'To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon.'
It may not be quite as grim as depicted in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, but the Fens does have its fair share of problems: rural poverty, isolated communities and tensions between locals and migrant workers are all features of this huge area of flat reclaimed land in the East of England.
It is against this background that the Greater Fens Museums Partnership was set up to increase awareness of the area's museums and to improve access to their collections and services. The idea was initiated by the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (NMAS), the lead partner for the East of England Museum Hub. The first meeting in February 2005 led to the creation of the Fens partnership, which now consists of 20 museums and related organisations.
The result is the Feast of Fenland, a project centred on a travelling exhibition based on the theme of food - a vital industry in this agriculturally rich area. First stop will be Wisbech and Fenland Museum in March where the exhibition will be piloted to see if it is to the taste of visitors. It will then move on to 17 other venues including museums in Spalding, Ely, March, Peterborough, Ramsey and Whittlesey. It will end at the Lynn Museum in April 2008.
Marie Kennedy started as the project officer for Feast of Fenland in October 2006 and will be in the post until April 2008. She says the exhibition will have four main themes: landscape; people; supply and demand; and the processes of food production.
These themes will be used to follow the progress of food from the field to the supermarket and in the process tackle contemporary and historical subjects. Museums will be able to add items from their own collection to supplement the exhibition and there is some money for each museum to run events.
Finding a subject for the exhibition that was interesting and relevant to museum visitors was vital, so a number of specialist topics were rejected early on. Food was chosen because of its importance to the Fens and the broad range of issues that could be linked with it.
One of the problems identified by the Rural Museums Network is the perception that rural museums are not sufficiently engaged in areas of mainstream public interest.
The network was created in 2003 as a forum to discuss and resolve concerns among rural museums, and its Building Relevance Programme identifies buying and eating food among the subjects that people are interested in, along with protecting wildlife and enjoying the countryside. It also recognises that displays often emphasise technical progress above human interest.
'We needed to make sure the subject was not "worthy, but dull",' says Bill Seaman, the Norfolk museums manager for the NMAS. 'The Building Relevance Programme is very important in showing that rural museums shouldn't become caricatures of themselves. They need to get away from being seen as quaint and unworldly but, fight it as we might, there are still examples of dusty and musty museums that are not relevant and not appealing except to those few in the know.'
An important part of creating a human-interest element to Feast of Fenland was a photographic commission to document the lives of those working in the area's farming industries.
Many of the museums have lots of historical photographs of agricultural workers, but are missing more up-to-date images. So photographer Nick May spent about three weeks during September, October and November at various locations around the Fens.
'I was asked to look at the whole of agriculture, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of migrant workers, who come from the European Union and elsewhere,' says May. 'There is a climate of racism to some extent in the media and also a more general misunderstanding about the contribution that migrant workers make.
'The idea was to make the point that these people are working incredibly hard doing work that most British people don't want to do and they are making a positive contribution to the area and its economy.'
Documenting the lives of migrant workers in the Fens is the type of high-profile contemporary issue that can be addressed through the subject of food. It is also building on existing work being carried out by another Greater Fens Museums Partnership member, the East Midlands Museum Hub, which is working on a photographic project about the Portuguese community in Boston, Lincolnshire. This initiative is part of Moving Here, a national scheme to explore why people have been coming to England for the past 200 years.
Boston has been a particularly difficult place for migrant workers, as they have had to suffer antipathy from the existing community and negative coverage in the local press. Demographic change has been rapid, with the 2001 census showing that the largest non-white community was the 161 Chinese people living in a town of 55,000. But in recent years thousands of Portuguese have come to Boston to work and have since been followed by eastern Europeans, particularly from Poland.
'Boston is quite isolated, it was unused to migrant workers and there has been a lot of antagonism,' says the regional projects manager for Renaissance East Midlands, David Worthington, who is moving to Hartlepool to become the head of museums. 'Cultural diversity is a major shock to the system for lots of people.'
Worthington says that one of the aims of Feast of Fenland is to put migrant workers in a proper historical context and show they are nothing new. The Fens has always attracted workers from outside the area, from the Dutch engineers who worked on draining the Fens in the 17th century through to the seasonal fruit pickers from London, the south-east and the Midlands in the last century.
Migrant workers are among those being targeted with the outreach elements of Feast of Fenland, alongside older and younger people. Because of the heavily rural nature of the Fens, reaching isolated communities is an important part of the project.
