Symbols play a big role in Northern Ireland as shown by the recent unrest among the Protestant community over the decision by Belfast City Council not to fly the union flag on city hall every day of the year.
The ongoing protests have rather overshadowed another symbolic event for Northern Ireland – this year’s city of culture in Derry-Londonderry, as it is named in the publicity.
This is less about historic tensions between the country’s Catholic and Protestant communities and more about the benefits that have flowed from the peace process following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
As the first UK City of Culture, Derry is holding more than 300 events, with museums and galleries playing an important role alongside music and theatre. Nearly £20m is being spent on the celebrations, including £12.6m from Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.
The most obvious physical symbol of the city of culture is the £13m Peace Bridge, which was unveiled in June 2011. It spans the Foyle river and bridges the gap between the largely Catholic west bank of the city and the mainly Protestant community on the east bank.
The New Year’s Eve fireworks display that marked the beginning of the City of Culture year took place on the Peace Bridge. It also provides a link to Ebrington, another symbolically charged site, which was the home of the British army until it left in 2003.
The Culture Company, the arm’s length body established to oversee the festival, has its offi ces in Ebrington. And the former barracks have also been used to create a space for up to 5,000 spectators for events, which is important when the biggest permanent venue in the city, the Forum, seats just 1,000.
Beyond the symbolic significance of places such as Ebrington and the Peace Bridge, what will the city of culture year bring in terms of infrastructure and new ways of working for the city’s cultural institutions?
The year’s planning has not been without problems. The most serious difficulty came to light in October last year when Derry City Council took over the marketing budget of Culture Company.
The council stepped in after chief executive Sharon O’Connor reportedly said that Culture Company’s marketing division was “not performing”.
The story of Derry
There has also been difficulty in finding appropriate venues to accommodate all the events that the Culture Company wants to hold. The £10m redevelopment of the city’s Guildhall, for example, has been delayed and it will not now open until halfway through the city of culture year in June.
One venue that is on schedule is the Tower Museum, which reopened last month as part of a redevelopment programme that included a £150,000 grant through the City of Culture fund. This includes a revamped main entrance, an enhanced entrance via the Craft Village and improvements to the existing Story of Derry exhibition.
Later this month the project will be complete when a new discovery zone opens. This will focus on the changing landscape as it evolves from its prehistoric beginnings through to the 21st century.
The council’s museum and heritage service also has longer-term plans to create a £7.6m maritime and heritage centre. This will fill a gap as Northern Ireland has no major maritime museum and it will allow the city to better tell the story of the battle of the Atlantic during world war two, when Derry became a vital escort base for the allies.
The council is also planning to redevelop the Foyle Valley Heritage Centre, part of a wider regeneration of the Foyle Valley Gateway area.
Two independent museums in Derry have redevelopment plans as well, but neither of these will be completed in 2013.
One is the Museum of Free Derry, which was created to tell the story of the civil rights movement in the city and particularly the events of 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday, when the British army shot 26 civil rights protesters and bystanders – 13 of them died.
The museum is planning a £2m extension, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board.
Work is expected to start in September 2013 to be finished by the following summer. The extension will be built around the existing building, which was converted to a museum in 2006 and has the last two remaining bullet holes from Bloody Sunday.
“Virtually all we have comes from the community,” says museum manager Adrian Kerr, who says the organisation wants to make better use of the thousands of items in its collection.
“We have an amazing archive but it is locked away in an industrial unit. What we don’t have at the moment is flexible space.”
The Siege of Derry
The other museum that has secured redevelopment funding is centred on the Apprentice Boys of Derry Association, a Protestant organisation that keeps alive the memory of the 1688-89 Siege of Derry, when 13 apprentice boys shut the city gates against the army of the Catholic king, James II.
The museum has a small exhibition that presents the history of the siege and explains the development of the Apprentice Boys and the background to modern celebrations such as its parades.
The association is spending £3m on a new visitor centre and the renovation of the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall. Funding comes from the European Union’s Peace III Programme and the tourist board.
“People with other religious beliefs who visit will understand why we commemorate the siege,” says the general secretary of the association, Billy Moore, who hopes the venue will help community relations by conveying the association’s history to a wider audience.
Community-led venues such as the Museum of Free Derry and the Apprentice Boys of Derry Museum and Exhibition are supported with advice from the Derry City Council’s Heritage and Museum Service. Roisin Doherty, the head of the service, says the mix of museums in the city works well.
