Dundee, the wee city on the east coast of Scotland, is on course for a big transformation. A city with a population of less than 150,000, its last boom time was a couple of centuries ago. At that time Dundee was placed on the international map thanks to a raw material called jute that was imported from India, and the whaling industry.
What remains of those industries forms the basis of the stories told in Dundee's five museums. There is talk now of the city being the next Scottish urban space set to experience a renaissance - well, at least according to Dundee's publicity machine. It's certainly all change in the centre of Dundee. Barely a turn is made without encountering road works or property developments.
And culture is at the forefront of this regeneration - which suits John Stewart-Young, who came to Dundee in search of a big capital project, which had up until then eluded him.
He arrived in 1997 as an arts and heritage manager at Dundee City Council and became part of the team delivering the new £9.1m Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) complex, which was completed in 1999. He was also responsible for museum management and development.
Stewart-Young says that while everyone's sights seemed to be on DCA, his turned to how he could make his mark on the museums. 'I've always said I don't want to just be a manager. I need to be far more proactive than that. I have always liked to be in a situation where I am developing things. It's more exciting.'
Four years later he dropped the arts from his title and became the heritage manager. He had four council facilities to focus on and attacked them all with equal vigour.
The Broughty Castle Museum and the Mills Observatory are the two smaller museums in the service. These were refurbished with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in 2002 and 2003.
Then he led a fundraising effort for what will probably be the big project of his life. The McManus Galleries, the council's flagship museum, is to get an internal and external facelift. It is costing £8.5m. Stewart-Young raised £4.9m from the HLF, £700,000 European Regional Development Fund money, £500,000 from Historic Scotland and the remainder from Dundee city council.
Since being seconded to the role of the project director for the McManus Galleries redevelopment last year, he has been able to finally satisfy his hunger for a large cultural development project.
The McManus closed last month for the work to begin and is scheduled to reopen at the end of 2007. Its 150,000 objects, mostly fine and decorative art but including a significant natural history, archaeology and local history collection, have already been taken into storage. The development project is named Who We Are, because, as Stewart-Young says, the project is 'not about saving a building, it's about people'.
One of the main aims of the redevelopment is to make strong use of the objects to reflect Dundee's identity -past, present and future. 'We are trying to tell the story of Dundee from its earliest time right through to yesterday and hopefully a bit of tomorrow.'
And in doing so, Stewart-Young hopes that those groups least likely to visit the museum (the young and the old) will be tempted to come through the doors.
His method? All of the visitor services will be relocated to the sunny south side of the building. A lifelong learning space and improved interaction with staff will be integral to visitor experience. The front of house staff, who worked with curators on the auditing and moving of objects to the store before closure, will become more customer-facing, with a remit to talk to visitors about the collections.
The galleries will be made up of stories and not arranged by categories of objects. And if the public don't respond well to certain displays, there will be the flexibility to change elements of each one, rather than having to alter the whole display.
The McManus interior is a Victorian design with awkward additions such as fire stairs and new walls in the 1980s. The plan will be to open up the space to make it more welcoming and bright. Its opulent gothic exterior is in good architectural company with similarly striking Victorian buildings nearby. A new south entrance will provide a more direct welcome to city shoppers and look onto a new pedestrianised area.
Stewart-Young is not coy about what all this will mean for Dundee. 'We will have the best regional museum in Scotland. There's no regional museum that is undertaking this radical redevelopment,' he says. 'I'm billing it as the largest cultural development of this century. Of course, DCA was last century,' he laughs.
Stewart-Young is encouraged by the council's investment in the contemporary arts complex and likewise McManus. DCA has proved a success, attracting 350,000 visitors a year.
Visual artists from around the world exhibit there and the centre has amassed an international reputation as well as a young, trendy crowd from the universities of Dundee and Abertay, who use it as a Friday night hangout. Stewart-Young wants a piece of that action for the museum.
The city council understands that good cultural provision is vital if new jobs are to be created and sustained in the city, says Stewart-Young. Dundee is becoming a hub for biotechnologists and has the largest cluster of biomedical sciences taught at universities in the UK after Cambridge.
According to Stewart-Young Biomedical businesses are starting to choose whether to invest in San Diego or Dundee. 'Those kind of decisions are being made. If you've got no cultural infrastructure there's no way they are going to come here.'
Stewart-Young found, however, that this way of seeing things was not shared at Dumfries and Galloway Council, where he spent the ten years before Dundee - first as the regional arts officer and then for one year as the principal arts officer.
He developed the local Gracefield Arts Centre, sourced funding, established acquisition budgets and increased visitor numbers significantly. He also undertook a part-time museum diploma at Leicester. Once it was finished, he took sole responsibility for arts development in the region.
