Victorian municipal museums were built on commercial success and civic pride, paid for by wealthy merchants and manufacturers who wanted to be remembered as philanthropists. People flocked to them and continued to do so well into the 20th century because they were a free public resource – instructive as well as fascinating to visit.
But in today’s globalised and privatised world, civic pride can seem a quaint commodity. And Victorian collections, acquired in a different time and context, and often seen as the spoils of empire, can seem increasingly irrelevant or even offensive in Britain’s multicultural society.
The decade since the economic crash has seen local authority-run museums and art galleries struggle for survival amid savage cuts. Many have closed or had to scale back staff, opening hours, exhibitions and education programmes. Others, through a combination of restructuring and external funding, have managed to reinvent themselves or are in the process of doing so.
The common denominator is audiences, and reconnecting with them – or in some cases connecting for the first time. Victorian municipal museums were often built as multipurpose venues, with art galleries and museum collections sharing space with town hall functions, concert venues and libraries. Forced restructuring has led many council-run museums to share spaces, resources and expertise again. They may be taking varying approaches to this, but all are aiming to reconnect with their original intentions and meaning, and reframe collections for the 21st century.
As the late Giles Waterfield recently wrote in his history of municipal galleries, The People’s Galleries: “The majority of provincial museums were primarily seen from their earliest days not as the loci for important collections, but as didactic powerhouses, with the didacticism leavened by entertainment – rivalling and sometimes outdoing the national museums.”
The didacticism is no longer appropriate but municipal museums were a bold experiment in their day. And according to many of their current directors, with vision and courage these museums can become vibrant and relevant civic centres once again.
Birmingham Museums
By 2024, Birmingham is set to become a “super-diverse” city. More than a quarter of its inhabitants are Asian or British Asian, and its population is likely to be less than 50% white by the time of the next census. But this multiculturalism and diversity is not always reflected in its museum audiences.
“A museum is not successful if it is not serving local people,” says Sara Wajid, a senior manager of public programmes at Royal Museums Greenwich and one of 20 Arts Council England-funded change makers appointed to encourage diversity in leadership positions in the cultural sector.
Wajid’s role as the head of interpretation at Birmingham Museums Trust in 2017 is to reinterpret its collections to appeal to a broader range of people. This is part of an £18m redevelopment to upgrade the venue.
In its heyday, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (opposite), which opened in 1886, attracted up to one million visitors annually, but that was when the colonial nature of the displays was not challenged and its audiences overwhelmingly white.
“It’s the first major civic collection to be reinterpreted for young people and it’s a question of how far you are willing to go to make it more relevant for non-traditional museum-going audiences,” says Wajid.
Birmingham has a bold interpretation-led ethos upheld by Ellen McAdam, the director of the museums trust, who previously rang the changes at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. Wajid wants to build on that – she aims to commission contemporary creative responses to Birmingham’s artworks and objects, which include one of the finest publicly owned pre-Raphaelite collections in the world.
“They could be stories around race, gender or sexuality,” says Wajid. “For example, we have works by the pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon that could be reinterpreted through the lens of his experience as a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal.”
Another example is the Victorian painting The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown. “This depicts a young family about to embark on a sea voyage,” says Wajid. “There are no people of colour in it but it has parallels with today’s refugees on boats in the Mediterranean. We want the team to feel confident about taking risks with interpretation. It doesn’t take much to refresh objects. It’s about unboxing them and letting them breathe.”
Contemporary collecting is an important part of the redevelopment. New acquisitions include Rivers of Birminam, a photographic collection by Vanley Burke, which depicts the city’s Caribbean community during the 1960s. “This important social record matters to everybody in Birmingham, not just black people,” says Wajid.
Sara Wajid is the head of interpretation at Birmingham Museums Trust
The Atkinson, Southport, Merseyside
Wealthy Victorians were attracted to the genteel resort of Southport for its health-giving properties. William Atkinson, a wealthy Yorkshire textile manufacturer who paid for the Atkinson Art Gallery & Library in 1878, had retired there for health reasons.