“We are very lucky in that the Tower Museum can tell the story of the city as a whole,” says Doherty. “The Apprentice Boys Museum and the Museum of Free Derry tell the community history, which they feel they can tell in their voice. It works quite well, and there is a good partnership working with the community museums.”
It does seem a shame that a number of projects will not be completed earlier, even if the two community museums are not a direct part of the city of culture programme.
However, there are established temporary exhibition venues including the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), which occupies the ground floor of three restored and extended Georgian houses on the historic city walls. The building was completed in 2007 for about £1m and the CCA moved into the ground floor, which had never been occupied, late last year after an £80,000 refurbishment.
There is also the Context Gallery, a space for temporary exhibitions at the Playhouse Theatre, which was created as part of a £4.6m redevelopment of the venue in 2009. And there is Void, an artist-led contemporary art space that opened in 2005.
One of the main city of culture events will be the Turner Prize show, which is making its third foray outside London following a stint at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in 2011 and Tate Liverpool in 2008. It will be on show at the Ebrington site.
Portrait of a city
With a lack of traditional venues, the city is also using its historic attractions as part of its cultural programming. These include the city walls, which are 400 years old this year.
The Holywell Trust’s City Walls Heritage Project will be marking this anniversary with a yearlong programme of activities. And artist Rita Duffy will reclaim a factory space in the city centre for an art project that takes its inspiration from the shirt factories of Derry.
Clare McDermott, one of the programmers at the Culture Company, says there is lots of interest from people who want to exhibit their works this year but lack of space means they are having to be creative.
This is being done with Portrait of a City, which will create a digital archive of resident’s memories that will be shown at series of community exhibitions.
“Portrait of a City will hopefully have a life well beyond 2013,” says McDermott. “We want to create the biggest digital memory bank that exists for any city.”
A strong cultural legacy, which genuinely benefits all sections of the community, is something that many in the city want to see.
“For the city of culture it is great to have the events, but it is all about legacy, and that was one of the key things in the bid,” says Doherty at Derry’s heritage and museum service.
“It is a big, big challenge for the city, everybody is looking at us, but I think there is a commitment there to deliver it.”
One of the biggest changes facing museums all over Northern Ireland is a plan to reduce the number of local councils from 26 to 11.
Chris Bailey, the director of the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), says this will affect not only the 20 museums that are run by 17 of the current councils, but also National Museums Northern Ireland and the other 18 independent and voluntary-run museums, too.
“It might not be wholly bad news because with the changes in the status of local authorities will come a whole series of additional powers,” says Bailey, who points to areas such as planning, regeneration, conservation and tourism, among others.
These are all areas that museums might make a bigger contribution to. “They could play a much more significant role in the cultural landscape of local authorities than they are currently doing,” says Bailey.
The NIMC has prepared a document, The Future of Northern Ireland’s Local Museum Services, outlining some of the challenges and opportunities ahead.
One of the things that museums need to do is make sure that they articulate their value to local communities and what they can contribute to the aims of local authorities.
Local authority museums in Northern Ireland do not seem to have been as badly hit by budget cuts as museums elsewhere in the UK. This could change though.
Roisin Doherty, the head of Derry City Council’s Heritage and Museum Service, says museums need to make sure they tie in with local authority agendas.
“Derry City Council was very forward looking in developing the service when it did and building it up,” says Doherty. “The difficulty and challenge going forward is very much to reassert how important museums are for tourism, learning and participation.”
The issues affecting museums and galleries in Northern Ireland will be discussed at a Museums Association members’ meeting in Belfast on 12 June.
Although the focus is on the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture this year, much of the recent cultural development has been in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast.
The most high-profile project opened in March 2012, the £97m the Titanic Belfast. The visitor attraction, which employed Event Communications as its exhibition designer, attracted 500,000 people in its first six months.
The Ulster Museum reopened in late 2009 after a £17.8m redevelopment. Haley Sharpe was the exhibition designer, and the venue, which is part of National Museums Northern Ireland, won the 2010 Art Fund Prize. The MAC is a mixed-use arts centre that opened in April 2012.
The £18m facility is located directly behind one of Belfast’s oldest landmarks, St Anne’s Cathedral, and features two theatres, three art galleries, a rehearsal space, dance studio and three education and workshop rooms.
Away from Belfast, the largest cultural project to open recently is the visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway, which is run by the National Trust. The £18.5m building was unveiled in July last year and includes exhibition space, cafe and shops. It was designed by Event Communications.
