Independent museums are usually very resilient institutions and the Florence Nightingale Museum is no different. Its director, Natasha McEnroe, has had to deal with a challenging couple of years since she joined the museum in 2011.
McEnroe became director shortly after the museum’s capital project was completed in 2010 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the death of Nightingale, the nurse who is known worldwide for her work during the Crimean war and her contribution to medicine and nursing.
But after the highs of the redeveloped museum and the anniversary, there was a fall in visitor numbers in 2012 during the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which affected many of London’s smaller museums. There was also the threat that Nightingale would be taken off the national history curriculum, a serious problem for a venue that attracts more than 18,000 school visits a year.
But McEnroe’s varied experience has prepared her well for the challenges thrown up by her role at the Florence Nightingale Museum. She started off doing front-of-house work at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), an experience that she says is still useful today in terms of understanding the needs and expectations of visitors.
But it was her next job as the curator of Dr Johnson’s House that had the most impact on her future. McEnroe joined the museum, which is dedicated to Samuel Johnson, creator of the famous Dictionary of the English Language, as the only employee and her two predecessors had both been elderly women who had died in post.
“Employing an enthusiastic 27-year-old who was a museum professional was a brave step for the trustees,” says McEnroe.
“And I loved it as a project because things were run in such an old-fashioned way that you could make very few changes and have huge improvements. It was such a challenge and it was so much my baby.”
McEnroe’s initial aims were fairly straightforward – buy the museum a computer, set up a website, get the volunteers onside. Later there was work on audience development and a big capital project.
“Johnson’s house was such an important part of my career because it crystallised my love of personality museums and the way you can take a famous person and use their life as a focus. You can see that here at the Florence Nightingale Museum.”
Dr Johnson’s House also sparked her love of the history of medicine, as one of her strategies was to look at Johnson through his health and the health of his friends. McEnroe spent 10 years at the museum and enjoyed her time there.
“It was definitely a happy time,” she says, although it was a live-in job, which had its pros and cons. “Not having a commute was a definite advantage but there was downside, as you are continually on call and it’s hard to switch off. But I miss the house still, I have great fondness for it.”
University challenge
Her next job, as the museum manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, part of University College London, involved another capital project. This time it was a wholesale move of the museum and its 80,000 specimens, including a very heavy rhinoceros, to another site on UCL’s campus.
McEnroe’s time at the Grant Museum was a good chance to learn more about working within a university and she also enjoyed having a large pool of colleagues who she could go to for help and advice.
As part of her role, she was also responsible for a collection left to the university by the controversial Victorian scientist Francis Galton, who invented the term eugenics in 1883. Coincidentally, Galton was related to Nightingale as their cousins were married.
“I love the Grant Museum collection as an Victorian zoological historic collection and as an aesthetic collection it is brilliant. But biology is not my subject, I’m not a zoologist, so I don’t respond to the collection in that way, whereas the Galton collection, as much more the history of biology rather than active biology today, was much more up my street in terms of subject matter.”
With all this experience of the history of medicine and museums and collections centred on famous personalities, the move to the Florence Nightingale Museum seemed like an obvious one for McEnroe.
But there was one very big difference from her roles at the Grant Museum and Johnson’s House in that the capital project at the Florence Nightingale Museum had just been finished.
“It is a very different role to carry something forward following a big capital project that everyone has been very fired up about and you have all that energy. I do feel that the love of the subject is what you need at that stage.”
One of the first things that McEnroe did at the museum was develop a written strategy that she could use to provide direction for the museum’s future.
In some ways the Florence Nightingale Museum has a great location, opposite Big Ben, near the London Eye and part of a major hospital, St Thomas’s.
But it is tucked away a bit and is housed in a basement with no obvious place for expansion. McEnroe’s strategy includes the possibility that the museum could move.
Also, like most other small independent museums, the Florence Nightingale Museum is dependent on the number of people who come through the door for its revenue, both in terms of ticket sales and shop sales.
This is why the 30% drop in admissions during the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was such a big deal. And it showed how important it is for the museum to diversify its audiences and activities, and therefore its main income streams.
To help achieve this McEnroe has worked hard to develop vibrant events and talks that attract more adults to the museum.
There is also a temporary exhibitions programme that uses the education space during the summer when the busy schools programme quietens down. McEnroe points to the importance of Bone, an exhibition exploring the history and substance of bone, during the difficult period last year.
“That probably saved our bacon in the dire summer Olympics, which was so bad for so many small museums,” says McEnroe.
“Our evaluation was showing at one point that one in three people were coming specifically to see Bone. It was a poor summer for everybody but without Bone it would have been absolutely disastrous.”
National curriculum
Another potential disaster was the revised national history curriculum, which at one stage had proposed dropping Nightingale.
In the end, she remained on, much to McEnroe’s relief. And there were positives as a result of the campaign – in anticipation of Nightingale being taken off the curriculum the museum made plans to focus more on 20th-century nursing, particularly Edith Cavell, a plan that it will still carry out.
“We have ended up in a better place than we thought possible. I can see it now in a positive light.”
McEnroe also says that the campaign to keep Nightingale on the national curriculum revealed how many people are interested in the pioneering nurse.
“This is what is so lovely about Nightingale, there is no push, you don’t have to strain to make her preoccupations relevant, it is glaringly obvious,” says McEnroe.
“What Nightingale is preoccupied with is infection control, hospital design, the dignity of the patient, nurse training, whether nurses are compassionate enough – all of this is continuously in the news.”
Nightingale’s name has been useful in helping McEnroe secure funding. An example is the money given by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and Guy’s and St Thomas’s Charity to buy a collection of 10 oil paintings by Victor Tardieu.
These show a volunteer field hospital at Bourbourg near Dunkirk in 1915 and will be used for the museum’s first world war centenary programme next year.
McEnroe is also pleased that the HLF has funded an engagement programme linked to the acquisition, which will also allow the exhibition to tour.
“The museum has a really strong reputation in learning and community engagement, so to actually be able to show what we can do when we have a bit of money is really exciting,” says McEnroe.
Whether its applying for funding, lobbying to keep Nightingale on the national curriculum, or planning talks in the museum, one of the main things McEnroe likes about her role is the variety.
“What I do love about the job is that there is always something different. Recently, in the space of an hour I was lying on the floor with an allen key trying to work out how to move a shelf in a display case and then I was with a trustee showing a cabinet minister round the museum. Now that is an extreme example but that is why I enjoy it – it is not all good, but it is never boring.”
The museum was founded in 1989 to promote the understanding and appreciation of Florence Nightingale’s legacy and its continuing influence on nursing, health and medicine.
The collection consists of personal material associated with Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts. The museum archives include about 800 letters from Nightingale and an important rare book collection of 284 titles.
The museum is located in St Thomas’s Hospital, where it has a lease for the next 10 years.
Its total number of visits in 2012-13 was 40,984. School visits make up on average 18,000 visits per year.
The museum has no endowed funds and receives no recurrent grant-in-aid. In 2012-13, museum income (excluding project grants and capital costs) was £300,159, against expenditure of £296,726.
The museum has nine paid staff, three of whom are full-time.
The museum underwent a £1.4m redevelopment in 2010, the centenary of the death of Florence Nightingale.
Natasha McEnroe became the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in 2011 following just over four years as the museum manager at the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, part of University College London (UCL).
During this time she was also the curator of the UCL’s Galton Collection.
Before this she spent nearly 10 years as the curator of Dr Johnson’s House in London.
McEnroe has a master’s in museum studies from UCL and took her first degree at the University of Greenwich.
McEnroe became director shortly after the museum’s capital project was completed in 2010 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the death of Nightingale, the nurse who is known worldwide for her work during the Crimean war and her contribution to medicine and nursing.
But after the highs of the redeveloped museum and the anniversary, there was a fall in visitor numbers in 2012 during the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which affected many of London’s smaller museums. There was also the threat that Nightingale would be taken off the national history curriculum, a serious problem for a venue that attracts more than 18,000 school visits a year.
But McEnroe’s varied experience has prepared her well for the challenges thrown up by her role at the Florence Nightingale Museum. She started off doing front-of-house work at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), an experience that she says is still useful today in terms of understanding the needs and expectations of visitors.
But it was her next job as the curator of Dr Johnson’s House that had the most impact on her future. McEnroe joined the museum, which is dedicated to Samuel Johnson, creator of the famous Dictionary of the English Language, as the only employee and her two predecessors had both been elderly women who had died in post.
“Employing an enthusiastic 27-year-old who was a museum professional was a brave step for the trustees,” says McEnroe.
“And I loved it as a project because things were run in such an old-fashioned way that you could make very few changes and have huge improvements. It was such a challenge and it was so much my baby.”
McEnroe’s initial aims were fairly straightforward – buy the museum a computer, set up a website, get the volunteers onside. Later there was work on audience development and a big capital project.
“Johnson’s house was such an important part of my career because it crystallised my love of personality museums and the way you can take a famous person and use their life as a focus. You can see that here at the Florence Nightingale Museum.”
Dr Johnson’s House also sparked her love of the history of medicine, as one of her strategies was to look at Johnson through his health and the health of his friends. McEnroe spent 10 years at the museum and enjoyed her time there.
“It was definitely a happy time,” she says, although it was a live-in job, which had its pros and cons. “Not having a commute was a definite advantage but there was downside, as you are continually on call and it’s hard to switch off. But I miss the house still, I have great fondness for it.”
University challenge
Her next job, as the museum manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, part of University College London, involved another capital project. This time it was a wholesale move of the museum and its 80,000 specimens, including a very heavy rhinoceros, to another site on UCL’s campus.
McEnroe’s time at the Grant Museum was a good chance to learn more about working within a university and she also enjoyed having a large pool of colleagues who she could go to for help and advice.
As part of her role, she was also responsible for a collection left to the university by the controversial Victorian scientist Francis Galton, who invented the term eugenics in 1883. Coincidentally, Galton was related to Nightingale as their cousins were married.
