People’s choice

When the People’s History Museum opens in Manchester next month, it will be the first of several high-profile developments featuring social history at their core, alongside the Cardiff Story, the Museum of Liverpool, and new galleries at the Museum of London.

The social history movement of the last 60 years has transformed the way in which collections are interpreted. It has also increased the importance of community partnership work and social inclusion in museums.

“It wasn’t because of the entomologists and it wasn’t because of the archaeologists,” says David Fleming, the director of National Museums Liverpool.

“It wasn’t because of the art historians, who’d be studying Reynolds and Gainsborough. It was the social historians that started bringing about that new way of thinking.

"The growth of the discipline of social history in museums has been the single most important factor in the democratisation of museums and the opening up of access and social inclusion policies.”

Asking practitioners for a definition of social history in museums leads to some mixed responses, but all agree that it is, in essence, people-focused. Broadly speaking, it evolved as an academic discipline during the 1950s, with particular emphasis on the concept of “history from below”, driven by the History Workshop ethos, which recognised the histories of ordinary people over the traditional histories of the ruling classes, and held as a central tenet that history should be a collaborative exercise.

“Hidden” histories

Previously, social history in museums had been strictly folkloric, describing customs and myths, but as graduates of the new discipline joined museums, they argued for the representation of hitherto “hidden” histories, such as stories about the working-class and minority groups.

Fleming points to a defining moment in the 1980s when a number of cities, including Hull, Edinburgh and Liverpool, created specific social history museums and galleries for the first time.

“What museums had been good at before then was essentially showing middle-class life,” he says. “As the importance of social history grew, we began to move into looking more at working-class life.”

But Fleming’s view of social history as “essentially working-class people’s history” is not unanimously accepted. At the annual conference of the Social History Curators Group (SHCG) last year, when it celebrated its 35th anniversary, Cathy Ross, the director of collections and learning at the Museum of London, took part in what she describes as “a healthy debate” over how social history should be presented in museums.

“Social history is just as much about art and culture and those things as it is about working-class history,” she says. “The social history approach has been so influential, putting people first, and looking at artefacts in terms of their context, that almost everyone is a social historian now.

“The argument then is, is there a need for a separate social history discipline if everybody has absorbed its values and the work has been mainstreamed? In a way social history is dead, but long live history, long live human history.”

Missing links

While there are debates about the definition of social history, there is consensus on the difficulties of displaying it in museums, which are traditionally object-focused.

One of the dilemmas is that for those museums depicting social histories prior to the 1970s, when the objects of ordinary life were not seen as valuable to museums and consequently were not collected, how do you tell those stories?

And for contemporary practitioners, how do you sift through an increasingly disposable culture to find objects that will be relevant to telling today’s story in 50 years’ time? Ross says it is inevitable that you will lose things.

“All you can do is, like a newspaper, do your lead stories as you see them to the best of your ability, but there will be some things that you miss.”

The emphasis on narrative over objects is an underpinning philosophy and a necessity for many social history museums. Michael Houlihan, the director general of National Museums Wales, says linking together what objects you have often takes imagination. 

“At St Fagans we are trying to bring our archaeology and social history collections together. One option would be to produce a narrative that brings you from a 250,000-year-old set of teeth through to modern Wales. Inevitably, there are huge evidential gaps in that sort of approach, where you would have to insert what I call fiction.

“It could be the text, it could be the tableau you create, it could be in the juxtaposition of certain objects together. You’re not producing evidence to illustrate your point. Any narrative has to involve a degree of fiction, and I think sometimes mu-seums are pretty poor at recognising this.”

It is an issue that Victoria Rogers, the chief curator of the Cardiff Story and the chairwoman of the SHCG, has come up against during the development of a completely new museum that will tell the story of the city from 1797 to the present day. The first Cardiff Story gallery is to open in autumn 2010.

“People wanted it to be object-rich, which is great, but quite a challenge when you have practically nothing in your collection stores,” Rogers says. Her response was to go out into the community and gather oral history and archive material to tell the stories, while appealing for objects in the local press.

For Rogers, in keeping with the values of social history, the personal story is as valid as the curator’s narrative, and she recognises that there may be more than one version of events. Rather than rendering the curator redundant, she says, this approach needs increased curatorial rigour to ensure that both sides of the story are presented.

“The curator’s role is to negotiate through that and help people access what are sometimes different points of view.”

Of course there are social history museums that are object-rich, especially those that have a focus on industrial history. Steph Mastoris, the director of the National Waterfront Museum, Wales, argues there is still a need for object knowledge and research.

Teaching connoisseurship

“What has changed quite radically, partly because of the way in which museum training has gone, and partly because of these requirements from the museum community, is that very few object specialists are coming into the profession now,” says Mastoris.

“Within the next few years we are going to have a whole generation of curators who have really quite important collections, but probably don’t fully appreciate their significance. I would hope that what the future is about is the object coming back to the front again.”

Nick Mansfield, the director of the People’s History Museum, agrees that curatorial training is not what it used to be: “[Museum curators] don’t do an apprenticeship in objects. The postgraduate courses do much more on museum management.

“Teaching connoisseurship, to use an old-fashioned word, is quite hard to do. I’m not arguing for going back to tweedy old buffers, but you need to know why certain things are important in the lifeblood of the town that the museum is in.”

But, he adds: “I’m not pessimistic about it. Considering what social history was 30-odd years ago, it’s come a heck of a long way.”

Patrick Steel is the website editor at the Museums Association

Collection More than 1,500 objects will be on display, political prints and banners, a selection of very early trade union material, posters including some from the second world war, and a skeleton painting used when workers joined a trade union and had to swear an oath of allegiance.
Opening Early 2010
Cost £12.5m
Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £7.18m, Manchester City Council, North West Development Agency, European Regional Development Fund
Exhibition design Headland Design Associates
Architect Austin-Smith:Lord
Project management Paul Cleworth Project Management
Brand consultant True North
Access consultant Full Circle Arts
Digital agency Reading Room

Collection More than 1,000 objects, with more to come, including a chocolate tin that was given to children in Cardiff to mark the opening of the Queen Alexandra Dock, a souvenir ticket from one of the first flights from Pengam Airport, and a set of candlesticks brought to the city by a Holocaust refugee.
Opening Summer 2010
Cost £4.4m
Main funders Cardiff Council £1.75m, applications also being made to Welsh Assembly Government and the Heritage Lottery Fund
Chief curator Victoria Rogers
Project director Kate Howe
Exhibition design Redman Design
Graphic design Redman Design

Collection A wide range of objects, including a part of the stage where Paul McCartney met John Lennon in 1957, boxer John Conteh’s gloves and world-title belt, and a carriage from Liverpool’s overland railway.
Opening Spring 2011
Cost £72m
Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £11m, Northwest Regional Development Agency £32.7m, European Regional Development Fund £5m, Garfield Weston Foundation £1m
Chief curator Janet Dugdale, director of urban history for the Museum of Liverpool
Project director Sharon Granville, executive director for the Museum of Liverpool
Exhibition design Haley Sharpe Design, Redman Design
Exhibition masterplanner BRC Imagination Arts
Exhibition lighting consultant Sutton Vane
Construction manager for exhibition fit-out Fraser Randall
Cost manager Turner & Townsend
Access consultant VisionSense Building
Contractor Pihl Galliford Try