The ongoing protests have rather overshadowed another symbolic event for Northern Ireland – this year’s city of culture in Derry-Londonderry, as it is named in the publicity.
This is less about historic tensions between the country’s Catholic and Protestant communities and more about the benefits that have flowed from the peace process following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
As the first UK City of Culture, Derry is holding more than 300 events, with museums and galleries playing an important role alongside music and theatre. Nearly £20m is being spent on the celebrations, including £12.6m from Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.
The most obvious physical symbol of the city of culture is the £13m Peace Bridge, which was unveiled in June 2011. It spans the Foyle river and bridges the gap between the largely Catholic west bank of the city and the mainly Protestant community on the east bank.
The New Year’s Eve fireworks display that marked the beginning of the City of Culture year took place on the Peace Bridge. It also provides a link to Ebrington, another symbolically charged site, which was the home of the British army until it left in 2003.
The Culture Company, the arm’s length body established to oversee the festival, has its offi ces in Ebrington. And the former barracks have also been used to create a space for up to 5,000 spectators for events, which is important when the biggest permanent venue in the city, the Forum, seats just 1,000.
Beyond the symbolic significance of places such as Ebrington and the Peace Bridge, what will the city of culture year bring in terms of infrastructure and new ways of working for the city’s cultural institutions?
The year’s planning has not been without problems. The most serious difficulty came to light in October last year when Derry City Council took over the marketing budget of Culture Company.
The council stepped in after chief executive Sharon O’Connor reportedly said that Culture Company’s marketing division was “not performing”.
The story of Derry
There has also been difficulty in finding appropriate venues to accommodate all the events that the Culture Company wants to hold. The £10m redevelopment of the city’s Guildhall, for example, has been delayed and it will not now open until halfway through the city of culture year in June.
One venue that is on schedule is the Tower Museum, which reopened last month as part of a redevelopment programme that included a £150,000 grant through the City of Culture fund. This includes a revamped main entrance, an enhanced entrance via the Craft Village and improvements to the existing Story of Derry exhibition.
Later this month the project will be complete when a new discovery zone opens. This will focus on the changing landscape as it evolves from its prehistoric beginnings through to the 21st century.
The council’s museum and heritage service also has longer-term plans to create a £7.6m maritime and heritage centre. This will fill a gap as Northern Ireland has no major maritime museum and it will allow the city to better tell the story of the battle of the Atlantic during world war two, when Derry became a vital escort base for the allies.
The council is also planning to redevelop the Foyle Valley Heritage Centre, part of a wider regeneration of the Foyle Valley Gateway area.
Two independent museums in Derry have redevelopment plans as well, but neither of these will be completed in 2013.
One is the Museum of Free Derry, which was created to tell the story of the civil rights movement in the city and particularly the events of 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday, when the British army shot 26 civil rights protesters and bystanders – 13 of them died.
The museum is planning a £2m extension, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board.
Work is expected to start in September 2013 to be finished by the following summer. The extension will be built around the existing building, which was converted to a museum in 2006 and has the last two remaining bullet holes from Bloody Sunday.
“Virtually all we have comes from the community,” says museum manager Adrian Kerr, who says the organisation wants to make better use of the thousands of items in its collection.
“We have an amazing archive but it is locked away in an industrial unit. What we don’t have at the moment is flexible space.”
The Siege of Derry
The other museum that has secured redevelopment funding is centred on the Apprentice Boys of Derry Association, a Protestant organisation that keeps alive the memory of the 1688-89 Siege of Derry, when 13 apprentice boys shut the city gates against the army of the Catholic king, James II.
The museum has a small exhibition that presents the history of the siege and explains the development of the Apprentice Boys and the background to modern celebrations such as its parades.
The association is spending £3m on a new visitor centre and the renovation of the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall. Funding comes from the European Union’s Peace III Programme and the tourist board.
“People with other religious beliefs who visit will understand why we commemorate the siege,” says the general secretary of the association, Billy Moore, who hopes the venue will help community relations by conveying the association’s history to a wider audience.
Community-led venues such as the Museum of Free Derry and the Apprentice Boys of Derry Museum and Exhibition are supported with advice from the Derry City Council’s Heritage and Museum Service. Roisin Doherty, the head of the service, says the mix of museums in the city works well.
“We are very lucky in that the Tower Museum can tell the story of the city as a whole,” says Doherty. “The Apprentice Boys Museum and the Museum of Free Derry tell the community history, which they feel they can tell in their voice. It works quite well, and there is a good partnership working with the community museums.”
It does seem a shame that a number of projects will not be completed earlier, even if the two community museums are not a direct part of the city of culture programme.
However, there are established temporary exhibition venues including the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), which occupies the ground floor of three restored and extended Georgian houses on the historic city walls. The building was completed in 2007 for about £1m and the CCA moved into the ground floor, which had never been occupied, late last year after an £80,000 refurbishment.
There is also the Context Gallery, a space for temporary exhibitions at the Playhouse Theatre, which was created as part of a £4.6m redevelopment of the venue in 2009. And there is Void, an artist-led contemporary art space that opened in 2005.
One of the main city of culture events will be the Turner Prize show, which is making its third foray outside London following a stint at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in 2011 and Tate Liverpool in 2008. It will be on show at the Ebrington site.
Portrait of a city
With a lack of traditional venues, the city is also using its historic attractions as part of its cultural programming. These include the city walls, which are 400 years old this year.
The Holywell Trust’s City Walls Heritage Project will be marking this anniversary with a yearlong programme of activities. And artist Rita Duffy will reclaim a factory space in the city centre for an art project that takes its inspiration from the shirt factories of Derry.
Clare McDermott, one of the programmers at the Culture Company, says there is lots of interest from people who want to exhibit their works this year but lack of space means they are having to be creative.
This is being done with Portrait of a City, which will create a digital archive of resident’s memories that will be shown at series of community exhibitions.
“Portrait of a City will hopefully have a life well beyond 2013,” says McDermott. “We want to create the biggest digital memory bank that exists for any city.”
A strong cultural legacy, which genuinely benefits all sections of the community, is something that many in the city want to see.
“For the city of culture it is great to have the events, but it is all about legacy, and that was one of the key things in the bid,” says Doherty at Derry’s heritage and museum service.
“It is a big, big challenge for the city, everybody is looking at us, but I think there is a commitment there to deliver it.”
All change for Northern Ireland’s museums
One of the biggest changes facing museums all over Northern Ireland is a plan to reduce the number of local councils from 26 to 11.
Chris Bailey, the director of the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), says this will affect not only the 20 museums that are run by 17 of the current councils, but also National Museums Northern Ireland and the other 18 independent and voluntary-run museums, too.
“It might not be wholly bad news because with the changes in the status of local authorities will come a whole series of additional powers,” says Bailey, who points to areas such as planning, regeneration, conservation and tourism, among others.
These are all areas that museums might make a bigger contribution to. “They could play a much more significant role in the cultural landscape of local authorities than they are currently doing,” says Bailey.
The NIMC has prepared a document, The Future of Northern Ireland’s Local Museum Services, outlining some of the challenges and opportunities ahead.
One of the things that museums need to do is make sure that they articulate their value to local communities and what they can contribute to the aims of local authorities.
Local authority museums in Northern Ireland do not seem to have been as badly hit by budget cuts as museums elsewhere in the UK. This could change though.
Roisin Doherty, the head of Derry City Council’s Heritage and Museum Service, says museums need to make sure they tie in with local authority agendas.
“Derry City Council was very forward looking in developing the service when it did and building it up,” says Doherty. “The difficulty and challenge going forward is very much to reassert how important museums are for tourism, learning and participation.”
The issues affecting museums and galleries in Northern Ireland will be discussed at a Museums Association members’ meeting in Belfast on 12 June.
Northern Ireland’s heritage assets
Although the focus is on the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture this year, much of the recent cultural development has been in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast.
The most high-profile project opened in March 2012, the £97m the Titanic Belfast. The visitor attraction, which employed Event Communications as its exhibition designer, attracted 500,000 people in its first six months.
The Ulster Museum reopened in late 2009 after a £17.8m redevelopment. Haley Sharpe was the exhibition designer, and the venue, which is part of National Museums Northern Ireland, won the 2010 Art Fund Prize. The MAC is a mixed-use arts centre that opened in April 2012.
The £18m facility is located directly behind one of Belfast’s oldest landmarks, St Anne’s Cathedral, and features two theatres, three art galleries, a rehearsal space, dance studio and three education and workshop rooms.
Away from Belfast, the largest cultural project to open recently is the visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway, which is run by the National Trust. The £18.5m building was unveiled in July last year and includes exhibition space, cafe and shops. It was designed by Event Communications.
