Ten years ago the cultural sector was very much on the up. Everyone was blissfully unaware of the looming financial crisis and lottery money was helping to support capital projects all over the UK. These included exciting new-builds and high-profile redevelopments of much-loved institutions.
Museums and galleries played a big part in this cultural renaissance. So, how have those venues that reopened their doors in 2006 after game-changing refits – or, indeed, the ones who opened for the first time – fared over the past decade?
John Holt asks a few of them whether every new display and development was a hit with the public, how they coped in the economic downturn that lurked just around the corner and what they might do differently today.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Reopened in 2006 after a three-year renovation that cost £27.9m
The remarkable interior redesign of the much-loved Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was much more of a cultural revolution than a regular refurbishment.
One-hundred-year-old wiring was overhauled and the former basement storage area was opened up to provide a shop, restaurant, education areas and a whopping 35% extra exhibition space.
But the real difference was felt in how one of the world’s most varied museum collections was given a new lease of life and relevance.
“There was a recognition that the place had become old-fashioned and not really welcoming for visitors,” says museum manager Neil Ballantyne. “We adopted a story-based approach and a redesign that focused on accessibility, with non-expert visitors, families and children particularly in mind.”
In some cases, however, objects proved to be a little too accessible. “In the natural history gallery, for example, the thinking was that psychological, rather than physical, barriers were enough to ensure people treated all objects with reverence.
“That’s fine, of course, when it comes to paintings but you try keeping a toddler from climbing on top of a baby elephant,” says Ballantyne, who also had to monitor potentially recalcitrant members of staff.
“I also had to ensure there wasn’t any creep away from the Kelvingrove family-friendly ethos which, for example, set a 30-word maximum for labels. One or two of the old-school curators, perhaps frustrated by what they perceived to be a lack of detail, might have wanted to add more by a process of stealth. I had to keep an eye on that sort of thing.”
The Heritage Lottery Fund requirement for the museum to change a dozen stories a year across its 22 galleries soon became problematic, however.
“We found a lot of people simply did not realise the permanent galleries were being refreshed, because the building is so huge,” says Ballantyne. “In 2010, we decided to go for changes to a single gallery, which enabled the marketing people to make a real song and dance about them.”
The West Court gallery was redesigned earlier this year, with favourite objects redisplayed and new geographic “eco-zones” created during the time that the museum’s iconic Spitfire was lowered from the ceiling for safety checks.
The new programme of gallery adjustments also enabled costs to be spread over the year, ensuring that Kelvingrove – with around a million visitors a year – ticked over financially, Ballantyne adds.
A few economies have been made; discovery centre areas are no longer fully staffed, as they were in 2006, and charges have been introduced for temporary exhibitions.
Museum on the Mound, Edinburgh
Opened 10 years ago to tell the story of money in general and the Bank of Scotland in particular
Not every museum suffered as a result of the 2008 credit crunch.
“I don’t think we so much survived the crash as benefited from it; our visitor numbers kept growing,” says Doug MacBeath, the curator of the museum based in the former headquarters of the Bank of Scotland.
“I think that was down to banks in general often being the lead news story of the day, and it just got people interested,” MacBeath says. “They’d say things like, ‘If this is what the banks are spending their profits on, they can’t be that bad.’ It was nice to be doing our bit to re-establish customer faith in the sector.”
The museum looks at all aspects of finance from a social history perspective rather than a purely corporate one.
“We have a letter from a soldier during the Jacobite Rebellion requesting compensation for banknotes that had been destroyed to stop them falling into enemy hands. We have another from the artist Sir Henry Raeburn, asking for an overdraft, which is displayed opposite one of the portraits he was working on when he died.
“On paper, life assurance is quite a boring subject. However, Clerical Medical was the first such organisation to insist on medical exams before granting policies, so our display focuses as much on 19th-century ailments as it does on the business side of things,” says MacBeath, who did the research for the display.
While parents ponder the history of the pounds in their pockets, younger visitors are given the chance to crack the code of a safe filled with chocolate coins, or strike a replica medieval Scottish penny.
The museum is looking to include more names from the canon of financial history, such as Scottish Widows, MacBeath says.
“I also hope this will be an opportunity to update some of the other displays. Our stories tend to cover history up to the 1980s and 90s. That was fine in 2006, but now I need to bring them into the 21st century.”