So when The Atkinson, run by Sefton Council, reopened in 2013 after a £17m redevelopment, two narrative strands – coast and wellbeing – underpinned not only the reinterpretation of its collections, but also their application to social and education programmes.
“You have to make your building useful to your community, and understanding your sense of place is the first step,” says Emma Anderson, the director of the museum.
The redevelopment, which incorporated a former bank and the neighbouring Southport Arts Centre, has drawn together many of the council’s disparate social and cultural services under one roof, and now includes two theatres, a library, cafe and shop, exhibition spaces and a museum and Egyptology gallery. This gallery dates from Victorian times when ancient Egypt and its cultural artefacts were of great interest. They are now more contentious.
“We knew little about Mrs Goodison, a local woman who brought back the objects from a trip to Egypt in 1887,” says Anderson. “But we used this to broaden the interpretation to look at Victorian women travellers and the ethics of collecting, for example.”
The Atkinson did not have a budget for community outreach, so Anderson had to contact organisations that already had their own audiences. The venue provides space for community groups, such as a co-located children’s centre in the children’s library, a film-makers’ group for young adults with Asperger’s syndrome and a veterans group that uses it for therapeutic sessions.
“These buildings were multipurpose and democratic from the start,” says Anderson. “They are beautiful, light-filled spaces and you get a sense of worth from just being here. We try to ensure that the wellbeing and learning is not just thematic, but also delivered at a population level.” Which, in a sense, is exactly where it started.
Emma Anderson is the director of The Atkinson in Southport, Merseyside
Behind the scenes at The Atkinson
Twenty-year-old Tom Rogers wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after his A-levels when he saw an advertisement on Sefton Council’s website for a community and collections trainee at The Atkinson in Southport. The placement was part of the British Museum’s Learning Museum programme, which funds 20 young people through the Heritage Lottery Fund Skills for the Future scheme.
Rogers now works behind the scenes at The Atkinson and does everything from administration to learning how to clean taxidermy specimens. He also works on exhibition installations and, with the lifelong learning manager, helps set up schools events and contributes ideas for workshops.
“It’s opened my eyes to museum work,” he says. “I didn’t understand what went into it and the variety of work involved.”
On The Atkinson’s Imagining Autism project – an immersive experience for autistic children and their families – Rogers works closely with the actors involved. “It’s an imaginary journey into outer space and it’s great to see the children’s faces change from scared and apprehensive when they first enter to beaming smiles when they leave.”
Rogers has also visited museums across the country, from Henley-on-Thames to the Outer Hebrides, as part of his training. “This part of the programme has been a standout experience for me. My generation doesn’t always value museums, but if there were more schemes like this it would open their eyes to how interesting and varied museum work is. I’ve picked up skills that will last forever.”
Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire
Harris Museum & Art Gallery occupies a commanding position at the heart of the city. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) called it “one of the most remarkable Victorian public buildings of northern England”. But people now regard it as a grey monolith dominating the marketplace with “dead and unchanging” displays, according to a recent consultation carried out to inform a planned £18.6m refurbishment.
“The Harris exemplifies the ideals of the great Victorian philanthropists about a place having a monument to art and culture for its citizens,” says Jon Finch, the project leader for Re-Imagining the Harris at Preston council. “But we have to try and transfer that set of perspectives onto 21st century museums. The Harris is a key civic organisation in Preston and we are trying to shape a vision of a civic centre for the city.”
Four themes – democracy, creativity, animation and permeability – have been identified from the consultation process.
“On a basic level, the Harris can make people feel comfortable and safe,” says Finch. “But it also needs to become more active, so we are planning more talks on general topics and want to broaden our ideas around the interpretation of objects. They can be used in more creative and flexible ways, and the sector should not be afraid of that. It’s the traditional approach, not the objects, that needs jettisoning.
