Many working in museums are only involved in one major capital project in their careers but Rowan Brown, the director of the National Mining Museum Scotland, is moving towards her third in less than 10 years.
The organisation, an independent that was known as the Scottish Mining Museum until it was rebranded last month, recently benefited from becoming one of three industrial museums to receive money direct from the Scottish government, giving it a stability that will allow it to support a major redevelopment.
The scheme, which will allow visitors to go underground, is much-needed as, unlike the two major coalmining museums in England and Wales, the National Mining Museum Scotland does not offer visitors an underground tour.
But the capital project is some way off as Brown only joined the museum last year and is developing a range of smaller projects first.
“We are working towards a much bigger overall development and vision for the site but there are several steps to get there,” says Brown. “We are keen to work hard on audience development over the next couple of years so that when we come to changing the galleries and programmes we will know we are really answering a legitimate need.”
For now, Brown is overseeing projects such as the one funded by the Museums Association’s (MA) Effective Collections programme that is using the collections to help with Alzheimer’s and dementia care.
This outreach project is part of a plan by the museum to look at how it can use its collections in a more strategic way. Another scheme, funded by Cairn Energy, is a youth education project related to the use of fossil fuels.
A lot of Brown’s thinking at the museum is about how to make coalmining relevant to modern life. As an industry it has almost totally disappeared, although there is some open cast mining in Scotland. But at its peak in the early 20th century more than 140,000 people were employed in Scottish coal mines.
“It is quite difficult to communicate, particularly to school children, as a lot of them have not even seen coal before,” says Brown, who is trying to put coal into the wider context of today’s energy development and supply.
The first capital project Brown worked on was the £27.9m redevelopment of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. She joined the museum service in 2002 and was a big fan of its museums, having grown up in the city.
“My favourite museum was Haggs Castle, which is no more, sadly. It had the children’s toy collection but they also had a 16th-century herb garden and Mary Queen of Scots stayed there at one point, so you got to dress up as Mary. It was the most fantastic place for a small child.”
After working on the Kelvingrove redevelopment, Brown became a curator at the city’s transport museum and the plan was to stay at Glasgow Museums. But then a job came up at National Museums Scotland (NMS), an opportunity she did not feel she could turn down.
Her time at NMS gave her the chance to work on another capital project, the £46m redevelopment of the Royal Museum, which will reopen as part of the National Museum of Scotland in July.
The job at the National Mining Museum Scotland means Brown has worked in local authority, national and independent museums during the past 10 years.
“Surprisingly, there have been more similarities between Lady Victoria here and working at the Museum of Transport in Glasgow because there is a very similar atmosphere, a similar size of team and everybody is incredibly enthusiastic about the place,” Brown says.
In some ways, Brown has joined the National Mining Museum Scotland at a good time. Like other industrial museums in Scotland, it has struggled financially in recent years, a victim of being harder to reach than many venues and having to care for a large site with historic structures that are expensive to maintain. But direct funding from the Scottish government has made a huge difference.
“It is partly about status,” says Brown. “The fact that we are now funded directly, like the Scottish Fisheries Museum and the Scottish Maritime Museum, recognises that we have a key role in Scotland’s overall heritage offer, which is wonderful.”
The museum has been further boosted by the launch in March of Industrial Museums Scotland. One of the aims of the federation, which is led by the three museums that now receive direct government funding, is to provide support for smaller industrial museums.
This was one of the ideas that came out of the Museums Think Tank, a group of experts brought together by the Scottish government to review how the sector could move forward.
The group, whose report was published six months later than expected in December 2010, was also asked to look at the relationship between different types of museums and to create a strategic plan for the future.
The Scottish government has asked Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS) to develop the national strategy and a report is expected later this year following consultation during the summer.
One of the think tank’s key recommendations was that a national development body should be created as the single organisation to develop and deliver strategy. MGS, which also distributes government funding to the sector, could become this development body and abandon its status as a membership body.
“I think it would be wonderful if a grant-giving body was not also a membership body,” says Brown. “That would allow it to be a lot tidier and it would also mean there can’t be any arguments about subjectivity.
"There has been a lot of fantastic work done by MGS in recent years, and the Recognition scheme has virtually salvaged this place, but there are things that you might do differently and it is difficult to make those things heard within the context of a membership organisation.”
One thing that Brown is keen to see as part of the development of national strategy is some meaningful public consultation.
“It would be very useful if we took this opportunity as a sector to talk to the public,” Brown says. “That has been a huge gap in all the consultation exercises that have taken place in recent years. What we really need to do is talk to our audiences and non-audiences about what they want from the sector.”
One of the reasons for this is that consultation might help the public understand more about the issues facing many of Scotland’s museums.
“There is a lot misunderstanding in the public domain about the chunks of funding we get and what that means in reality. When you seen an HLF project that has a £50m or £75m price tag it is easy to think that the sector is really well funded. But it is always the usual suspects who can command that kind of funding and that is the bit that is not that well publicised.”
Brown is keen on the benefits provided by the many networks that exist for museum professionals. The Scottish Museums Federation, an individual membership body, has been particularly important.
“I think the federation is great for people exchanging ideas, networking and learning about the sector and it is particularly good in the earlier stages of your career.
"It was a big influence on me personally because it meant I was able to get a much better sense of what was happening in museums generally rather than just being immersed in my own organisation. Glasgow City Council had a huge museum structure and NMS was huge, so you could quite easily be buffered from what goes on outside.”
Brown has also been very much involved in the MA and says “it is vital to have a broader UK and international perspective on things”.
As well as becoming an MA board member recently, she was involved in the development of Old Tools, New Uses, an innovative scheme created by the Scottish Transport and Industry Collections and Knowledge network and funded by the MA’s Effective Collections scheme.
The project allowed Scottish museums to have their tool and domestic technology collections assessed by an independent adviser. Some unwanted items were then donated to artisan communities in Africa.
“We don’t have huge resources to spend, so it is important that everybody works together,” says Brown, who is already very much imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit of independent museums. This attitude will be vital if her third major capital project is to be a success.
Rowan Brown is speaking at this year’s Museums Association annual conference in Brighton (3-4 October)
www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Rowan Brown grew up in Glasgow and took an MA in art history at the University of St Andrews. She also has a postgraduate diploma in museum studies from the University of Leicester.
Her first museum job was in 2002 as a research assistant on the Kelvingrove New Century Project in Glasgow. She then became a curator of transport and technology at Glasgow Museums before joining National Museums Scotland (NMS) in 2006 as a curator of technology.
She became the senior curator of technology at NMS in 2008 before joining the Scottish Mining Museum in 2010 as its director.
The museum has been renamed the National Mining Museum Scotland. Brown is a board Member of the Museums Association, president of the Scottish Museums Federation and chairwoman of Industrial Museums Scotland.
The museum is based at the Lady Victoria Colliery in Newtongrange, just outside Edinburgh, and cares for Scotland’s national coalmining collection.
The collection at the museum comprises more than 60,000 items, including objects, archive material, photographs and books.
The Lady Victoria Colliery opened in the 1890s and became renowned as one of the first Scottish “super pits” and a showpiece for the industry. In its lifetime it produced a record 40 million tons of coal, all hauled up the 500-metre shaft by the largest winding engine in Scotland.
At its peak, the colliery had a workforce of almost 2,000 men and women. The colliery closed in 1981 and the museum opened in 1984.
The National Mining Museum Scotland employs 33 people (17 full-time equivalent) and has about 50 volunteers.
The National Mining Museum Scotland already offers visitors a range of experiences but an underground tour is one of the things that Rowan Brown is hoping to add as part of a wider capital project.