Which museum has created 100 jobs in the past five years and is planning to create another 100 in the next decade? Many people’s answer would not be Beamish in County Durham.
But the open-air museum has been doing very well recently and has increased visitor numbers by nearly 70% since 2008 to 500,000 a year, a return to its 1980s heyday.
For Beamish director Richard Evans, who has overseen this transformation, there is a bit of guilt that his museum is doing so well while others in the sector are suffering death by a thousand cuts.
“We are very sensitive that it is a very tricky time for many people working in our sector,” Evans says. “Nevertheless, while in many ways we don’t want to appear to be too arrogant and sure of ourselves, there is a success story to tell here.”
As well as more staff, increasing visitor numbers and higher turnover, Beamish also received more good news last year when it was chosen as one of 16 Arts Council England major partner museums. This was achieved in a joint bid with the Bowes Museum and is worth more than £2.2m over three years.
But it wasn’t always like this. When Evans joined Beamish in 2008, the museum was on a path of long-term decline. It was expected to lose £250,000 that year, which was predicted to double the following year.
This was caused by a gradual but steady fall in the number of visitors combined with a drop in the financial contributions from various local authorities from a high of about 40% down to about 3% of total income.
New business plan
“We had a business model that was developed in the 1980s and had not been adapted,” says Evans. “It relied on local authority contributions to the museum and we had reached the point where we weren’t able to meet our costs through our own efforts.”
Evans launched an internal review, rather than bringing in outside consultants. “In my view, the staff here knew what the problems were and, crucially, were passionate about taking the place forward and protecting it, not just for themselves but because museums benefit from tremendously committed staff, and Beamish is no different.”
The principles behind the plan were in many ways pretty straightforward.
“We decided not to go to our local authority partners and ask for more revenue funding,” Evans says.
“What we tried to do was to arrest the decline in visitors numbers, control our costs and increase income through a range of new initiatives.”
To achieve these aims, Evans and his team concentrated on four priorities. The first was to really focus on the identity of the museum as a place that tells the story of everyday working life in north-east England.
This led to changes such as removing barriers so people can walk into rooms, producing things for people to eat and giving visitors hands-on experiences, including riding on trams.
“The principle of open-air museum curatorship for me is all about the placing of the object in context so people can come and interpret it themselves,” says Evans, who invested in new attractions to achieve this.
The second priority was to control costs and increase revenue. This resulted in a restructuring of the organisation, which Evans says involved making some tough decisions, including making eight people redundant. More positively, it also led to initiatives such as a new ticket that allows visitors to pay once and return all year. All-year round opening was also introduced.
A third priority was to improve the learning offer, both formal and informal, for all ages. And the final key aim was to strengthen the relationship the museum has with its communities and the region.
An example of the community work it does is a European Union-funded scheme looking at how the museum provides experiences for older people who live with dementia. This is being carried out with five other museums and one of the aims is to develop an evidence base about the value of reminiscence work carried out by museums in the language healthcare professionals understand.
“Focusing on those four areas of work has been the critical thing,” says Evans. “And over the last four years we have been more successful than we thought we were going to be. We were planning to stop the decline but we’ve had an increase of visitors that has been at a greater rate than it was in the 1980s.”
Evans was not the obvious candidate to get the museum out of the mess that it was in. Before joining he had no experience of working in a museum, having spent his career at independent heritage trusts.
“I found out afterwards I was the wildcard candidate as there were other people with lots of museum experience,” says Evans.
In what he describes as a two-day process similar to that used on television show The Apprentice, 10 candidates were gradually whittled down to one. The Beamish trustees seem to have made a good decision as the museum is now thriving under Evans.
But he does not want to stand still and recently revealed a £23m masterplan that will take 10 years and will lead to about 100 new jobs. A key component is the creation of a 1950s town as well as overnight accommodation at the museum for the first time.
An important part of the masterplan’s development has been analysing why visitors have been attracted to the museum recently.
“We have done a lot of research to try and find out why we have been successful,” says Evans.
“We have segmented audiences into six quite clear categories, which are around motivations to visit rather than how much money you have, because we believe that whether you are a millionaire or someone on benefits, you may well be brought to the museum for exactly the same motivation.”
Evans is also thinking about how Beamish can cater for the demands of modern visitors.
“In the future people will want to consume different types of experiences, they don’t want the one-size-fits-all 1980s visitor attraction experience. They will come with quite particular demands and interests and they may want to come at all times of day and we need to be quite flexible about that.”
Developing the workforce
Evans is also keen to develop the skills and opportunities for his workforce at Beamish. Even though he has not worked in a museum for long, he has become acutely aware of the challenges that face those who want to forge careers in the sector.
“A lot of managers, directors and curators are nice people who have a social conscience and want the best for the next generation who are coming into our profession and are deeply worried about that,” he says.
“I lecture at Newcastle University and every year I go and stare at 50 people who are desperate for a career in museums and you do wonder where these opportunities are coming from.”
One of the areas he is thinking hard about is how the museum manages apprenticeships. He is concerned that, while there is lots of money for such schemes, there is often little chance of actual employment when the individual finishes the apprenticeship.
“We need to careful about the number of young people we train to do anything unless there are real opportunities for them,” he says. “The reality for us and other museums is that there is a finite number of opportunities in our particular sector.
“What we are going to be working on over the next five or six years is proper jobs, so not the kind when we use the term apprenticeships and it’s code for cheap labour,” Evans continues. “We want to try and create employment and we won’t be able to do that unless there is real demand for that skill.”
Evans is looking at developing long-term apprenticeships where modern skills are taught alongside heritage methods. The idea is that this will enable apprentices to find work outside museums and heritage.
All of this relates to the impact that Beamish makes on the community and Evans refers to the work of the Museums Association’s Museums 2020 initiative when talking about the future of the sector.
“There are quite significant impacts that we make across economic, social and cultural fields,” he says. “About 65% of our audience is from outside the north east and they are bringing significant spending power into a region that really needs it.”
Evans is not from the north east (his family is half Welsh and he went to school in Kent) but he is one of those people who is really proud of the region and very attached to it.
“It’s a fantastic region and it makes sense as a region in a way that not all do. My home is a very early lead miner’s cottage, tucked away from the world, with no electricity. So I live in a rural location and work in my favourite museum in the UK – I’m very happy indeed.”
Richard Evans, who was born in rural Kent, lives on the border of County Durham in the North Pennines.
He has an MA in English and philosophy from Glasgow University.
Prior to joining Beamish in 2008, Evans was the director of the Wentworth Castle and Stainborough Park restoration project near Barnsley. Before that he was the development officer for New Lanark World Heritage Village in Scotland.
Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, was founded in 1970 and was developed by its first director Frank Atkinson.
The museum tells the story of everyday working life in north-east England using its social, industrial and agricultural collections, which are designated. It is situated in 350 acres of woodland and farmland.
The museum attracts 500,000 visitors a year and has 275 FTE staff, 350 volunteers and an annual budget of £7m.
Beamish is one of Arts Council England’s 16 Renaissance major partner museums in a partnership with the Bowes Museum, which is also in County Durham. As part of this, Bowes and Beamish receive over £2.2m from 2012-15.
But the open-air museum has been doing very well recently and has increased visitor numbers by nearly 70% since 2008 to 500,000 a year, a return to its 1980s heyday.
For Beamish director Richard Evans, who has overseen this transformation, there is a bit of guilt that his museum is doing so well while others in the sector are suffering death by a thousand cuts.
“We are very sensitive that it is a very tricky time for many people working in our sector,” Evans says. “Nevertheless, while in many ways we don’t want to appear to be too arrogant and sure of ourselves, there is a success story to tell here.”
As well as more staff, increasing visitor numbers and higher turnover, Beamish also received more good news last year when it was chosen as one of 16 Arts Council England major partner museums. This was achieved in a joint bid with the Bowes Museum and is worth more than £2.2m over three years.
But it wasn’t always like this. When Evans joined Beamish in 2008, the museum was on a path of long-term decline. It was expected to lose £250,000 that year, which was predicted to double the following year.
This was caused by a gradual but steady fall in the number of visitors combined with a drop in the financial contributions from various local authorities from a high of about 40% down to about 3% of total income.
New business plan
“We had a business model that was developed in the 1980s and had not been adapted,” says Evans. “It relied on local authority contributions to the museum and we had reached the point where we weren’t able to meet our costs through our own efforts.”
Evans launched an internal review, rather than bringing in outside consultants. “In my view, the staff here knew what the problems were and, crucially, were passionate about taking the place forward and protecting it, not just for themselves but because museums benefit from tremendously committed staff, and Beamish is no different.”
The principles behind the plan were in many ways pretty straightforward.
“We decided not to go to our local authority partners and ask for more revenue funding,” Evans says.
“What we tried to do was to arrest the decline in visitors numbers, control our costs and increase income through a range of new initiatives.”
To achieve these aims, Evans and his team concentrated on four priorities. The first was to really focus on the identity of the museum as a place that tells the story of everyday working life in north-east England.
This led to changes such as removing barriers so people can walk into rooms, producing things for people to eat and giving visitors hands-on experiences, including riding on trams.
“The principle of open-air museum curatorship for me is all about the placing of the object in context so people can come and interpret it themselves,” says Evans, who invested in new attractions to achieve this.
The second priority was to control costs and increase revenue. This resulted in a restructuring of the organisation, which Evans says involved making some tough decisions, including making eight people redundant. More positively, it also led to initiatives such as a new ticket that allows visitors to pay once and return all year. All-year round opening was also introduced.
A third priority was to improve the learning offer, both formal and informal, for all ages. And the final key aim was to strengthen the relationship the museum has with its communities and the region.
An example of the community work it does is a European Union-funded scheme looking at how the museum provides experiences for older people who live with dementia. This is being carried out with five other museums and one of the aims is to develop an evidence base about the value of reminiscence work carried out by museums in the language healthcare professionals understand.
“Focusing on those four areas of work has been the critical thing,” says Evans. “And over the last four years we have been more successful than we thought we were going to be. We were planning to stop the decline but we’ve had an increase of visitors that has been at a greater rate than it was in the 1980s.”
Evans was not the obvious candidate to get the museum out of the mess that it was in. Before joining he had no experience of working in a museum, having spent his career at independent heritage trusts.
“I found out afterwards I was the wildcard candidate as there were other people with lots of museum experience,” says Evans.
In what he describes as a two-day process similar to that used on television show The Apprentice, 10 candidates were gradually whittled down to one. The Beamish trustees seem to have made a good decision as the museum is now thriving under Evans.
But he does not want to stand still and recently revealed a £23m masterplan that will take 10 years and will lead to about 100 new jobs. A key component is the creation of a 1950s town as well as overnight accommodation at the museum for the first time.
An important part of the masterplan’s development has been analysing why visitors have been attracted to the museum recently.
“We have done a lot of research to try and find out why we have been successful,” says Evans.
“We have segmented audiences into six quite clear categories, which are around motivations to visit rather than how much money you have, because we believe that whether you are a millionaire or someone on benefits, you may well be brought to the museum for exactly the same motivation.”
Evans is also thinking about how Beamish can cater for the demands of modern visitors.
“In the future people will want to consume different types of experiences, they don’t want the one-size-fits-all 1980s visitor attraction experience. They will come with quite particular demands and interests and they may want to come at all times of day and we need to be quite flexible about that.”
Developing the workforce
Evans is also keen to develop the skills and opportunities for his workforce at Beamish. Even though he has not worked in a museum for long, he has become acutely aware of the challenges that face those who want to forge careers in the sector.
“A lot of managers, directors and curators are nice people who have a social conscience and want the best for the next generation who are coming into our profession and are deeply worried about that,” he says.
“I lecture at Newcastle University and every year I go and stare at 50 people who are desperate for a career in museums and you do wonder where these opportunities are coming from.”
One of the areas he is thinking hard about is how the museum manages apprenticeships. He is concerned that, while there is lots of money for such schemes, there is often little chance of actual employment when the individual finishes the apprenticeship.
“We need to careful about the number of young people we train to do anything unless there are real opportunities for them,” he says. “The reality for us and other museums is that there is a finite number of opportunities in our particular sector.
“What we are going to be working on over the next five or six years is proper jobs, so not the kind when we use the term apprenticeships and it’s code for cheap labour,” Evans continues. “We want to try and create employment and we won’t be able to do that unless there is real demand for that skill.”
Evans is looking at developing long-term apprenticeships where modern skills are taught alongside heritage methods. The idea is that this will enable apprentices to find work outside museums and heritage.
All of this relates to the impact that Beamish makes on the community and Evans refers to the work of the Museums Association’s Museums 2020 initiative when talking about the future of the sector.
“There are quite significant impacts that we make across economic, social and cultural fields,” he says. “About 65% of our audience is from outside the north east and they are bringing significant spending power into a region that really needs it.”
Evans is not from the north east (his family is half Welsh and he went to school in Kent) but he is one of those people who is really proud of the region and very attached to it.
“It’s a fantastic region and it makes sense as a region in a way that not all do. My home is a very early lead miner’s cottage, tucked away from the world, with no electricity. So I live in a rural location and work in my favourite museum in the UK – I’m very happy indeed.”
Richard Evans at a glance
Richard Evans, who was born in rural Kent, lives on the border of County Durham in the North Pennines.
He has an MA in English and philosophy from Glasgow University.
Prior to joining Beamish in 2008, Evans was the director of the Wentworth Castle and Stainborough Park restoration project near Barnsley. Before that he was the development officer for New Lanark World Heritage Village in Scotland.
Beamish at a glance
Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, was founded in 1970 and was developed by its first director Frank Atkinson.
The museum tells the story of everyday working life in north-east England using its social, industrial and agricultural collections, which are designated. It is situated in 350 acres of woodland and farmland.
The museum attracts 500,000 visitors a year and has 275 FTE staff, 350 volunteers and an annual budget of £7m.
Beamish is one of Arts Council England’s 16 Renaissance major partner museums in a partnership with the Bowes Museum, which is also in County Durham. As part of this, Bowes and Beamish receive over £2.2m from 2012-15.
