Like many museum professionals, Sue Shave, the director of Chiltern Open Air Museum, has moved around the country a lot during her career.
She has now been at the Buckinghamshire museum, which reopens on 28 March following its winter break, for more than 10 years after joining from Coldharbour Mill, a Georgian spinning mill in Devon.
She started out in the early 1990s as a volunteer at a visitor centre for archaeology in York where she later became an assistant manager. She then moved to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex to take a job as an education officer. From there she went to Birmingham to work at Thinktank, the science centre that the city council was developing at the £140m Millennium Point scheme.
Shave says that she learned a lot from all these roles and is particularly pleased with her time at Thinktank, where she set up and managed a range of educational programmes, including the development of the interactive Lego Lab.
“They put a lot of time and money into Lego Lab and I think that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of at Thinktank,” Shave says.
“The programme actually enabled people of all ages to learn how to do computer programming using Lego equipment. It was fantastic -– we’d have five- and six-year-olds and 90-year-olds sitting side by side learning together. And we ran a lot of programmes with kids from some of the poorer areas of the city.”
But despite this range of experience, it was her time at Weald and Downland that made the most impression on Shave.
“It was a fantastic experience and I’ve never forgotten about it –- open-air museums just got into my blood,” she says. “I once said this to Richard Harris [who was the director of Weald and Downland at the time] and he looked amazed that anyone could think otherwise.”
“Everywhere I go now it’s about the buildings,” Shave says. “I’m always looking at them because they are our primary collection here. What’s unique and fantastic about this museum is our buildings.”
Caring for historic buildings
Historic buildings certainly need a bit of love, as they can be challenging and expensive objects to maintain. More than 30 structures have been rescued and rebuilt at Chiltern Open Air Museum’s site since the museum was founded in 1976 and there are more in store.
The buildings include an iron age house, a 1906 public convenience from Caversham, a High Wycombe toll house from 1826, a vicarage built in 1896 in Thame, a prefab constructed shortly after the end of world war two and a Nissen hut.
Effective fundraising is vital for small independent museums, but it is particularly important at Chiltern Open Air Museum because of the work that is needed to maintain the buildings. Shave says that when she started as the director, the museum was well-run and fit-for-purpose but it needed to secure money to develop the collection.
“When I arrived in 2004, there were a lot of volunteers and staff who had great ideas and they were at the stage where they wanted to implement them and to look at how the museum could get funding to make this happen,” Shave says.
“As as an independent museum and a charity, we just didn’t have that kind of money for development projects. Survival was hard enough.”
Shave’s strategy was to secure small pots of money from largely local sources that would enable the museum to implement a development plan for the buildings that were in its stores.
“In those first few years we got a lot of the smaller grants from sources such as the Chilterns Conservation Board, who’ve been hugely supportive of us and have funded all sorts of developments that have really enhanced the museum.”
Securing grants and other funding is still important and this work has been supported by the appointment of a dedicated fundraiser. This was done with the help of money from the Association of Independent Museums’ Sustainability Grant Scheme.
Shave says the appointment has been a massive success, shown by the fact that the museum currently has five Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) awards on the go: these comprise three Skills for the Future awards; a Your Heritage grant for the Haddenham Fusion Project; and a Catalyst grant for looking at new revenue streams.
Diversifying income
Having a strategy to increase and diversify income is important for the museum, which receives no regular funding.
“Colleagues in local authority museums are having a completely different issue in that their funding is being cut,” Shave says.
“But we don’t have any funding to cut. So every year you’re budgeting and looking at what your expenditure is likely to be and how you’re going to meet that – this is what every independent museum has to spend time worrying about.”
Shave says that it is important to balance trying new things with focusing on what you do well already. Its forward plan includes targeting the wedding market, raising more revenue from individual giving and improving income from schools. The museum also receives revenue from some more unusual sources, particularly filming.
Grantchester, Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife and Midsomer Murders are among the television programmes that have used Chiltern Open Air Museum as a location.
Sustainability is another important issue at the museum, which has an environmentally friendly ethos.
The 43-acre site, which includes woodland and arable fields, is maintained using traditional skills and machinery. The museum aims to be self-sufficient where possible.
Chiltern Open Air Museum has also been successful in securing money to support work in this area. Green Ways from Yesterday was a project funded through the Happy Museum initiative that aimed to capture sustainable skills and practices from the experiences of older people, and celebrate the contribution these can make to a more sustainable future.
This focused on the 1940s “make do and mend” philosophy, and involved local community groups, charities, crafts people and food producers sharing environmentally friendly ways of living that are relevant today.