'There is an issue of people's ability to access services so we made a conscious decision to take the work of museums out to these rural communities because in many cases you have a real barrier in terms of geographical isolation,' says Robin Hanley, the area museums officer for NMAS, based at King's Lynn. 'As far as the East of England hub is concerned, engaging with isolated rural communities is one of the priorities.'
There are also practical ways that the organisers of the Fens project are hoping that Feast of Fenland will help the museums in the partnership. These include improving skills among the workforce, as many museums are small independents with little or no money for training. Improving facilities such as display cases is another practical aim.
But more broadly, it is also hoped that the partnership will have a life beyond the Feast of Fenland and the relationships established will be maintained. The partners in the scheme believe that one of its major advantages is the wide geographic range of those involved, with organisations coming from the counties of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and the unitary authority of Peterborough, as well as the East Midlands and East of England regions.
'It is very interesting that we are able to work effectively across borders, both county and regional,' says Hanley. 'I think that is one of the huge advantages of Renaissance in the Regions, as previously the county and regional barriers would have been a challenge.'
Funding has come from three main sources: the East of England Hub contributed £96,000, the East Midlands Hub £10,000, while there was also £60,000 from Fens LeAP Leader+, a European Union initiative that includes the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs money.
The museums in the Greater Fens Museums Partnership certainly seem pleased by the project and that some Renaissance money has come their way.
'To be fair, I'm not sure we were expecting anything from Renaissance funding,' says Peter Hewitt, the chairman of the volunteer-run March and District Museum, which gets about 4,500 mainly local visitors a year and will host the exhibition in July.
'We are an independent museum and there was the perception that everything was going to the Renaissance hubs. This is partly why it's a good initiative. There are also a number of other good effects, such as giving us the chance to look afresh at the items in our collection.'
The exhibition will start at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, another independent, but one with a full-time assistant curator and a part-time curator. It attracts about 15,000 people a year, including a fair number of tourists.
Its curator, David Wright, says: 'There are a lot of positive outcomes from this, not just the exhibition, but also the bond of the Greater Fens Museums Partnership itself. It is showing ways in which partnerships can work and identify projects that are relevant to the area.'
With all the effort that has gone in to making it happen, it seems unlikely that the exhibition will be as flat as the Fenland landscape. And it will be interesting to see if it changes people's perceptions of the area's many migrant workers.
It may not be quite as grim as depicted in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, but the Fens does have its fair share of problems: rural poverty, isolated communities and tensions between locals and migrant workers are all features of this huge area of flat reclaimed land in the East of England.
It is against this background that the Greater Fens Museums Partnership was set up to increase awareness of the area's museums and to improve access to their collections and services. The idea was initiated by the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (NMAS), the lead partner for the East of England Museum Hub. The first meeting in February 2005 led to the creation of the Fens partnership, which now consists of 20 museums and related organisations.
The result is the Feast of Fenland, a project centred on a travelling exhibition based on the theme of food - a vital industry in this agriculturally rich area. First stop will be Wisbech and Fenland Museum in March where the exhibition will be piloted to see if it is to the taste of visitors. It will then move on to 17 other venues including museums in Spalding, Ely, March, Peterborough, Ramsey and Whittlesey. It will end at the Lynn Museum in April 2008.
Marie Kennedy started as the project officer for Feast of Fenland in October 2006 and will be in the post until April 2008. She says the exhibition will have four main themes: landscape; people; supply and demand; and the processes of food production.
These themes will be used to follow the progress of food from the field to the supermarket and in the process tackle contemporary and historical subjects. Museums will be able to add items from their own collection to supplement the exhibition and there is some money for each museum to run events.
Finding a subject for the exhibition that was interesting and relevant to museum visitors was vital, so a number of specialist topics were rejected early on. Food was chosen because of its importance to the Fens and the broad range of issues that could be linked with it.
One of the problems identified by the Rural Museums Network is the perception that rural museums are not sufficiently engaged in areas of mainstream public interest.
The network was created in 2003 as a forum to discuss and resolve concerns among rural museums, and its Building Relevance Programme identifies buying and eating food among the subjects that people are interested in, along with protecting wildlife and enjoying the countryside. It also recognises that displays often emphasise technical progress above human interest.
'We needed to make sure the subject was not "worthy, but dull",' says Bill Seaman, the Norfolk museums manager for the NMAS. 'The Building Relevance Programme is very important in showing that rural museums shouldn't become caricatures of themselves. They need to get away from being seen as quaint and unworldly but, fight it as we might, there are still examples of dusty and musty museums that are not relevant and not appealing except to those few in the know.'