Jurassic Coast Gallery, Bridport Museum, Dorset
Created to showcase the area’s important fossil finds
Steven Spielberg’s revelatory velociraptors and the designation of a slice of the Dorset and East Devon coastline as a World Heritage Site not only proved that palaeontology rocked but also turned the term “Jurassic” into a very powerful brand.
It’s a term they’re keen to embrace down by the sea even though, technically, it doesn’t tell the whole story about the local geology and the fossils found within it.
“The Triassic and Cretaceous periods are also represented in our geology but we picked the word people knew for marketing purposes,” says Emily Hicks, a curator at the Bridport Museum Trust. “Similarly, the bulk of the fossils we have are from the sea rather than the land, but for publicity purposes we don’t have much of a problem using the word ‘dinosaurs’.”
The small gallery in Bridport Museum houses local ammonites, brittle stars (starfish) and a plesiosaur skeleton; an artistic volunteer covered the walls with a marine-themed mural.
But it is time for change. The museum will reopen in the spring with a safer, sturdier building, redesigned galleries and displays, and a new activity programme.
“One of the issues raised when we put the proposal together was why we bothered to show fossils when there were much bigger, better displays elsewhere along the coast,” Hicks says. “Our displays were not showing what was unique about our patch; people want local specifics and stories, not just generic history. It’s symptomatic of how museums are changing.”
The new approach will imagine underwater life in the Bridport area some 180 million years ago.
The Cartoon Museum, London
Moved to larger premises in 2006 to display more original artwork, from 18th-century Hogarth to modern-day Viz
Having outgrown its original base, the Cartoon Museum moved in 2006 to new premises near the British Museum, introducing charging to pay the much higher rent and targeted fundraising to meet running costs.
“We needed a bigger space for displaying different types of material,” says the director and curator Anita O’Brien. “We had one gallery for temporary exhibitions and if what was on in there wasn’t their thing, visitors had nothing else to see.
“A space close to the British Museum doesn’t hurt as far as passing trade goes – a lot of people stumble upon us,” O’Brien says. “Events that attract publicity and word of mouth are very important to us because we can’t afford to advertise very much.”
The BBC, for example, recently held a relaunch for Target Books – publishers of the Doctor Who novels – at the Cartoon Museum and O’Brien struck a deal to keep the cover artwork displays in place after the event. “Things like that have a very enthusiastic audience on social media and people came to see the artwork and also enjoyed our exhibition about graphic novels.”
Size is an issue; the museum is again looking for more room so that it can mount larger displays and charge separately for temporary exhibitions and main galleries.
“It isn’t an easy task in central London,” O’Brien notes. “The trouble is that people are always expecting and encouraging you to do more.”
Weston Park, Sheffield
Reopened 10 years ago after a £17.3m redevelopment that transformed the museum and gallery
“The building became noticeably lighter,” says Kirstie Hamilton, the head of exhibitions and displays at Museums Sheffield, of the renovated Weston Park.
“There used to be a very dark corridor through the centre of the museum, which was forbidding. Suddenly, there were bright dedicated displays of social history, a whole new look for the natural science collection and a world cultures collection.
“There was an accessible cafe, a shop, and better learning areas. Overall, Weston Park became a much more cohesive experience for visitors, and won many awards.”
All was not sweetness and light for long, however. Months after Weston Park reopened its doors, the economic downturn began to rain blows on the museum sector in general, and Sheffield in particular.
“We felt the force across the organisation,” Hamilton says. “We were emerging from a time of significant investment into something more austere; the first round of redundancies in 2009 was the point at which we knew we had to make changes.”
Worse was to come when the charity lost most of its Arts Council England funding. To hit back, Sheffield decided that displays of civic pride were the way forward.
“The projects that have a direct relationship with the city are the ones that enthuse people. Shipping in amazing objects from London is all well and good, but what people really remember and treasure are the things that bring the story of Sheffield to life.”
Weston Park’s latest redevelopment programme – courtesy of a further £750,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund – includes work on the popular Our History Lab, About Art and What on Earth galleries.
“We have paid particular attention to the wear and tear of things I call ‘over-loved’, and addressed areas that weren’t working as we anticipated. The new approach is less design-heavy, more about an infrastructure we can play with and develop.”
With one or two lessons learned, Hamilton says future developments will be based on small changes and won’t be of the all-or-nothing kind.