“There must be opportunities for people to make and show so, for example, we want to give the local creative sector space in the building. A partnership with the University of Central Lancashire allows students to research the collections to inspire costumes, photography, 3D printing and so on.”
A plan to open up the hard-to-access basement area to the surrounding square has been controversial. “Preston’s morale and pride has been low for decades and the consultation served to reinforce that,” Finch says. “It may take us into uncomfortable places, but it’s our role to listen and respond. Preston is not a main tourism centre so we must listen to the people who say they don’t come back because nothing has changed.”
Jon Finch is the project leader for Re-Imagining the Harris at Preston council
Paisley Museum, Paisley, Renfrewshire
In the 1870s, 90% of the world’s cotton thread was made by J&P Coats, a textile company founded by James Coats in Paisley. His son Peter Coats, who inherited the business with his brothers, became a noted philanthropist and funded Paisley’s Free Library & Museum in 1870.
Now, the factories and jobs of the Victorian thread industry are long gone and Paisley is so economically depressed that Mhairi Black, the Scottish National Party MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, described the town’s bid for City of Culture 2021 as “partly a cry for help”.
And yet Paisley has more listed buildings than anywhere in Scotland outside Edinburgh, including the porticoed museum, which sits in a prominent position in the city centre. It contains the largest collection of paisley shawls in the world – the tear-drop pattern is named after the city it was invented in. “The town’s textile connection has been lost sight of,” says Kirsty Devine, the project director for the Paisley Museum redevelopment at Renfrewshire Leisure. “We want to bring it back to the fore and make it more accessible through changing shows and interpretation. More than half our visitors are families and they want the displays to change more often. So we are looking at doing that to coax visitors back.”
The museum has also opened Scotland’s first museum store on the high street, which is the focus of a wider regeneration plan. “The store increases access to our collections, enlivens the street and allows us to test people’s interests,” says Devine. “The challenge is to re-engender a sense of pride, ownership and enterprise. Paisley has an interesting history and we want to work with residents to tell those stories in meaningful ways.”
Kirsty Devine is the project director for the Paisley Museum redevelopment at Renfrewshire Leisure
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
But in today’s globalised and privatised world, civic pride can seem a quaint commodity. And Victorian collections, acquired in a different time and context, and often seen as the spoils of empire, can seem increasingly irrelevant or even offensive in Britain’s multicultural society.
The decade since the economic crash has seen local authority-run museums and art galleries struggle for survival amid savage cuts. Many have closed or had to scale back staff, opening hours, exhibitions and education programmes. Others, through a combination of restructuring and external funding, have managed to reinvent themselves or are in the process of doing so.
The common denominator is audiences, and reconnecting with them – or in some cases connecting for the first time. Victorian municipal museums were often built as multipurpose venues, with art galleries and museum collections sharing space with town hall functions, concert venues and libraries. Forced restructuring has led many council-run museums to share spaces, resources and expertise again. They may be taking varying approaches to this, but all are aiming to reconnect with their original intentions and meaning, and reframe collections for the 21st century.
As the late Giles Waterfield recently wrote in his history of municipal galleries, The People’s Galleries: “The majority of provincial museums were primarily seen from their earliest days not as the loci for important collections, but as didactic powerhouses, with the didacticism leavened by entertainment – rivalling and sometimes outdoing the national museums.”
The didacticism is no longer appropriate but municipal museums were a bold experiment in their day. And according to many of their current directors, with vision and courage these museums can become vibrant and relevant civic centres once again.
Birmingham Museums
By 2024, Birmingham is set to become a “super-diverse” city. More than a quarter of its inhabitants are Asian or British Asian, and its population is likely to be less than 50% white by the time of the next census. But this multiculturalism and diversity is not always reflected in its museum audiences.
“A museum is not successful if it is not serving local people,” says Sara Wajid, a senior manager of public programmes at Royal Museums Greenwich and one of 20 Arts Council England-funded change makers appointed to encourage diversity in leadership positions in the cultural sector.