“The Happy Museum project was one of the ways in which we started to better communicate our sustainability work to people,” Shave says.
“We are doing it because this museum is about historic buildings and ways of life in the past, and what we are trying to do is relearn some of those skills and preserve them. And we’re doing it because we want to keep those skills alive and to show people what this landscape would have looked like and why.”
A lot of the work done at the museum is done by its 200-plus volunteers. This ranges from conservation and maintenance work on the buildings, landscaping and looking after animals that live on the site, to front-of-house tasks such as ticketing, stewarding and helping to develop and run events.
“I don’t think there is anything that happens at the museum where volunteers are not involved in some way. And their knowledge and their life experience has often initiated or contributed to the work in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to develop without that particular set of skills.”
Keeping things fresh
Shave says she has seen a lot of changes in the 10 years that she has been at Chiltern Open Air Museum. And she particularly values the way volunteers keep things fresh and bring in new ideas. Staff employed through the HLF’s Skills for the Future scheme are also important in this respect.
“They’re trainees but they’re not just here to learn from us. They bring their own ideas with them and they challenge us,” she says.
“It’s good that organisations such as museums are challenged on a regular basis about why they are doing things the way they are; it means you have to justify things and think, actually, no, they’re right, there is another way of doing this. It’s wonderful that we have seen all these new people coming into the organisation.”
Sue Shave became the director of Chiltern Open Air Museum in 2004.
She joined from Coldharbour Mill, a 200-year-old spinning mill set in the Devon village of Uffculme.
Before that she set up the education department at the Thinktank science centre in Birmingham as the first education programmes manager.
From 1995 to 2000 she was an education officer at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex.
Shave started her career in 1990 as a volunteer at the Archaeological Resource Centre in York, where she later became an assistant manager.
Chiltern Open Air Museum was founded in 1976 with the aim of rescuing threatened buildings – -the past houses and workplaces of ordinary people that are disappearing from the landscape. More than 30 structures have been rescued and rebuilt at its 43-acre site, which covers 2,000 years of history in the Chilterns.
The museum was originally run solely by volunteers but now has five full-time and six part-time staff members. It is a registered charity and receives no regular grants towards its running costs.
The museum recently won bronze in the VisitEngland Awards for Excellence in the Small Visitor Attraction of the Year category 2014.
She has now been at the Buckinghamshire museum, which reopens on 28 March following its winter break, for more than 10 years after joining from Coldharbour Mill, a Georgian spinning mill in Devon.
She started out in the early 1990s as a volunteer at a visitor centre for archaeology in York where she later became an assistant manager. She then moved to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex to take a job as an education officer. From there she went to Birmingham to work at Thinktank, the science centre that the city council was developing at the £140m Millennium Point scheme.
Shave says that she learned a lot from all these roles and is particularly pleased with her time at Thinktank, where she set up and managed a range of educational programmes, including the development of the interactive Lego Lab.
“They put a lot of time and money into Lego Lab and I think that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of at Thinktank,” Shave says.
“The programme actually enabled people of all ages to learn how to do computer programming using Lego equipment. It was fantastic -– we’d have five- and six-year-olds and 90-year-olds sitting side by side learning together. And we ran a lot of programmes with kids from some of the poorer areas of the city.”
But despite this range of experience, it was her time at Weald and Downland that made the most impression on Shave.
“It was a fantastic experience and I’ve never forgotten about it –- open-air museums just got into my blood,” she says. “I once said this to Richard Harris [who was the director of Weald and Downland at the time] and he looked amazed that anyone could think otherwise.”
“Everywhere I go now it’s about the buildings,” Shave says. “I’m always looking at them because they are our primary collection here. What’s unique and fantastic about this museum is our buildings.”
Caring for historic buildings
Historic buildings certainly need a bit of love, as they can be challenging and expensive objects to maintain. More than 30 structures have been rescued and rebuilt at Chiltern Open Air Museum’s site since the museum was founded in 1976 and there are more in store.
The buildings include an iron age house, a 1906 public convenience from Caversham, a High Wycombe toll house from 1826, a vicarage built in 1896 in Thame, a prefab constructed shortly after the end of world war two and a Nissen hut.
Effective fundraising is vital for small independent museums, but it is particularly important at Chiltern Open Air Museum because of the work that is needed to maintain the buildings. Shave says that when she started as the director, the museum was well-run and fit-for-purpose but it needed to secure money to develop the collection.
“When I arrived in 2004, there were a lot of volunteers and staff who had great ideas and they were at the stage where they wanted to implement them and to look at how the museum could get funding to make this happen,” Shave says.
“As as an independent museum and a charity, we just didn’t have that kind of money for development projects. Survival was hard enough.”
Shave’s strategy was to secure small pots of money from largely local sources that would enable the museum to implement a development plan for the buildings that were in its stores.
“In those first few years we got a lot of the smaller grants from sources such as the Chilterns Conservation Board, who’ve been hugely supportive of us and have funded all sorts of developments that have really enhanced the museum.”
Securing grants and other funding is still important and this work has been supported by the appointment of a dedicated fundraiser. This was done with the help of money from the Association of Independent Museums’ Sustainability Grant Scheme.
Shave says the appointment has been a massive success, shown by the fact that the museum currently has five Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) awards on the go: these comprise three Skills for the Future awards; a Your Heritage grant for the Haddenham Fusion Project; and a Catalyst grant for looking at new revenue streams.
Diversifying income
Having a strategy to increase and diversify income is important for the museum, which receives no regular funding.
“Colleagues in local authority museums are having a completely different issue in that their funding is being cut,” Shave says.
“But we don’t have any funding to cut. So every year you’re budgeting and looking at what your expenditure is likely to be and how you’re going to meet that – this is what every independent museum has to spend time worrying about.”
Shave says that it is important to balance trying new things with focusing on what you do well already. Its forward plan includes targeting the wedding market, raising more revenue from individual giving and improving income from schools. The museum also receives revenue from some more unusual sources, particularly filming.
Grantchester, Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife and Midsomer Murders are among the television programmes that have used Chiltern Open Air Museum as a location.
Sustainability is another important issue at the museum, which has an environmentally friendly ethos.
The 43-acre site, which includes woodland and arable fields, is maintained using traditional skills and machinery. The museum aims to be self-sufficient where possible.
Chiltern Open Air Museum has also been successful in securing money to support work in this area. Green Ways from Yesterday was a project funded through the Happy Museum initiative that aimed to capture sustainable skills and practices from the experiences of older people, and celebrate the contribution these can make to a more sustainable future.
This focused on the 1940s “make do and mend” philosophy, and involved local community groups, charities, crafts people and food producers sharing environmentally friendly ways of living that are relevant today.
“The Happy Museum project was one of the ways in which we started to better communicate our sustainability work to people,” Shave says.
“We are doing it because this museum is about historic buildings and ways of life in the past, and what we are trying to do is relearn some of those skills and preserve them. And we’re doing it because we want to keep those skills alive and to show people what this landscape would have looked like and why.”
A lot of the work done at the museum is done by its 200-plus volunteers. This ranges from conservation and maintenance work on the buildings, landscaping and looking after animals that live on the site, to front-of-house tasks such as ticketing, stewarding and helping to develop and run events.
“I don’t think there is anything that happens at the museum where volunteers are not involved in some way. And their knowledge and their life experience has often initiated or contributed to the work in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to develop without that particular set of skills.”
Keeping things fresh
Shave says she has seen a lot of changes in the 10 years that she has been at Chiltern Open Air Museum. And she particularly values the way volunteers keep things fresh and bring in new ideas. Staff employed through the HLF’s Skills for the Future scheme are also important in this respect.
“They’re trainees but they’re not just here to learn from us. They bring their own ideas with them and they challenge us,” she says.
“It’s good that organisations such as museums are challenged on a regular basis about why they are doing things the way they are; it means you have to justify things and think, actually, no, they’re right, there is another way of doing this. It’s wonderful that we have seen all these new people coming into the organisation.”
Sue Shave at a glance
Sue Shave became the director of Chiltern Open Air Museum in 2004.
She joined from Coldharbour Mill, a 200-year-old spinning mill set in the Devon village of Uffculme.
Before that she set up the education department at the Thinktank science centre in Birmingham as the first education programmes manager.
From 1995 to 2000 she was an education officer at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex.
Shave started her career in 1990 as a volunteer at the Archaeological Resource Centre in York, where she later became an assistant manager.
Chiltern Open Air Museum at a glance
Chiltern Open Air Museum was founded in 1976 with the aim of rescuing threatened buildings – -the past houses and workplaces of ordinary people that are disappearing from the landscape. More than 30 structures have been rescued and rebuilt at its 43-acre site, which covers 2,000 years of history in the Chilterns.
The museum was originally run solely by volunteers but now has five full-time and six part-time staff members. It is a registered charity and receives no regular grants towards its running costs.
The museum recently won bronze in the VisitEngland Awards for Excellence in the Small Visitor Attraction of the Year category 2014.