He spent just one year in this new role: 'I realised I was getting buried down there. I'd given a lot of energy to making things happen. But I was never going to get to the big capital redevelopment that was really needed.'
And he adds: 'I always wanted it to happen there but the council were gentleman farmers and they just weren't up for it. The stability of any funding base is political support. That was lacking there.'
Stewart-Young says that because he is coming to museums from the arts world, where the funding base is less stable, he may view the strength of the museum sector in a more positive light than
others. 'There's always ways and means of getting more money.'
But he says museums need to be practical. 'Receiving rather than transmitting,' is the key. 'I think a lot of people forget to listen about what funding priorities are and aligning themselves to that. There's a fair degree of pragmatism within all of this.'
There is no doubt that he would have liked more money from the HLF for the McManus refurbishment. But he recognised that regional museums are unlikely to be successful in the over-£5m stream.
Stewart-Young has taken Dundee to his heart. Though he was born in London, his Scottish father (a teacher and a jazz musician who played at Ronnie Scott's club and backed Ella Fitzgerald) and artist mother ('when she got the time with six children') shifted the family to Suffolk. He describes his childhood as idyllic. When he was ten, the family moved to Kinross.
Stewart-Young becomes animated when he tells stories of 19th-century Dundee when the Victoria gallery at the McManus became the first building to have electric light in Scotland, or during the Juteopolis era when the skilled women worked the mills and the 'kettle-boilers', in other words the men, stayed at home to rear the children.
He made some changes when he arrived in Dundee that may have proved contentious. He says there was competition between museums to tell the jute story. McManus's trade and industry gallery was displaying information on the subject but it also figured prominently at the independent Verdant works, run by the Dundee Heritage Trust.
The council was reluctant to let go. 'It was a question of curatorial preciousness', says Stewart-Young. But it was eventually decided that it was more sensible for the trust to be telling that particular story. 'It's getting away from silo mentalities into something where everyone is working for the good of the city.'
He thinks the public are fully behind the McManus project and the wider cultural development, and he says there has been a lot of positive coverage in the local press. My taxi driver, though, was dubious.
As he navigated his way around the road works, he questioned how this development was going to help the people of Dundee: 'The city needs industry of some sort. Biochemistry is a very specialised area - it doesn't apply to that many people.'
Nevertheless, Stewart-Young believes his future is in Dundee: 'I'll probably retire here.' Though he will not rule out that a taste of project development on this scale might force him to look to the next burgeoning city.
What remains of those industries forms the basis of the stories told in Dundee's five museums. There is talk now of the city being the next Scottish urban space set to experience a renaissance - well, at least according to Dundee's publicity machine. It's certainly all change in the centre of Dundee. Barely a turn is made without encountering road works or property developments.
And culture is at the forefront of this regeneration - which suits John Stewart-Young, who came to Dundee in search of a big capital project, which had up until then eluded him.
He arrived in 1997 as an arts and heritage manager at Dundee City Council and became part of the team delivering the new £9.1m Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) complex, which was completed in 1999. He was also responsible for museum management and development.
Stewart-Young says that while everyone's sights seemed to be on DCA, his turned to how he could make his mark on the museums. 'I've always said I don't want to just be a manager. I need to be far more proactive than that. I have always liked to be in a situation where I am developing things. It's more exciting.'
Four years later he dropped the arts from his title and became the heritage manager. He had four council facilities to focus on and attacked them all with equal vigour.
The Broughty Castle Museum and the Mills Observatory are the two smaller museums in the service. These were refurbished with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in 2002 and 2003.
Then he led a fundraising effort for what will probably be the big project of his life. The McManus Galleries, the council's flagship museum, is to get an internal and external facelift. It is costing £8.5m. Stewart-Young raised £4.9m from the HLF, £700,000 European Regional Development Fund money, £500,000 from Historic Scotland and the remainder from Dundee city council.
Since being seconded to the role of the project director for the McManus Galleries redevelopment last year, he has been able to finally satisfy his hunger for a large cultural development project.
The McManus closed last month for the work to begin and is scheduled to reopen at the end of 2007. Its 150,000 objects, mostly fine and decorative art but including a significant natural history, archaeology and local history collection, have already been taken into storage. The development project is named Who We Are, because, as Stewart-Young says, the project is 'not about saving a building, it's about people'.
One of the main aims of the redevelopment is to make strong use of the objects to reflect Dundee's identity -past, present and future. 'We are trying to tell the story of Dundee from its earliest time right through to yesterday and hopefully a bit of tomorrow.'
And in doing so, Stewart-Young hopes that those groups least likely to visit the museum (the young and the old) will be tempted to come through the doors.
His method? All of the visitor services will be relocated to the sunny south side of the building. A lifelong learning space and improved interaction with staff will be integral to visitor experience. The front of house staff, who worked with curators on the auditing and moving of objects to the store before closure, will become more customer-facing, with a remit to talk to visitors about the collections.
The galleries will be made up of stories and not arranged by categories of objects. And if the public don't respond well to certain displays, there will be the flexibility to change elements of each one, rather than having to alter the whole display.
The McManus interior is a Victorian design with awkward additions such as fire stairs and new walls in the 1980s. The plan will be to open up the space to make it more welcoming and bright. Its opulent gothic exterior is in good architectural company with similarly striking Victorian buildings nearby. A new south entrance will provide a more direct welcome to city shoppers and look onto a new pedestrianised area.
Stewart-Young is not coy about what all this will mean for Dundee. 'We will have the best regional museum in Scotland. There's no regional museum that is undertaking this radical redevelopment,' he says. 'I'm billing it as the largest cultural development of this century. Of course, DCA was last century,' he laughs.
Stewart-Young is encouraged by the council's investment in the contemporary arts complex and likewise McManus. DCA has proved a success, attracting 350,000 visitors a year.
Visual artists from around the world exhibit there and the centre has amassed an international reputation as well as a young, trendy crowd from the universities of Dundee and Abertay, who use it as a Friday night hangout. Stewart-Young wants a piece of that action for the museum.
The city council understands that good cultural provision is vital if new jobs are to be created and sustained in the city, says Stewart-Young. Dundee is becoming a hub for biotechnologists and has the largest cluster of biomedical sciences taught at universities in the UK after Cambridge.
According to Stewart-Young Biomedical businesses are starting to choose whether to invest in San Diego or Dundee. 'Those kind of decisions are being made. If you've got no cultural infrastructure there's no way they are going to come here.'
Stewart-Young found, however, that this way of seeing things was not shared at Dumfries and Galloway Council, where he spent the ten years before Dundee - first as the regional arts officer and then for one year as the principal arts officer.
He developed the local Gracefield Arts Centre, sourced funding, established acquisition budgets and increased visitor numbers significantly. He also undertook a part-time museum diploma at Leicester. Once it was finished, he took sole responsibility for arts development in the region.
He spent just one year in this new role: 'I realised I was getting buried down there. I'd given a lot of energy to making things happen. But I was never going to get to the big capital redevelopment that was really needed.'
And he adds: 'I always wanted it to happen there but the council were gentleman farmers and they just weren't up for it. The stability of any funding base is political support. That was lacking there.'
Stewart-Young says that because he is coming to museums from the arts world, where the funding base is less stable, he may view the strength of the museum sector in a more positive light than
others. 'There's always ways and means of getting more money.'
But he says museums need to be practical. 'Receiving rather than transmitting,' is the key. 'I think a lot of people forget to listen about what funding priorities are and aligning themselves to that. There's a fair degree of pragmatism within all of this.'
There is no doubt that he would have liked more money from the HLF for the McManus refurbishment. But he recognised that regional museums are unlikely to be successful in the over-£5m stream.
Stewart-Young has taken Dundee to his heart. Though he was born in London, his Scottish father (a teacher and a jazz musician who played at Ronnie Scott's club and backed Ella Fitzgerald) and artist mother ('when she got the time with six children') shifted the family to Suffolk. He describes his childhood as idyllic. When he was ten, the family moved to Kinross.
Stewart-Young becomes animated when he tells stories of 19th-century Dundee when the Victoria gallery at the McManus became the first building to have electric light in Scotland, or during the Juteopolis era when the skilled women worked the mills and the 'kettle-boilers', in other words the men, stayed at home to rear the children.
He made some changes when he arrived in Dundee that may have proved contentious. He says there was competition between museums to tell the jute story. McManus's trade and industry gallery was displaying information on the subject but it also figured prominently at the independent Verdant works, run by the Dundee Heritage Trust.
The council was reluctant to let go. 'It was a question of curatorial preciousness', says Stewart-Young. But it was eventually decided that it was more sensible for the trust to be telling that particular story. 'It's getting away from silo mentalities into something where everyone is working for the good of the city.'
He thinks the public are fully behind the McManus project and the wider cultural development, and he says there has been a lot of positive coverage in the local press. My taxi driver, though, was dubious.
As he navigated his way around the road works, he questioned how this development was going to help the people of Dundee: 'The city needs industry of some sort. Biochemistry is a very specialised area - it doesn't apply to that many people.'
Nevertheless, Stewart-Young believes his future is in Dundee: 'I'll probably retire here.' Though he will not rule out that a taste of project development on this scale might force him to look to the next burgeoning city.
