John Roles laughs a lot when talking about his role as the head of museums and galleries in Leeds, but despite his friendly and relaxed manner, he must have a steelier side to have taken on what many saw as a poisoned chalice when he joined the service six years ago.
One national museum director told him: “You bloody fool, that job has destroyed more people’s careers and health than any other job I can think of in the museum world. What possessed you to say yes?”
The reason for this vehement view was the troubled history of the museum service. Unsupportive local politicians, interfering local history societies and a failed PFI bid for the art gallery combined to make it a challenging opportunity to say the least.
But one of the things that made Roles say yes was the chance to run a big service on his own after 18 years working his way up to head of collections at Brighton and Hove Museums.
There was also the potential of Leeds Museums and Galleries, which has 1.3 million artefacts, including four designated collections. There are nine sites open to the public and it is second only to Birmingham in terms of size of budget and staff for a local authority service in England and Wales.
Roles admits that improving the service was a challenge. “I don’t think it would be any secret to say that Leeds had a strange reputation,” he says. “It was very a traditional service, in the best and worst sense, and had a very low profile locally. One of my first meetings here was with a bunch of councillors and half of them did not know they ran museums. That’s how low the profile was.
“The museum service had the approach of, if we keep our heads down no one will notice us and perhaps we won’t get cut,” he continues. “There was low morale and a feeling that the council don’t understand us, and the council didn’t, as no one had tried to explain to them what we could contribute to their requirements.”
But Roles did not arrive at a bad time as some capital investment had been secured and there was the chance to go for more. Also, Renaissance in the Regions money had just started to kick in, so there was a new source of revenue funding.
Six years on and Leeds Museums and Galleries is in a very different state. The highlight was the opening of the £24m Leeds City Museum in 2008, while the service also developed the £6.3m Discovery Centre to store and conserve its collection. But money has also been spent on a wide range of smaller capital projects at other sites, adding things such as education spaces and community facilities. This includes £2m spent at the art gallery.
Council and Renaissance money has been used to improve education and community engagement work, with the number of learning officers rising from three and a half to ten across all the sites. The museum service has also been rebranded and more money has been spent on marketing and audience development.
Leeds Museums and Galleries has been rewarded with an increase in visitor numbers from 350,000 when Roles joined to more than one million a year now.
Many of the changes have been led by consultation with users, including a big project to guide the development of the city museum.
“When I arrived and asked what consultation had been done, I was presented with the consultation file, which consisted of a questionnaire that had been put out in the museums, which said: ‘Do you think it is good idea to have a new museum? Yes or no?’ That was the level of consultation, so we decided that there was rather more we could do.”
But all this change has not been painless. Roles’s creation of site keepers to oversee the running of individual sites was particularly controversial, with many in the museum community concerned that these new managers would not necessarily be curators.
“A large number of the museum directors [including Nicholas Serota, Mark Jones, and Neil MacGregor] wrote to the leader of the council complaining about this philistine who was destroying Leeds’s museums and galleries,” Roles says. “And you could work your way round the big museum organisations who were writing similar letters.”
But Roles says he was “somewhat baffled” by the reaction to his plans as he was increasing staff numbers and many of their rates of pay.
“As far as I could see it was good news,” he says. “The criticism seemed to be that I had the temerity to be creating what were called site keepers, who were in charge of everything from bogs and boilers to programming. And this was terrible because people thought these should be curators. Well, they could be curators, and in some cases they are, but there are also some that aren’t.”
Roles’s ability to force through change is partly due to the fact that he can deal with the politics. He also realised that it was not possible to take all the staff with him, something that past heads of service at Leeds had unsuccessfully tried. He might also have been helped by the fact that he was an outsider and had no prior connection to Leeds or its museums.
Roles was born in north London and started in the sector as a volunteer in his local museum and after a stint as an education officer covering someone on maternity leave in Cheltenham, he begun work on the development of a small museum in Royston in Hertfordshire.
The vested interests, conflicting aims, and long-held grudges associated with the project were probably good preparation for his time in Leeds. The museum was being set up from scratch and Roles was its first and only paid member of staff. He describes it as fun, but a baptism of fire.
