Visitors to Leicester’s New Walk Museum last year might have been surprised to see the venue’s popular Rutland Dinosaur skeleton wearing a large Leicester City Football Club scarf.
The creature gained the accessory for the Fearless Foxes exhibition, which looked back at the 2015-16 football season, when Leicester, nicknamed the Foxes, won the Premier League title. The team’s triumph over more illustrious competitors, having narrowly escaped relegation the previous year, stunned football fans around the world. The museum postponed an exhibition on birds to make way for the show, even though Leicester’s victory was not assured at the time. The reward was more than 100,000 visitors.
“This was the most successful exhibition we can recall having in terms of attracting people consistently over several months,” says Matthew Constantine, the collections, interpretation and learning manager at Leicester Arts and Museums Service.
It’s no secret that sport is popular, but it has not always been recognised as a legitimate heritage subject. That is now changing, with increasing numbers of museums exploring the important role that sport plays in national and regional cultures. In the process, they are also realising that the subject creates exciting opportunities to attract more diverse audiences and impact visitors’ health and wellbeing. And while sporting heritage infrastructure is still relatively undeveloped, museums, funders and clubs are increasingly finding new ways to work together.
Fearless Foxes was a partnership with local media organisations and the football club itself. This gave the museum access to photos, film footage and radio commentary, as well as memorabilia such as a special-edition “Vardy Salted” packet of Walkers crisps, named after star player Jamie Vardy. One wall was reserved for visitors’ contributions. “By the time the exhibition closed, there was barely a space where people hadn’t stuck Post-it notes, drawings or poems,” says Constantine.
Community connections
Observation, evaluation and TripAdvisor comments all suggested that the museum achieved its aim of reconnecting with its core audience of city residents rather than tourists or middle-class visitors from the surrounding area. “It was obvious that there were people who hadn’t been to the museum before, or hadn’t been for a long time,” says Constantine.
This echoes the experience of the National Football Museum (NFM), which reopened in Manchester in 2012, following the closure of its Preston venue. Kevin Moore, the director of the museum until January, says that its 500,000 visitors a year include a high proportion from social grades C2, D and E (42%) and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds (20%).
“Put bluntly, sport gets you the most diverse audience possible,” says Moore. “But it isn’t just the subject matter. You’ve got to do it really well.”
The museum is highly participatory, with a whole floor of interactives, including one for visitors to take penalty kicks against a virtual goalkeeper. But Moore argues that sport is not intrinsically different to any other heritage topic.
“I really don’t see any difference at all, whether you’re dealing with sport, popular music, Roman Britain or whatever,” he says. “Except that it’s incredibly popular and a lot of people have very strong passions for it.”
The NFM is currently developing its coverage of women’s football. In 2015 it acquired a major women’s football heritage collection with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant, and a recently-secured £100,000 grant from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund will be used to display more of this.
The museum aims to avoid uncritical celebration and confronts troubling aspects of football, such as hooliganism, stadium disasters and homophobia (using the story of Justin Fashanu, the only openly gay player at the top level of English men’s football, who committed suicide in 1998).
The NFM, whose first incarnation opened in 2001, is one of several UK museums that focus on a particular sport. The World Rugby Museum at Twickenham and the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames both opened in the 1990s, as did the British Golf Museum in St Andrews, Scotland. In London, there is the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum (1977) and the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) Museum at Lord’s cricket ground, which opened in 1953, making it one of the oldest sports museums in the world.
The MCC Museum began as a memorial gallery to cricketers who had died in conflict, and was aimed at members of the club. But over recent decades it has sought greater public engagement. After researching what potential audiences expected, the museum now aims to tell the story of world cricket as well as that of the MCC.
The club, founded in 1787, has always played an influential role in the game, but the museum has freedom to address episodes the club might rather forget.
One recent exhibition covered a 1953 tour on which England players prompted outrage by “ragging” a Pakistani umpire (kidnapping, gagging and pouring cold water over him).
“One of the themes we have been able to explore recently is how the MCC has sometimes got things wrong in the past – 20 years ago that wouldn’t have happened,” says the curator, Adam Chadwick.
Broader benefits
There is increasing interest too in using sporting heritage to tackle social challenges directly. The Football Memories project, co-ordinated by the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow, works with small groups of people who live with dementia, using images and memorabilia to stimulate recall.
“The groups bring people back into society,” says Richard McBrearty, the museum’s curator and a volunteer on the project. “It’s great for their health and wellbeing, and for the people that look after them.”
The project, which receives funding from Alzheimer Scotland, began as a pilot in 2009 and is now a “core aspect of the museum”, says McBrearty. There are about 150 groups, based at venues such as football clubs, care homes, day centres and libraries across Scotland, and led by volunteers or staff at these organisations.