“With each exhibition, we’re thinking about how we might use its infrastructure in a permanent display and how research can feed into collections development,” Hamilton says. “We’re trying to be more connected; we’re living within our means and working closely with communities.”
Museums and galleries played a big part in this cultural renaissance. So, how have those venues that reopened their doors in 2006 after game-changing refits – or, indeed, the ones who opened for the first time – fared over the past decade?
John Holt asks a few of them whether every new display and development was a hit with the public, how they coped in the economic downturn that lurked just around the corner and what they might do differently today.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Reopened in 2006 after a three-year renovation that cost £27.9m
The remarkable interior redesign of the much-loved Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was much more of a cultural revolution than a regular refurbishment.
One-hundred-year-old wiring was overhauled and the former basement storage area was opened up to provide a shop, restaurant, education areas and a whopping 35% extra exhibition space.
But the real difference was felt in how one of the world’s most varied museum collections was given a new lease of life and relevance.
“There was a recognition that the place had become old-fashioned and not really welcoming for visitors,” says museum manager Neil Ballantyne. “We adopted a story-based approach and a redesign that focused on accessibility, with non-expert visitors, families and children particularly in mind.”
In some cases, however, objects proved to be a little too accessible. “In the natural history gallery, for example, the thinking was that psychological, rather than physical, barriers were enough to ensure people treated all objects with reverence.
“That’s fine, of course, when it comes to paintings but you try keeping a toddler from climbing on top of a baby elephant,” says Ballantyne, who also had to monitor potentially recalcitrant members of staff.
“I also had to ensure there wasn’t any creep away from the Kelvingrove family-friendly ethos which, for example, set a 30-word maximum for labels. One or two of the old-school curators, perhaps frustrated by what they perceived to be a lack of detail, might have wanted to add more by a process of stealth. I had to keep an eye on that sort of thing.”
The Heritage Lottery Fund requirement for the museum to change a dozen stories a year across its 22 galleries soon became problematic, however.
“We found a lot of people simply did not realise the permanent galleries were being refreshed, because the building is so huge,” says Ballantyne. “In 2010, we decided to go for changes to a single gallery, which enabled the marketing people to make a real song and dance about them.”
The West Court gallery was redesigned earlier this year, with favourite objects redisplayed and new geographic “eco-zones” created during the time that the museum’s iconic Spitfire was lowered from the ceiling for safety checks.
The new programme of gallery adjustments also enabled costs to be spread over the year, ensuring that Kelvingrove – with around a million visitors a year – ticked over financially, Ballantyne adds.
A few economies have been made; discovery centre areas are no longer fully staffed, as they were in 2006, and charges have been introduced for temporary exhibitions.
Museum on the Mound, Edinburgh
Opened 10 years ago to tell the story of money in general and the Bank of Scotland in particular
Not every museum suffered as a result of the 2008 credit crunch.
“I don’t think we so much survived the crash as benefited from it; our visitor numbers kept growing,” says Doug MacBeath, the curator of the museum based in the former headquarters of the Bank of Scotland.
“I think that was down to banks in general often being the lead news story of the day, and it just got people interested,” MacBeath says. “They’d say things like, ‘If this is what the banks are spending their profits on, they can’t be that bad.’ It was nice to be doing our bit to re-establish customer faith in the sector.”
The museum looks at all aspects of finance from a social history perspective rather than a purely corporate one.
“We have a letter from a soldier during the Jacobite Rebellion requesting compensation for banknotes that had been destroyed to stop them falling into enemy hands. We have another from the artist Sir Henry Raeburn, asking for an overdraft, which is displayed opposite one of the portraits he was working on when he died.
“On paper, life assurance is quite a boring subject. However, Clerical Medical was the first such organisation to insist on medical exams before granting policies, so our display focuses as much on 19th-century ailments as it does on the business side of things,” says MacBeath, who did the research for the display.
While parents ponder the history of the pounds in their pockets, younger visitors are given the chance to crack the code of a safe filled with chocolate coins, or strike a replica medieval Scottish penny.
The museum is looking to include more names from the canon of financial history, such as Scottish Widows, MacBeath says.
“I also hope this will be an opportunity to update some of the other displays. Our stories tend to cover history up to the 1980s and 90s. That was fine in 2006, but now I need to bring them into the 21st century.”
Jurassic Coast Gallery, Bridport Museum, Dorset
Created to showcase the area’s important fossil finds
Steven Spielberg’s revelatory velociraptors and the designation of a slice of the Dorset and East Devon coastline as a World Heritage Site not only proved that palaeontology rocked but also turned the term “Jurassic” into a very powerful brand.
