cites a particularly memorable moment from her time running the learning programme at Ripon: “We did this public whipping to celebrate the reopening of the courthouse. We used a locally-made cat o’ nine tails – the person doing the whipping deliberately just missed the woman, who was one of our am-dram volunteers. She screamed as if it didn’t miss though.”

Whether engaging local communities or visitors from further afield, Mackay wants to make the most of whatever she has, and sees it as crucial to have good links with the Keswick tourist industry in order to provide reciprocal recommendations.

She’s also set up the Cumbria Museum Directors Group with her husband Andrew Mackay, the director of Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle. The aim is to raise the profile of museums across Cumbria.
 
“It’s all about the power of the community and their engagement with their local history,” Mackay says. “It’s about having fun with it as well as keeping it lively, relevant and interesting.”

It’s a good job Mackay is so positive about learning and teaching – she says that KMag had an HLF-funded post of learning officer for three years, but there wasn’t enough budget to keep the post after the funding ended, so at the moment Mackay is delivering learning as well.
 
“We’ve got a really good geology collection, lots of bird eggs, insects and a 4,000-strong beetle collection,” she says. “We’re working with Cumberland Geological Society to get school groups engaged with it, which is really good because the subject is on the curriculum for the first time now.”

Other outreach work the museum does revolves around Amy’s Care, which offers day sessions for those with dementia, and West House – a charity that supports people with learning difficulties to get them back into work – which runs the cafe.

Mackay couldn’t run KMag without the help of the dedicated volunteer team. But she puts in the extra hours too, including foraging for items to add to the collection. “I pick things up on walks and bring them in for our handling collections. I’ve got a fox and a sheep skull in the garden that are rotting down at the moment. They’re pretty ready to go actually. Pretty ripe.”


Keswick Museum and Art Gallery at a glance


Keswick Museum was established in 1882 and opened to the public in 1898. The museum was transferred to the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery Trust in 1995 under Allerdale Borough Council.

In 2014 the site was redeveloped with a £1.8m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
It is an Accredited museum, managed by a charitable company on behalf of the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery Trust.

Three paid members of staff and 56 volunteers run the museum. Opening hours are 10am-4pm. Annual revenue is about £150,000, not including grants. The museum won a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence in 2016.

Sue Mackay at a glance

Sue Mackay studied English literature at Bristol University and then volunteered at Bristol City Museums, before becoming a part-time cataloguer for Bristol Blaise Castle social history department.

She went on to work at the National Waterways Museum Gloucester, and then as the acting manager at Kettering Museum and Art Gallery. She gained her Associateship of the Museums Association (AMA) in 1991.
 
From 1995 to 2008 she became a teacher and also took a career break to have children.
In 2008, Mackay was appointed as the Archive Alive project manager at the volunteer-run Museum of North Craven Life, Settle, in the Yorkshire Dales.

She became the learning manager for Ripon Museum Trust in 2009, before being appointed as the curator of Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in 2014. She recently set up the Cumbria Museum Directors Group with her husband Andrew Mackay, the director of Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, and she has recently been appointed to the board of the Museums Association.

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