North Down Museum

Look back to move forwards

Through climate change funding from NI Museums Council, our museum was able to explore the impact of climate change locally. North Down Museum is a local authority museum in one of the newest cities in the UK – Bangor, Northern Ireland. It was the first time we utilised the subject of climate change to engage with our local community and visitors.

We developed four temporary exhibitions which looked at climate change in a variety of ways. These included, ‘Climate Change and our Borough’, ‘Climate Change and our Historic Environment’, ‘Climate Change and our Biodiversity’ and ‘Climate Change and our Sustainable Tourism’.

The exhibitions aimed to raise awareness of global issues but also offer insights into what was happening locally to mitigate against them and to offer hope and inspiration to take further action.

We redeveloped our ‘Calling all Explorers’ children’s exhibition to become an outdoor exhibition. We have explorer’s packs aimed at 7- to 11-year-olds so they can explore the flora, fauna and creatures that inhabit the parklands the museum sits in.

We focused on traditional and sustainable skills with our local thatcher rethatching the Monk’s Cell, which is a focal point of our Christian heritage offering. Videos of his work were taken as a legacy of the project.

Finally, we held a ‘Vegetarian Night @ the Museum’ in partnership with our local technical college. The students cooked, provided demos and served four wonderful vegetarian courses as we tried to encourage our visitors to eat less meat.

We worked in partnership with organisations such as NI Environment Link (a membership body for environmental charities), the National Trust, Historic Environment Division and council departments.

It raised the profile of the contribution that museums can make in encouraging engagement with climate change and providing information.  We have only scratched the surface, but within the museum there is an appetite to do more.

For more information, please contact Heather McGuicken, North Down Museum, via heather.mcguicken@ardsandnorthdown.gov.uk.