“The local history society had threatened to stand against the local authority in the elections if the councillors did not support creating a museum,” he says. “And the area museum service had advised strongly that the museum was never viable and should not proceed.
“We opened the museum on peanuts,” Roles continues. “I seem to remember we had a £20,000 budget to do the whole thing. We didn’t have any cases, although they didn’t have much in the way of collections.”
He then joined Brighton and Hove Museums, where he started as a curator, going on to become the head of collections. His responsibilities included project managing the £10m refurbishment of Brighton Museum.
Roles has spent his whole career in regional local authority museums, so he is keen for their voice to be heard. Much of his time at Leeds has involved making people aware of the work the museum service does and how it meets wider council aims.
“The National Museums Directors’ Conference is great, but that does lead to a very London-centric and national museum view. Sometimes the regional element gets lost and there is a lot of good stuff going on in the regions.”
Like many others working in larger local authority museum services, he is adamant about the benefits of Renaissance.
“Without Renaissance I could not have done what I have done here, full stop. It is only 9 per cent of the budget but it is the 9 per cent of the budget that I can spend and do something with. If things are going to change with Renaissance, ideally you want it to change over a couple of years, so you can phase it in. But we are not getting much indication at the moment, which does make it difficult to plan.”
Roles says that if the council has to make cuts, museums and galleries will have to take their share. But he believes that the image of the service has been transformed in the city and those that hold the purse strings are now onside in a way that they never were before, partly because Roles has been shouting about the good stuff that it does. And the new City Museum has helped as tangible evidence of the progress made.
“During the first few days of the school holidays after we opened the City Museum I got a phone call from the director of my department, who was in a terrible panic, thinking we had a bomb scare,” says Roles. He soon put him straight. “No, no, no, it’s a queue... it’s people actually queuing to get into the museum.”
John Roles started his career at Royston and District Museum and Art Gallery in Hertfordshire.
He then joined Brighton and Hove Museums as a curator. He later became the head of collections and was the internal project manager for the £10m refurbishment of Brighton Museum.
He joined Leeds Museums and Galleries in 2004 as the head of service.
Roles was born in Arnos Grove in north London in 1957.
One national museum director told him: “You bloody fool, that job has destroyed more people’s careers and health than any other job I can think of in the museum world. What possessed you to say yes?”
The reason for this vehement view was the troubled history of the museum service. Unsupportive local politicians, interfering local history societies and a failed PFI bid for the art gallery combined to make it a challenging opportunity to say the least.
But one of the things that made Roles say yes was the chance to run a big service on his own after 18 years working his way up to head of collections at Brighton and Hove Museums.
There was also the potential of Leeds Museums and Galleries, which has 1.3 million artefacts, including four designated collections. There are nine sites open to the public and it is second only to Birmingham in terms of size of budget and staff for a local authority service in England and Wales.
Roles admits that improving the service was a challenge. “I don’t think it would be any secret to say that Leeds had a strange reputation,” he says. “It was very a traditional service, in the best and worst sense, and had a very low profile locally. One of my first meetings here was with a bunch of councillors and half of them did not know they ran museums. That’s how low the profile was.
“The museum service had the approach of, if we keep our heads down no one will notice us and perhaps we won’t get cut,” he continues. “There was low morale and a feeling that the council don’t understand us, and the council didn’t, as no one had tried to explain to them what we could contribute to their requirements.”
But Roles did not arrive at a bad time as some capital investment had been secured and there was the chance to go for more. Also, Renaissance in the Regions money had just started to kick in, so there was a new source of revenue funding.
Six years on and Leeds Museums and Galleries is in a very different state. The highlight was the opening of the £24m Leeds City Museum in 2008, while the service also developed the £6.3m Discovery Centre to store and conserve its collection. But money has also been spent on a wide range of smaller capital projects at other sites, adding things such as education spaces and community facilities. This includes £2m spent at the art gallery.
Council and Renaissance money has been used to improve education and community engagement work, with the number of learning officers rising from three and a half to ten across all the sites. The museum service has also been rebranded and more money has been spent on marketing and audience development.