It’s a term they’re keen to embrace down by the sea even though, technically, it doesn’t tell the whole story about the local geology and the fossils found within it.
“The Triassic and Cretaceous periods are also represented in our geology but we picked the word people knew for marketing purposes,” says Emily Hicks, a curator at the Bridport Museum Trust. “Similarly, the bulk of the fossils we have are from the sea rather than the land, but for publicity purposes we don’t have much of a problem using the word ‘dinosaurs’.”
The small gallery in Bridport Museum houses local ammonites, brittle stars (starfish) and a plesiosaur skeleton; an artistic volunteer covered the walls with a marine-themed mural.
But it is time for change. The museum will reopen in the spring with a safer, sturdier building, redesigned galleries and displays, and a new activity programme.
“One of the issues raised when we put the proposal together was why we bothered to show fossils when there were much bigger, better displays elsewhere along the coast,” Hicks says. “Our displays were not showing what was unique about our patch; people want local specifics and stories, not just generic history. It’s symptomatic of how museums are changing.”
The new approach will imagine underwater life in the Bridport area some 180 million years ago.
The Cartoon Museum, London
Moved to larger premises in 2006 to display more original artwork, from 18th-century Hogarth to modern-day Viz
Having outgrown its original base, the Cartoon Museum moved in 2006 to new premises near the British Museum, introducing charging to pay the much higher rent and targeted fundraising to meet running costs.
“We needed a bigger space for displaying different types of material,” says the director and curator Anita O’Brien. “We had one gallery for temporary exhibitions and if what was on in there wasn’t their thing, visitors had nothing else to see.
“A space close to the British Museum doesn’t hurt as far as passing trade goes – a lot of people stumble upon us,” O’Brien says. “Events that attract publicity and word of mouth are very important to us because we can’t afford to advertise very much.”
The BBC, for example, recently held a relaunch for Target Books – publishers of the Doctor Who novels – at the Cartoon Museum and O’Brien struck a deal to keep the cover artwork displays in place after the event. “Things like that have a very enthusiastic audience on social media and people came to see the artwork and also enjoyed our exhibition about graphic novels.”
Size is an issue; the museum is again looking for more room so that it can mount larger displays and charge separately for temporary exhibitions and main galleries.
“It isn’t an easy task in central London,” O’Brien notes. “The trouble is that people are always expecting and encouraging you to do more.”
Weston Park, Sheffield
Reopened 10 years ago after a £17.3m redevelopment that transformed the museum and gallery
“The building became noticeably lighter,” says Kirstie Hamilton, the head of exhibitions and displays at Museums Sheffield, of the renovated Weston Park.
“There used to be a very dark corridor through the centre of the museum, which was forbidding. Suddenly, there were bright dedicated displays of social history, a whole new look for the natural science collection and a world cultures collection.
“There was an accessible cafe, a shop, and better learning areas. Overall, Weston Park became a much more cohesive experience for visitors, and won many awards.”
All was not sweetness and light for long, however. Months after Weston Park reopened its doors, the economic downturn began to rain blows on the museum sector in general, and Sheffield in particular.
“We felt the force across the organisation,” Hamilton says. “We were emerging from a time of significant investment into something more austere; the first round of redundancies in 2009 was the point at which we knew we had to make changes.”
Worse was to come when the charity lost most of its Arts Council England funding. To hit back, Sheffield decided that displays of civic pride were the way forward.
“The projects that have a direct relationship with the city are the ones that enthuse people. Shipping in amazing objects from London is all well and good, but what people really remember and treasure are the things that bring the story of Sheffield to life.”
Weston Park’s latest redevelopment programme – courtesy of a further £750,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund – includes work on the popular Our History Lab, About Art and What on Earth galleries.
“We have paid particular attention to the wear and tear of things I call ‘over-loved’, and addressed areas that weren’t working as we anticipated. The new approach is less design-heavy, more about an infrastructure we can play with and develop.”
With one or two lessons learned, Hamilton says future developments will be based on small changes and won’t be of the all-or-nothing kind.
“With each exhibition, we’re thinking about how we might use its infrastructure in a permanent display and how research can feed into collections development,” Hamilton says. “We’re trying to be more connected; we’re living within our means and working closely with communities.”