The concept is gathering momentum. The museum is planning an exhibition based around the memories of participants, and hosted a seminar on sport, mental health and dementia with Edinburgh University last year. It recently began supporting reminiscence groups for four more sports – golf, cricket, rugby and the traditional Scottish sport of shinty (descended from the same background as Irish hurling). And a separate UK-wide organisation, the Sporting Memories Foundation, has worked on projects with various institutions, including gathering memories for the NFM’s current exhibition on the 1966 World Cup.
The need for strategic thinking
Despite some exciting developments, the country’s sporting heritage could benefit from a more strategic approach, says Justine Reilly, the national programme manager at the Sport in Museums Network. An important concern identified by the network is that knowledge and collections are often held by clubs and individuals rather than museums. The organisation is supporting the creation of regional networks to help bring sporting and heritage organisations together.
“One of the biggest issues is how we unite the people who know how to look after collections in museums with the people that know about the collections in sports clubs,” says Reilly.
Watford Museum is one institution that does recognise the importance of sport to its local community. It began working closely with Watford Football Club for a 2002 exhibition on the club’s success in the 1970s and 1980s, gathering memories and objects from fans and players. Another exhibition followed the next year, and the museum continues to show Watford FC material both on its premises and online. It recently became the club’s official museum, managing and developing its collection. The club directs depositions to the museum, and helps to finance acquisitions. Some key objects, such as trophies, are taken on long-term loan.
Sarah Priestley, the museum’s curator, estimates that it has up to 100 times more football-related objects than before the partnership. One factor in this success, she says, was fan networks. She contacted fanzines and websites, and wrote about the collection for match programmes.
“Most fans are super-friendly,” she says. “They can share information for you and give you the best contacts.”
The other side of the equation is raising awareness of heritage opportunities among sports clubs. Last year, HLF East Midlands launched a campaign promoting its funding programmes to sports groups and heritage organisations that might partner with them.
“We are very keen to get the message out there that heritage is not just old buildings,” says Katie Lloyd, the development officer for HLF East Midlands. The HLF is also boosting sporting heritage through large grants. The Silverstone Heritage Experience in Northamptonshire, due for completion in 2019, was recently allocated £9.1m, while Palace House National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art opened in Newmarket last year following a £4.2m HLF grant in 2012.
The National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) received a £200,000 HLF grant last year and recently submitted a bid for further funding. Its chair of trustees, Paul Mainds, previously chief executive of the River & Rowing Museum, says that the NPHT will aim to fit into the existing sporting heritage “mosaic” of established sports museums, new sport-specific institutions, regional museums and clubs. It hopes to open a small heritage centre in Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, alongside satellite exhibitions in other locations across the UK.
“If we are a national organisation, we need to recognise that it is a national story,” says Mainds. In a similar vein, he says that as well as developing its own central collection, the trust will encourage local heritage organisations to keep objects that have a relevance to their own area.
The local sporting collection is certainly progressing nicely in Leicester, despite the struggles of the team this season. Objects from Fearless Foxes that will be kept include all the visitor comments, witty T-shirts and a club tie worn by the manager, Claudio Ranieri. “If we want to reflect on this in 100 years’ time, we will have something that we have captured,” says Matthew Constantine.
A planned heritage centre in Stoke Mandeville will focus on the story of how Ludwig Guttmann, a German-born Jewish doctor working at the Buckinghamshire hospital, held an archery contest in 1948 for disabled athletes, which later evolved into the Paralympics. The trust also plans satellite exhibitions in locations such as Manchester, Bradford, Norwich, London and south-west England, as well as touring displays at sport and heritage events.
Palace House National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art
Having outgrown its old location, the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket has moved to the site where Charles II’s stables once stood. In its newly refurbished format the venue is also home to the Retraining of Racehorses charity and the collection of the British Sporting Art Trust. There is more space for exhibitions, events, and it’s hoped that live horses will attract a more diverse audience.
National Rugby League Museum
Existing sport-specific museums in the UK tend to skew heavily towards traditionally middle- and upper-class pursuits. Aiming to redress this balance is the National Rugby League Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2020 in Bradford City Hall to mark the sport’s 125th anniversary. The museum will be funded from a range of sources, including private benefactors and central government grants.
Silverstone Heritage Experience
The organisiation received a £9.1m Heritage Lottery Fund grant in December to help it display the heritage of British motor racing and the famous Grand Prix circuit itself. The museum, which will be housed in a refurbished second world war hangar, will feature key cars and motorcycles and tell the stories of drivers, engineers and others involved in the sport. It is due to open in 2019.
Hockey Museum
The Hockey Museum in Woking began operating in 2011 and houses objects previously held at the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes, which closed in 2003. The constantly growing collection includes books, art and paraphernalia, as well as hockey equipment. The museum is open for two days a month, or by appointment, and is working towards Accreditation.
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer
The creature gained the accessory for the Fearless Foxes exhibition, which looked back at the 2015-16 football season, when Leicester, nicknamed the Foxes, won the Premier League title. The team’s triumph over more illustrious competitors, having narrowly escaped relegation the previous year, stunned football fans around the world. The museum postponed an exhibition on birds to make way for the show, even though Leicester’s victory was not assured at the time. The reward was more than 100,000 visitors.
“This was the most successful exhibition we can recall having in terms of attracting people consistently over several months,” says Matthew Constantine, the collections, interpretation and learning manager at Leicester Arts and Museums Service.
It’s no secret that sport is popular, but it has not always been recognised as a legitimate heritage subject. That is now changing, with increasing numbers of museums exploring the important role that sport plays in national and regional cultures. In the process, they are also realising that the subject creates exciting opportunities to attract more diverse audiences and impact visitors’ health and wellbeing. And while sporting heritage infrastructure is still relatively undeveloped, museums, funders and clubs are increasingly finding new ways to work together.
Fearless Foxes was a partnership with local media organisations and the football club itself. This gave the museum access to photos, film footage and radio commentary, as well as memorabilia such as a special-edition “Vardy Salted” packet of Walkers crisps, named after star player Jamie Vardy. One wall was reserved for visitors’ contributions. “By the time the exhibition closed, there was barely a space where people hadn’t stuck Post-it notes, drawings or poems,” says Constantine.
Community connections
Observation, evaluation and TripAdvisor comments all suggested that the museum achieved its aim of reconnecting with its core audience of city residents rather than tourists or middle-class visitors from the surrounding area. “It was obvious that there were people who hadn’t been to the museum before, or hadn’t been for a long time,” says Constantine.
This echoes the experience of the National Football Museum (NFM), which reopened in Manchester in 2012, following the closure of its Preston venue. Kevin Moore, the director of the museum until January, says that its 500,000 visitors a year include a high proportion from social grades C2, D and E (42%) and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds (20%).
“Put bluntly, sport gets you the most diverse audience possible,” says Moore. “But it isn’t just the subject matter. You’ve got to do it really well.”
The museum is highly participatory, with a whole floor of interactives, including one for visitors to take penalty kicks against a virtual goalkeeper. But Moore argues that sport is not intrinsically different to any other heritage topic.
“I really don’t see any difference at all, whether you’re dealing with sport, popular music, Roman Britain or whatever,” he says. “Except that it’s incredibly popular and a lot of people have very strong passions for it.”
The NFM is currently developing its coverage of women’s football. In 2015 it acquired a major women’s football heritage collection with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant, and a recently-secured £100,000 grant from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund will be used to display more of this.
The museum aims to avoid uncritical celebration and confronts troubling aspects of football, such as hooliganism, stadium disasters and homophobia (using the story of Justin Fashanu, the only openly gay player at the top level of English men’s football, who committed suicide in 1998).
The NFM, whose first incarnation opened in 2001, is one of several UK museums that focus on a particular sport. The World Rugby Museum at Twickenham and the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames both opened in the 1990s, as did the British Golf Museum in St Andrews, Scotland. In London, there is the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum (1977) and the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) Museum at Lord’s cricket ground, which opened in 1953, making it one of the oldest sports museums in the world.
The MCC Museum began as a memorial gallery to cricketers who had died in conflict, and was aimed at members of the club. But over recent decades it has sought greater public engagement. After researching what potential audiences expected, the museum now aims to tell the story of world cricket as well as that of the MCC.
The club, founded in 1787, has always played an influential role in the game, but the museum has freedom to address episodes the club might rather forget.
One recent exhibition covered a 1953 tour on which England players prompted outrage by “ragging” a Pakistani umpire (kidnapping, gagging and pouring cold water over him).
“One of the themes we have been able to explore recently is how the MCC has sometimes got things wrong in the past – 20 years ago that wouldn’t have happened,” says the curator, Adam Chadwick.
Broader benefits
There is increasing interest too in using sporting heritage to tackle social challenges directly. The Football Memories project, co-ordinated by the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow, works with small groups of people who live with dementia, using images and memorabilia to stimulate recall.
“The groups bring people back into society,” says Richard McBrearty, the museum’s curator and a volunteer on the project. “It’s great for their health and wellbeing, and for the people that look after them.”
The project, which receives funding from Alzheimer Scotland, began as a pilot in 2009 and is now a “core aspect of the museum”, says McBrearty. There are about 150 groups, based at venues such as football clubs, care homes, day centres and libraries across Scotland, and led by volunteers or staff at these organisations.
