Identity crisis

In May 1999 the people of Scotland and Wales took part in their countries' first elections for devolved parliaments. Ten years on, devolution has not only altered the political landscape, but has also influenced ideas about national identity and what it means to be British, which has had a number of implications for museums.

Mike Houlihan, director general at National Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru), is currently working on plans to redevelop the St Fagans National History Museum, which first opened in 1948 to help preserve Welsh traditions and language.

"St Fagans was founded as a museum of a culture that was being lost, but that culture has become more embedded and I think devolution will go a considerable way to continuing that process," says Houlihan, who is aware that museums in devolved countries need to meet the needs of new national agendas.

National identity is also very much at the forefront of Scotland: A Changing Nation, which opened in July 2008 at the National Museum of Scotland. It is the first permanent gallery to be redeveloped at the national museum since it opened a year after devolution.

This island race

"My own sense, when I returned here in 2002 after more than 20 years in England, was of the people in Scotland having a stronger sense of self-identity," says National Museums Scotland (NMS) director Gordon Rintoul. "And obviously we have tried to reflect some of this in the new gallery."

But reflecting identity in museums does have its challenges. Permanent exhibitions can not be changed quickly, which can make it difficult to keep pace with modern society. Proud boasts about the strength of the financial sector in Scotland: A Changing Nation now sit oddly with current news about the Royal Bank of Scotland. To an extent, museums are prisoners of past collecting and can only display yesterday's identity.

The displays in Scotland: A Changing Nation give a good overview of the country's development during the 20th century, but one of the areas that really works is One Nation, Five Million Voices, a film that presents a cross-section of people giving their views on what it means to be Scottish, or to live and work in Scotland. Their opinions on everything from food to nationhood communicate some of the contradictions and complexities of identity.

These intricacies are behind the debate surrounding the idea of creating a Museum of British History. Ever since the concept was first suggested in 2007 by former Tory minister Kenneth Baker, many of the disagreements have centred on what, and whose, stories it would tell.

Historian Tristram Hunt wrote in the Guardian in 2008 that this "deranged idea needs to be strangled at birth. It would resemble the worst kind of 1970s Soviet museums and make a mockery of our complex and contradictory national story."

Hunt believes exhibitions such as Taking Liberties, the British Lib-rary's recent investigation into the history of the 900-year struggle for freedoms and rights in Britain, represent a better approach.

The plan for a Museum of British History in London has been reborn in another form following a report from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in February that recommended creating a federated online entity that would draw on the collections of museums, libraries and archives across the UK.

The government has promoted explorations of identity as a way to improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy. Funding has followed this agenda and there are now a number of identity-related projects supported by cash from bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

One of these is the Great British Art Debate, which has received £1.1m from the HLF. This four-year project is a collaboration between Museums Sheffield, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, Tate Britain and Tyne & Wear Museums, who will share expertise and their collections. The aim is to explore what it means to be British in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.

Museums Sheffield senior curator of visual art, Sian Brown, says the approach is very much one of consultation. "We are asking questions, not giving the answers," she says. A series of taster exhibitions will feed into Restless Times in October 2010, which will look at art, identity and nationhood.

A Picture of You? closes early this month and looks at how artists explore identity and how individuals relate to the wider society. The art was chosen by curators, but this will be followed in the autumn by A Picture of Us?, which will invite people outside Museums Sheffield to choose works.

If consultation is one way that the Great British Art Debate is trying to tease out questions of identity, another is subverting British traditions. This is what the Tate hopes to achieve with its look at what is perceived to be a very British artistic discipline, the watercolour.

"By choosing works that are very diverse, very different from each other and very surprising, it will be a more fragmented, episodic and essayistic story of British watercolours," says Tate curator Martin Myrone.

Tyne & Wear Museums is focusing on the work of the 19th-century Romantic painter John Martin, who was born in Northumberland. Julie Milne, the curator of Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery, says the project will attempt to "show a modern-day audience how an artist connects with their lives".

Martin's huge oil paintings, which often feature apocalyptic scenes, can be related to today's fears of terrorism and his work is said to have inspired the iconography of modern heavy metal music.

But even the make up of the four partners in the Great British Art Debate points to one of the problems with questions of identity: they are all in England. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness is one that has become further complicated by devolution.

Rhiannon Mason, a senior lecturer in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies (ICCHS) at Newcastle University, is the author of Museums, Nations, Identities: Wales and its National Museums.

She has researched a variety of issues surrounding identity and museums and - with Zelda Baveystock - has recently been looking at Icons: A Portrait of England, a website initiative that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has funded through its Culture Online programme.

The web project launched in 2006 and is a kind of online hall of fame for English icons based on public nominations. Mason and Baveystock say that the public comments about the proposed icons highlight numerous tensions within the project, illustrating the multiple and conflicting ways in which people imagine what counts as "English culture".

Many of the comments on Big Ben disputed whether it was a symbol of England or Britain, for example. There was also controversy over the inclusion of multicultural symbols of Englishness such as SS Empire Windrush and the Notting Hill Carnival.

Nationalities not nationalism

Mason says: "One of the current debates about national identities in Britain is how to reimagine the nation as not just inclusive but pluralist at its very core". She argues that "museum collections have enormous potential to provide depth and breadth to such conversations because they can illustrate how diversity, hybridity, and cross-cultural exchange have always been part of any national story".

"The challenge for a museum trying to tell a story of national identity is how to do it without being jingoistic,"Mason adds. "The question is how museums can both connect with visitors' own understandings of national identities while providing them with an opportunity to reflect upon and question such ideas."

Some people argue that the sector moved forward with the many activities to commemorate the bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 2007. But others feel the bicentenary was not done particularly well and are still frustrated by the inability of museums to tackle subjects such as this.

Novelist and historian Mike Phillips, an HLF trustee and adviser for the past eight years, says the bicentenary "tended to isolate the whole business of slavery and what was happening then within foreign borders, such as the Caribbean. The discussions happening here tended to be ignored."

Phillips is unsure that museums are even particularly good places to take on identity. "The national identity is a conversation in progress. If you fix it by shows and exhibitions, what you are doing is working one step behind," he says.

Since 2006, Phillips has led the creation of Tate Encounters, a project to develop a series of case studies of how immigrant families, primarily from the African/Caribbean and Asian diasporas, encounter Tate Britain and its collection of British art.

But Phillips has become frustrated by how it has become enmeshed in traditional academic research practices when he felt it needed to confront these methods. "It will say a lot about the structure of the Tate, but it won't say a lot about identity," he says.

So, with all these obstacles, how will museums tackle identity in the future? There is a lot of work happening on reg-ional identity. As well as taking part in the Great British Art Debate, Tyne & Wear Museums is also involved in projects such as the redevelopment of the Art on Tyneside gallery, which will explore the relationships between identity, place and art.

There are also opportunities provided by the democratic and user-friendly nature of the web, although the limits of this have been exposed by the Icons website. And there are wider moves to give audiences the power to decide what goes into exhibitions and diversifying the sector's workforce will also have an impact. But broadly, it seems that to do such a complex subject justice, an approach that accepts a wider range of histories is needed.

As cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote in 2005 in his book, The Politics of Heritage: "The first task is redefining the nation, reimagining 'Britishness' or 'Englishness' itself in a more profoundly inclusive manner."