“I love the Grant Museum collection as an Victorian zoological historic collection and as an aesthetic collection it is brilliant. But biology is not my subject, I’m not a zoologist, so I don’t respond to the collection in that way, whereas the Galton collection, as much more the history of biology rather than active biology today, was much more up my street in terms of subject matter.”
With all this experience of the history of medicine and museums and collections centred on famous personalities, the move to the Florence Nightingale Museum seemed like an obvious one for McEnroe.
But there was one very big difference from her roles at the Grant Museum and Johnson’s House in that the capital project at the Florence Nightingale Museum had just been finished.
“It is a very different role to carry something forward following a big capital project that everyone has been very fired up about and you have all that energy. I do feel that the love of the subject is what you need at that stage.”
One of the first things that McEnroe did at the museum was develop a written strategy that she could use to provide direction for the museum’s future.
In some ways the Florence Nightingale Museum has a great location, opposite Big Ben, near the London Eye and part of a major hospital, St Thomas’s.
But it is tucked away a bit and is housed in a basement with no obvious place for expansion. McEnroe’s strategy includes the possibility that the museum could move.
Also, like most other small independent museums, the Florence Nightingale Museum is dependent on the number of people who come through the door for its revenue, both in terms of ticket sales and shop sales.
This is why the 30% drop in admissions during the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was such a big deal. And it showed how important it is for the museum to diversify its audiences and activities, and therefore its main income streams.
To help achieve this McEnroe has worked hard to develop vibrant events and talks that attract more adults to the museum.
There is also a temporary exhibitions programme that uses the education space during the summer when the busy schools programme quietens down. McEnroe points to the importance of Bone, an exhibition exploring the history and substance of bone, during the difficult period last year.
“That probably saved our bacon in the dire summer Olympics, which was so bad for so many small museums,” says McEnroe.
“Our evaluation was showing at one point that one in three people were coming specifically to see Bone. It was a poor summer for everybody but without Bone it would have been absolutely disastrous.”
National curriculum
Another potential disaster was the revised national history curriculum, which at one stage had proposed dropping Nightingale.
In the end, she remained on, much to McEnroe’s relief. And there were positives as a result of the campaign – in anticipation of Nightingale being taken off the curriculum the museum made plans to focus more on 20th-century nursing, particularly Edith Cavell, a plan that it will still carry out.
“We have ended up in a better place than we thought possible. I can see it now in a positive light.”
McEnroe also says that the campaign to keep Nightingale on the national curriculum revealed how many people are interested in the pioneering nurse.
“This is what is so lovely about Nightingale, there is no push, you don’t have to strain to make her preoccupations relevant, it is glaringly obvious,” says McEnroe.
“What Nightingale is preoccupied with is infection control, hospital design, the dignity of the patient, nurse training, whether nurses are compassionate enough – all of this is continuously in the news.”
Nightingale’s name has been useful in helping McEnroe secure funding. An example is the money given by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and Guy’s and St Thomas’s Charity to buy a collection of 10 oil paintings by Victor Tardieu.
These show a volunteer field hospital at Bourbourg near Dunkirk in 1915 and will be used for the museum’s first world war centenary programme next year.
McEnroe is also pleased that the HLF has funded an engagement programme linked to the acquisition, which will also allow the exhibition to tour.
“The museum has a really strong reputation in learning and community engagement, so to actually be able to show what we can do when we have a bit of money is really exciting,” says McEnroe.
Whether its applying for funding, lobbying to keep Nightingale on the national curriculum, or planning talks in the museum, one of the main things McEnroe likes about her role is the variety.
“What I do love about the job is that there is always something different. Recently, in the space of an hour I was lying on the floor with an allen key trying to work out how to move a shelf in a display case and then I was with a trustee showing a cabinet minister round the museum. Now that is an extreme example but that is why I enjoy it – it is not all good, but it is never boring.”
Florence Nightingale Museum at a glance
The museum was founded in 1989 to promote the understanding and appreciation of Florence Nightingale’s legacy and its continuing influence on nursing, health and medicine.
The collection consists of personal material associated with Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts. The museum archives include about 800 letters from Nightingale and an important rare book collection of 284 titles.
The museum is located in St Thomas’s Hospital, where it has a lease for the next 10 years.
Its total number of visits in 2012-13 was 40,984. School visits make up on average 18,000 visits per year.
The museum has no endowed funds and receives no recurrent grant-in-aid. In 2012-13, museum income (excluding project grants and capital costs) was £300,159, against expenditure of £296,726.
The museum has nine paid staff, three of whom are full-time.
The museum underwent a £1.4m redevelopment in 2010, the centenary of the death of Florence Nightingale.
Natasha McEnroe at a glance
Natasha McEnroe became the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in 2011 following just over four years as the museum manager at the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, part of University College London (UCL).
During this time she was also the curator of the UCL’s Galton Collection.
Before this she spent nearly 10 years as the curator of Dr Johnson’s House in London.
McEnroe has a master’s in museum studies from UCL and took her first degree at the University of Greenwich.