Leeds Museums and Galleries has been rewarded with an increase in visitor numbers from 350,000 when Roles joined to more than one million a year now.
Many of the changes have been led by consultation with users, including a big project to guide the development of the city museum.
“When I arrived and asked what consultation had been done, I was presented with the consultation file, which consisted of a questionnaire that had been put out in the museums, which said: ‘Do you think it is good idea to have a new museum? Yes or no?’ That was the level of consultation, so we decided that there was rather more we could do.”
But all this change has not been painless. Roles’s creation of site keepers to oversee the running of individual sites was particularly controversial, with many in the museum community concerned that these new managers would not necessarily be curators.
“A large number of the museum directors [including Nicholas Serota, Mark Jones, and Neil MacGregor] wrote to the leader of the council complaining about this philistine who was destroying Leeds’s museums and galleries,” Roles says. “And you could work your way round the big museum organisations who were writing similar letters.”
But Roles says he was “somewhat baffled” by the reaction to his plans as he was increasing staff numbers and many of their rates of pay.
“As far as I could see it was good news,” he says. “The criticism seemed to be that I had the temerity to be creating what were called site keepers, who were in charge of everything from bogs and boilers to programming. And this was terrible because people thought these should be curators. Well, they could be curators, and in some cases they are, but there are also some that aren’t.”
Roles’s ability to force through change is partly due to the fact that he can deal with the politics. He also realised that it was not possible to take all the staff with him, something that past heads of service at Leeds had unsuccessfully tried. He might also have been helped by the fact that he was an outsider and had no prior connection to Leeds or its museums.
Roles was born in north London and started in the sector as a volunteer in his local museum and after a stint as an education officer covering someone on maternity leave in Cheltenham, he begun work on the development of a small museum in Royston in Hertfordshire.
The vested interests, conflicting aims, and long-held grudges associated with the project were probably good preparation for his time in Leeds. The museum was being set up from scratch and Roles was its first and only paid member of staff. He describes it as fun, but a baptism of fire.
“The local history society had threatened to stand against the local authority in the elections if the councillors did not support creating a museum,” he says. “And the area museum service had advised strongly that the museum was never viable and should not proceed.
“We opened the museum on peanuts,” Roles continues. “I seem to remember we had a £20,000 budget to do the whole thing. We didn’t have any cases, although they didn’t have much in the way of collections.”
He then joined Brighton and Hove Museums, where he started as a curator, going on to become the head of collections. His responsibilities included project managing the £10m refurbishment of Brighton Museum.
Roles has spent his whole career in regional local authority museums, so he is keen for their voice to be heard. Much of his time at Leeds has involved making people aware of the work the museum service does and how it meets wider council aims.
“The National Museums Directors’ Conference is great, but that does lead to a very London-centric and national museum view. Sometimes the regional element gets lost and there is a lot of good stuff going on in the regions.”
Like many others working in larger local authority museum services, he is adamant about the benefits of Renaissance.
“Without Renaissance I could not have done what I have done here, full stop. It is only 9 per cent of the budget but it is the 9 per cent of the budget that I can spend and do something with. If things are going to change with Renaissance, ideally you want it to change over a couple of years, so you can phase it in. But we are not getting much indication at the moment, which does make it difficult to plan.”
Roles says that if the council has to make cuts, museums and galleries will have to take their share. But he believes that the image of the service has been transformed in the city and those that hold the purse strings are now onside in a way that they never were before, partly because Roles has been shouting about the good stuff that it does. And the new City Museum has helped as tangible evidence of the progress made.
“During the first few days of the school holidays after we opened the City Museum I got a phone call from the director of my department, who was in a terrible panic, thinking we had a bomb scare,” says Roles. He soon put him straight. “No, no, no, it’s a queue... it’s people actually queuing to get into the museum.”
John Roles at a glance
John Roles started his career at Royston and District Museum and Art Gallery in Hertfordshire.
He then joined Brighton and Hove Museums as a curator. He later became the head of collections and was the internal project manager for the £10m refurbishment of Brighton Museum.
He joined Leeds Museums and Galleries in 2004 as the head of service.
Roles was born in Arnos Grove in north London in 1957.