Wajid’s role as the head of interpretation at Birmingham Museums Trust in 2017 is to reinterpret its collections to appeal to a broader range of people. This is part of an £18m redevelopment to upgrade the venue.
In its heyday, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (opposite), which opened in 1886, attracted up to one million visitors annually, but that was when the colonial nature of the displays was not challenged and its audiences overwhelmingly white.
“It’s the first major civic collection to be reinterpreted for young people and it’s a question of how far you are willing to go to make it more relevant for non-traditional museum-going audiences,” says Wajid.
Birmingham has a bold interpretation-led ethos upheld by Ellen McAdam, the director of the museums trust, who previously rang the changes at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. Wajid wants to build on that – she aims to commission contemporary creative responses to Birmingham’s artworks and objects, which include one of the finest publicly owned pre-Raphaelite collections in the world.
“They could be stories around race, gender or sexuality,” says Wajid. “For example, we have works by the pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon that could be reinterpreted through the lens of his experience as a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal.”
Another example is the Victorian painting The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown. “This depicts a young family about to embark on a sea voyage,” says Wajid. “There are no people of colour in it but it has parallels with today’s refugees on boats in the Mediterranean. We want the team to feel confident about taking risks with interpretation. It doesn’t take much to refresh objects. It’s about unboxing them and letting them breathe.”
Contemporary collecting is an important part of the redevelopment. New acquisitions include Rivers of Birminam, a photographic collection by Vanley Burke, which depicts the city’s Caribbean community during the 1960s. “This important social record matters to everybody in Birmingham, not just black people,” says Wajid.
Sara Wajid is the head of interpretation at Birmingham Museums Trust
The Atkinson, Southport, Merseyside
Wealthy Victorians were attracted to the genteel resort of Southport for its health-giving properties. William Atkinson, a wealthy Yorkshire textile manufacturer who paid for the Atkinson Art Gallery & Library in 1878, had retired there for health reasons.
So when The Atkinson, run by Sefton Council, reopened in 2013 after a £17m redevelopment, two narrative strands – coast and wellbeing – underpinned not only the reinterpretation of its collections, but also their application to social and education programmes.
“You have to make your building useful to your community, and understanding your sense of place is the first step,” says Emma Anderson, the director of the museum.
The redevelopment, which incorporated a former bank and the neighbouring Southport Arts Centre, has drawn together many of the council’s disparate social and cultural services under one roof, and now includes two theatres, a library, cafe and shop, exhibition spaces and a museum and Egyptology gallery. This gallery dates from Victorian times when ancient Egypt and its cultural artefacts were of great interest. They are now more contentious.
“We knew little about Mrs Goodison, a local woman who brought back the objects from a trip to Egypt in 1887,” says Anderson. “But we used this to broaden the interpretation to look at Victorian women travellers and the ethics of collecting, for example.”
The Atkinson did not have a budget for community outreach, so Anderson had to contact organisations that already had their own audiences. The venue provides space for community groups, such as a co-located children’s centre in the children’s library, a film-makers’ group for young adults with Asperger’s syndrome and a veterans group that uses it for therapeutic sessions.
“These buildings were multipurpose and democratic from the start,” says Anderson. “They are beautiful, light-filled spaces and you get a sense of worth from just being here. We try to ensure that the wellbeing and learning is not just thematic, but also delivered at a population level.” Which, in a sense, is exactly where it started.
Emma Anderson is the director of The Atkinson in Southport, Merseyside
Behind the scenes at The Atkinson
Twenty-year-old Tom Rogers wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after his A-levels when he saw an advertisement on Sefton Council’s website for a community and collections trainee at The Atkinson in Southport. The placement was part of the British Museum’s Learning Museum programme, which funds 20 young people through the Heritage Lottery Fund Skills for the Future scheme.
Rogers now works behind the scenes at The Atkinson and does everything from administration to learning how to clean taxidermy specimens. He also works on exhibition installations and, with the lifelong learning manager, helps set up schools events and contributes ideas for workshops.