An important part of creating a human-interest element to Feast of Fenland was a photographic commission to document the lives of those working in the area's farming industries.
Many of the museums have lots of historical photographs of agricultural workers, but are missing more up-to-date images. So photographer Nick May spent about three weeks during September, October and November at various locations around the Fens.
'I was asked to look at the whole of agriculture, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of migrant workers, who come from the European Union and elsewhere,' says May. 'There is a climate of racism to some extent in the media and also a more general misunderstanding about the contribution that migrant workers make.
'The idea was to make the point that these people are working incredibly hard doing work that most British people don't want to do and they are making a positive contribution to the area and its economy.'
Documenting the lives of migrant workers in the Fens is the type of high-profile contemporary issue that can be addressed through the subject of food. It is also building on existing work being carried out by another Greater Fens Museums Partnership member, the East Midlands Museum Hub, which is working on a photographic project about the Portuguese community in Boston, Lincolnshire. This initiative is part of Moving Here, a national scheme to explore why people have been coming to England for the past 200 years.
Boston has been a particularly difficult place for migrant workers, as they have had to suffer antipathy from the existing community and negative coverage in the local press. Demographic change has been rapid, with the 2001 census showing that the largest non-white community was the 161 Chinese people living in a town of 55,000. But in recent years thousands of Portuguese have come to Boston to work and have since been followed by eastern Europeans, particularly from Poland.
'Boston is quite isolated, it was unused to migrant workers and there has been a lot of antagonism,' says the regional projects manager for Renaissance East Midlands, David Worthington, who is moving to Hartlepool to become the head of museums. 'Cultural diversity is a major shock to the system for lots of people.'
Worthington says that one of the aims of Feast of Fenland is to put migrant workers in a proper historical context and show they are nothing new. The Fens has always attracted workers from outside the area, from the Dutch engineers who worked on draining the Fens in the 17th century through to the seasonal fruit pickers from London, the south-east and the Midlands in the last century.
Migrant workers are among those being targeted with the outreach elements of Feast of Fenland, alongside older and younger people. Because of the heavily rural nature of the Fens, reaching isolated communities is an important part of the project.
'There is an issue of people's ability to access services so we made a conscious decision to take the work of museums out to these rural communities because in many cases you have a real barrier in terms of geographical isolation,' says Robin Hanley, the area museums officer for NMAS, based at King's Lynn. 'As far as the East of England hub is concerned, engaging with isolated rural communities is one of the priorities.'
There are also practical ways that the organisers of the Fens project are hoping that Feast of Fenland will help the museums in the partnership. These include improving skills among the workforce, as many museums are small independents with little or no money for training. Improving facilities such as display cases is another practical aim.
But more broadly, it is also hoped that the partnership will have a life beyond the Feast of Fenland and the relationships established will be maintained. The partners in the scheme believe that one of its major advantages is the wide geographic range of those involved, with organisations coming from the counties of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and the unitary authority of Peterborough, as well as the East Midlands and East of England regions.
'It is very interesting that we are able to work effectively across borders, both county and regional,' says Hanley. 'I think that is one of the huge advantages of Renaissance in the Regions, as previously the county and regional barriers would have been a challenge.'
Funding has come from three main sources: the East of England Hub contributed £96,000, the East Midlands Hub £10,000, while there was also £60,000 from Fens LeAP Leader+, a European Union initiative that includes the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs money.
The museums in the Greater Fens Museums Partnership certainly seem pleased by the project and that some Renaissance money has come their way.
'To be fair, I'm not sure we were expecting anything from Renaissance funding,' says Peter Hewitt, the chairman of the volunteer-run March and District Museum, which gets about 4,500 mainly local visitors a year and will host the exhibition in July.
'We are an independent museum and there was the perception that everything was going to the Renaissance hubs. This is partly why it's a good initiative. There are also a number of other good effects, such as giving us the chance to look afresh at the items in our collection.'
The exhibition will start at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, another independent, but one with a full-time assistant curator and a part-time curator. It attracts about 15,000 people a year, including a fair number of tourists.
Its curator, David Wright, says: 'There are a lot of positive outcomes from this, not just the exhibition, but also the bond of the Greater Fens Museums Partnership itself. It is showing ways in which partnerships can work and identify projects that are relevant to the area.'
With all the effort that has gone in to making it happen, it seems unlikely that the exhibition will be as flat as the Fenland landscape. And it will be interesting to see if it changes people's perceptions of the area's many migrant workers.