The concept is gathering momentum. The museum is planning an exhibition based around the memories of participants, and hosted a seminar on sport, mental health and dementia with Edinburgh University last year. It recently began supporting reminiscence groups for four more sports – golf, cricket, rugby and the traditional Scottish sport of shinty (descended from the same background as Irish hurling). And a separate UK-wide organisation, the Sporting Memories Foundation, has worked on projects with various institutions, including gathering memories for the NFM’s current exhibition on the 1966 World Cup.
The need for strategic thinking
Despite some exciting developments, the country’s sporting heritage could benefit from a more strategic approach, says Justine Reilly, the national programme manager at the Sport in Museums Network. An important concern identified by the network is that knowledge and collections are often held by clubs and individuals rather than museums. The organisation is supporting the creation of regional networks to help bring sporting and heritage organisations together.
“One of the biggest issues is how we unite the people who know how to look after collections in museums with the people that know about the collections in sports clubs,” says Reilly.
Watford Museum is one institution that does recognise the importance of sport to its local community. It began working closely with Watford Football Club for a 2002 exhibition on the club’s success in the 1970s and 1980s, gathering memories and objects from fans and players. Another exhibition followed the next year, and the museum continues to show Watford FC material both on its premises and online. It recently became the club’s official museum, managing and developing its collection. The club directs depositions to the museum, and helps to finance acquisitions. Some key objects, such as trophies, are taken on long-term loan.
Sarah Priestley, the museum’s curator, estimates that it has up to 100 times more football-related objects than before the partnership. One factor in this success, she says, was fan networks. She contacted fanzines and websites, and wrote about the collection for match programmes.
“Most fans are super-friendly,” she says. “They can share information for you and give you the best contacts.”
The other side of the equation is raising awareness of heritage opportunities among sports clubs. Last year, HLF East Midlands launched a campaign promoting its funding programmes to sports groups and heritage organisations that might partner with them.
“We are very keen to get the message out there that heritage is not just old buildings,” says Katie Lloyd, the development officer for HLF East Midlands. The HLF is also boosting sporting heritage through large grants. The Silverstone Heritage Experience in Northamptonshire, due for completion in 2019, was recently allocated £9.1m, while Palace House National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art opened in Newmarket last year following a £4.2m HLF grant in 2012.
The National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) received a £200,000 HLF grant last year and recently submitted a bid for further funding. Its chair of trustees, Paul Mainds, previously chief executive of the River & Rowing Museum, says that the NPHT will aim to fit into the existing sporting heritage “mosaic” of established sports museums, new sport-specific institutions, regional museums and clubs. It hopes to open a small heritage centre in Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, alongside satellite exhibitions in other locations across the UK.
“If we are a national organisation, we need to recognise that it is a national story,” says Mainds. In a similar vein, he says that as well as developing its own central collection, the trust will encourage local heritage organisations to keep objects that have a relevance to their own area.
The local sporting collection is certainly progressing nicely in Leicester, despite the struggles of the team this season. Objects from Fearless Foxes that will be kept include all the visitor comments, witty T-shirts and a club tie worn by the manager, Claudio Ranieri. “If we want to reflect on this in 100 years’ time, we will have something that we have captured,” says Matthew Constantine.
The next generation of sports museums: five to watch
National Paralympic Heritage TrustA planned heritage centre in Stoke Mandeville will focus on the story of how Ludwig Guttmann, a German-born Jewish doctor working at the Buckinghamshire hospital, held an archery contest in 1948 for disabled athletes, which later evolved into the Paralympics. The trust also plans satellite exhibitions in locations such as Manchester, Bradford, Norwich, London and south-west England, as well as touring displays at sport and heritage events.
Palace House National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art
Having outgrown its old location, the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket has moved to the site where Charles II’s stables once stood. In its newly refurbished format the venue is also home to the Retraining of Racehorses charity and the collection of the British Sporting Art Trust. There is more space for exhibitions, events, and it’s hoped that live horses will attract a more diverse audience.
National Rugby League Museum
Existing sport-specific museums in the UK tend to skew heavily towards traditionally middle- and upper-class pursuits. Aiming to redress this balance is the National Rugby League Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2020 in Bradford City Hall to mark the sport’s 125th anniversary. The museum will be funded from a range of sources, including private benefactors and central government grants.
Silverstone Heritage Experience
The organisiation received a £9.1m Heritage Lottery Fund grant in December to help it display the heritage of British motor racing and the famous Grand Prix circuit itself. The museum, which will be housed in a refurbished second world war hangar, will feature key cars and motorcycles and tell the stories of drivers, engineers and others involved in the sport. It is due to open in 2019.
Hockey Museum
The Hockey Museum in Woking began operating in 2011 and houses objects previously held at the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes, which closed in 2003. The constantly growing collection includes books, art and paraphernalia, as well as hockey equipment. The museum is open for two days a month, or by appointment, and is working towards Accreditation.
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer