“We wanted to provoke people into understanding Roman life,” says Andrew Mackay, who became the director of the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust at the start of this year.
“So, we went for a contemporary approach of comparing what it was like in Carlisle 2,000 years ago with the Gaza Strip and other divided communities now. It’s controversial, but by relating Hadrian’s Wall to contemporary issues, people understand it better. I can now empathise much more with the native communities that were here when the Romans came, built a wall and divided what was one community.”
Being in Carlisle, Tullie House is right on the border of Scotland and England, and the museum tells the history of the region. It also houses a significant art collection and a lot of natural and archaeological specimens.
Mackay was the head of collections and programming before replacing Hilary Wade, who had been the director of the museum since 2003. In his previous role, he led the team on the Roman gallery, which opened in 2012. It has proved popular with visitors, and shows the value of long-term loan schemes, this one with the British Museum, where many key objects came from.
“I really persevered to get artefacts of national importance,” says Mackay.
But local links are the priority now. Mackay wants to foster ties with Carlisle’s cathedral and castle to exploit the city’s full potential. “We’re keen to develop the city as a cultural tourism destination; we’re working closely with all the museums along Hadrian’s Wall and Tyne and Wear Museums.”
Tullie House is one of 21 Arts Council England Major Partner Museums, and Mackay says that his team has recently submitted an application to achieve Designated status for its natural sciences collection. The museum also won the Telegraph Family Friendly Museum Award in 2015, awarded by Kids In Museums.
You can see why Tullie House won the award. The border reiver galleries upstairs have fun interactive activities in them, and the museum dedicates its ground floor galleries to a family-friendly exhibition every summer. A Viking’s Guide to Deadly Dragons, Cressida Cowell’s popular children’s book, is the focus of a touring exhibition from Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle, which is at Tullie House until 9 October.
Inspiring objects
Families are unquestionably a key audience, says Mackay. And something he thinks will help further engage this group is Tullie House’s new acquisition: a whale skeleton.
“We’ve spent 18 months acquiring and conserving it,” he says. “We now need a specialist to mount it so we can hang it in the atrium. It will make a real statement.”
The museum wasn’t looking to acquire a whale skeleton, but sometimes a chance arises that you can’t miss, says Mackay. He’s managed to establish a collections fund, which is a rarity in many museums today.
“I love the power that museum objects have to inspire people to think differently,” he says. “A few years ago we led a handling session with a group of excluded children in Carlisle. They were 14 to 15 years old, and were pretty bolshie. We sat them round and opened a box of Roman artefacts and passed them round.
“There was one lad who was really twitchy, not settling and not happy to be there. So, I handed him a Roman glass jug that was used for fish oil. It was only about the size of a teacup and incredibly fragile. ‘Would you like to hold this?’ I asked. ‘You’re going to allow me to hold that?’ he replied. ‘Yes, it’s 2,000 years old so don’t drop it. It’s really valuable.’ He couldn’t believe that I trusted him to hold something so treasured.”
The boy’s teacher got back in touch to say that the session had transformed the teenager’s life; he was now interested in history and was really engaged at school.
This kind of experience is embedded in Mackay. As a boy, he was expected to go into the family DIY hardware business, but was more interested in birdwatching.
“I saw a job advertised at the local museum to catalogue their bird collection,” he says. “I didn’t tell my parents. I was 17 or 18. I applied for it and was invited to meet the curator. The museum was actually looking for graduates, but the curator let me do the test. He put me in a room full of stuffed birds and I had to write down all the species I could identify. I must have done well because he took me on.”
From that point Mackay knew he wanted to work in museums. He says that they really do change lives, which is a belief he puts at the heart of his work. He has even quoted the Museums Association’s Museums Change Lives scheme – a vision for the impact that museums can have on society – at the back of Tullie House’s new manifesto. The booklet has been put together off the back of a tough six months for the trust.
When Mackay began shadowing the previous director it had just been confirmed the museum would face further cuts to core grants, so the business plan Mackay was working on became a response to how the organisation could survive with less money. It meant that he was forced to make redundancies to make the museum’s vision more sustainable.
Cultural capital
Mackay has consolidated resources, but he also worked hard to continue investing – knowledge and capital – in innovative programmes. The museum has a youth panel, which has developed an app for Tullie House, and also helps to select exhibitions.
Mackay has also been collaborating with the British Museum (BM) on the Talking Objects programme, where gallery invigilators engage with their museum’s collection to inspire them to interact with visitors by asking them questions. And then there’s the knowledge exchange scheme, also with the BM, where one member of each staff base goes to the other institution for a week and learns from the other’s museum.
And it doesn’t stop there. Mackay reveals that Tullie House has been working with the Xuzhou Imperial Decree Museum in China.
“They wanted to improve their knowledge and understanding of managing museums, and were particularly excited about the community engagement workshops Tullie House runs,” he says. “The British Council helped fund us taking a box of Roman objects out there. They were absolutely gobsmacked. We got national coverage from TV, newspapers. One teacher said they had never seen anything like it before. She pointed to the museum director and said, ‘If you could get him to do this, we’d be here every day.’”
Mackay has seen museums change lives first-hand on many occasions.
“So often people are into the numbers game – number of visitors, revenue – but actually if you can change the course of somebody’s life through an experience, that is actually what matters.”
“So, we went for a contemporary approach of comparing what it was like in Carlisle 2,000 years ago with the Gaza Strip and other divided communities now. It’s controversial, but by relating Hadrian’s Wall to contemporary issues, people understand it better. I can now empathise much more with the native communities that were here when the Romans came, built a wall and divided what was one community.”
Being in Carlisle, Tullie House is right on the border of Scotland and England, and the museum tells the history of the region. It also houses a significant art collection and a lot of natural and archaeological specimens.
Mackay was the head of collections and programming before replacing Hilary Wade, who had been the director of the museum since 2003. In his previous role, he led the team on the Roman gallery, which opened in 2012. It has proved popular with visitors, and shows the value of long-term loan schemes, this one with the British Museum, where many key objects came from.
“I really persevered to get artefacts of national importance,” says Mackay.
But local links are the priority now. Mackay wants to foster ties with Carlisle’s cathedral and castle to exploit the city’s full potential. “We’re keen to develop the city as a cultural tourism destination; we’re working closely with all the museums along Hadrian’s Wall and Tyne and Wear Museums.”
Tullie House is one of 21 Arts Council England Major Partner Museums, and Mackay says that his team has recently submitted an application to achieve Designated status for its natural sciences collection. The museum also won the Telegraph Family Friendly Museum Award in 2015, awarded by Kids In Museums.
You can see why Tullie House won the award. The border reiver galleries upstairs have fun interactive activities in them, and the museum dedicates its ground floor galleries to a family-friendly exhibition every summer. A Viking’s Guide to Deadly Dragons, Cressida Cowell’s popular children’s book, is the focus of a touring exhibition from Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle, which is at Tullie House until 9 October.
Inspiring objects
Families are unquestionably a key audience, says Mackay. And something he thinks will help further engage this group is Tullie House’s new acquisition: a whale skeleton.
“We’ve spent 18 months acquiring and conserving it,” he says. “We now need a specialist to mount it so we can hang it in the atrium. It will make a real statement.”
The museum wasn’t looking to acquire a whale skeleton, but sometimes a chance arises that you can’t miss, says Mackay. He’s managed to establish a collections fund, which is a rarity in many museums today.
“I love the power that museum objects have to inspire people to think differently,” he says. “A few years ago we led a handling session with a group of excluded children in Carlisle. They were 14 to 15 years old, and were pretty bolshie. We sat them round and opened a box of Roman artefacts and passed them round.
“There was one lad who was really twitchy, not settling and not happy to be there. So, I handed him a Roman glass jug that was used for fish oil. It was only about the size of a teacup and incredibly fragile. ‘Would you like to hold this?’ I asked. ‘You’re going to allow me to hold that?’ he replied. ‘Yes, it’s 2,000 years old so don’t drop it. It’s really valuable.’ He couldn’t believe that I trusted him to hold something so treasured.”
The boy’s teacher got back in touch to say that the session had transformed the teenager’s life; he was now interested in history and was really engaged at school.
This kind of experience is embedded in Mackay. As a boy, he was expected to go into the family DIY hardware business, but was more interested in birdwatching.
“I saw a job advertised at the local museum to catalogue their bird collection,” he says. “I didn’t tell my parents. I was 17 or 18. I applied for it and was invited to meet the curator. The museum was actually looking for graduates, but the curator let me do the test. He put me in a room full of stuffed birds and I had to write down all the species I could identify. I must have done well because he took me on.”
From that point Mackay knew he wanted to work in museums. He says that they really do change lives, which is a belief he puts at the heart of his work. He has even quoted the Museums Association’s Museums Change Lives scheme – a vision for the impact that museums can have on society – at the back of Tullie House’s new manifesto. The booklet has been put together off the back of a tough six months for the trust.
When Mackay began shadowing the previous director it had just been confirmed the museum would face further cuts to core grants, so the business plan Mackay was working on became a response to how the organisation could survive with less money. It meant that he was forced to make redundancies to make the museum’s vision more sustainable.
Cultural capital
Mackay has consolidated resources, but he also worked hard to continue investing – knowledge and capital – in innovative programmes. The museum has a youth panel, which has developed an app for Tullie House, and also helps to select exhibitions.
Mackay has also been collaborating with the British Museum (BM) on the Talking Objects programme, where gallery invigilators engage with their museum’s collection to inspire them to interact with visitors by asking them questions. And then there’s the knowledge exchange scheme, also with the BM, where one member of each staff base goes to the other institution for a week and learns from the other’s museum.
And it doesn’t stop there. Mackay reveals that Tullie House has been working with the Xuzhou Imperial Decree Museum in China.
“They wanted to improve their knowledge and understanding of managing museums, and were particularly excited about the community engagement workshops Tullie House runs,” he says. “The British Council helped fund us taking a box of Roman objects out there. They were absolutely gobsmacked. We got national coverage from TV, newspapers. One teacher said they had never seen anything like it before. She pointed to the museum director and said, ‘If you could get him to do this, we’d be here every day.’”
Mackay has seen museums change lives first-hand on many occasions.
“So often people are into the numbers game – number of visitors, revenue – but actually if you can change the course of somebody’s life through an experience, that is actually what matters.”