“It’s opened my eyes to museum work,” he says. “I didn’t understand what went into it and the variety of work involved.”
On The Atkinson’s Imagining Autism project – an immersive experience for autistic children and their families – Rogers works closely with the actors involved. “It’s an imaginary journey into outer space and it’s great to see the children’s faces change from scared and apprehensive when they first enter to beaming smiles when they leave.”
Rogers has also visited museums across the country, from Henley-on-Thames to the Outer Hebrides, as part of his training. “This part of the programme has been a standout experience for me. My generation doesn’t always value museums, but if there were more schemes like this it would open their eyes to how interesting and varied museum work is. I’ve picked up skills that will last forever.”
Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire
Harris Museum & Art Gallery occupies a commanding position at the heart of the city. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) called it “one of the most remarkable Victorian public buildings of northern England”. But people now regard it as a grey monolith dominating the marketplace with “dead and unchanging” displays, according to a recent consultation carried out to inform a planned £18.6m refurbishment.
“The Harris exemplifies the ideals of the great Victorian philanthropists about a place having a monument to art and culture for its citizens,” says Jon Finch, the project leader for Re-Imagining the Harris at Preston council. “But we have to try and transfer that set of perspectives onto 21st century museums. The Harris is a key civic organisation in Preston and we are trying to shape a vision of a civic centre for the city.”
Four themes – democracy, creativity, animation and permeability – have been identified from the consultation process.
“On a basic level, the Harris can make people feel comfortable and safe,” says Finch. “But it also needs to become more active, so we are planning more talks on general topics and want to broaden our ideas around the interpretation of objects. They can be used in more creative and flexible ways, and the sector should not be afraid of that. It’s the traditional approach, not the objects, that needs jettisoning.
“There must be opportunities for people to make and show so, for example, we want to give the local creative sector space in the building. A partnership with the University of Central Lancashire allows students to research the collections to inspire costumes, photography, 3D printing and so on.”
A plan to open up the hard-to-access basement area to the surrounding square has been controversial. “Preston’s morale and pride has been low for decades and the consultation served to reinforce that,” Finch says. “It may take us into uncomfortable places, but it’s our role to listen and respond. Preston is not a main tourism centre so we must listen to the people who say they don’t come back because nothing has changed.”
Jon Finch is the project leader for Re-Imagining the Harris at Preston council
Paisley Museum, Paisley, Renfrewshire
In the 1870s, 90% of the world’s cotton thread was made by J&P Coats, a textile company founded by James Coats in Paisley. His son Peter Coats, who inherited the business with his brothers, became a noted philanthropist and funded Paisley’s Free Library & Museum in 1870.
Now, the factories and jobs of the Victorian thread industry are long gone and Paisley is so economically depressed that Mhairi Black, the Scottish National Party MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, described the town’s bid for City of Culture 2021 as “partly a cry for help”.
And yet Paisley has more listed buildings than anywhere in Scotland outside Edinburgh, including the porticoed museum, which sits in a prominent position in the city centre. It contains the largest collection of paisley shawls in the world – the tear-drop pattern is named after the city it was invented in. “The town’s textile connection has been lost sight of,” says Kirsty Devine, the project director for the Paisley Museum redevelopment at Renfrewshire Leisure. “We want to bring it back to the fore and make it more accessible through changing shows and interpretation. More than half our visitors are families and they want the displays to change more often. So we are looking at doing that to coax visitors back.”
The museum has also opened Scotland’s first museum store on the high street, which is the focus of a wider regeneration plan. “The store increases access to our collections, enlivens the street and allows us to test people’s interests,” says Devine. “The challenge is to re-engender a sense of pride, ownership and enterprise. Paisley has an interesting history and we want to work with residents to tell those stories in meaningful ways.”
Kirsty Devine is the project director for the Paisley Museum redevelopment at Renfrewshire Leisure
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist