“We want to become the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum,” says Esme Ward, the director of Manchester Museum, which is run by the University of Manchester. She’s been in her role for a year, is the first female director of the organisation, and is now leading a major renovation of the building.
The £13m Hello Future project is happening over the next three years, opening in 2021. A two-storey extension will house new galleries, entrance and shop, and the scheme includes a South Asia Gallery and Chinese Culture Gallery.
One of the core aims of the project is to be as collaborative as possible. Ward says the museum is working with the Manchester China Institute and the university on the creation of the Chinese Culture Gallery, which she hopes will help develop understanding between the UK and China. The museum is also consulting widely for the new South Asia Gallery.
“If this really is the UK’s first gallery to explore South Asian diaspora communities and their experiences, we need to know what to interrogate,” Ward says. “So, we have met with around 100 researchers, faith leaders, artists and community leaders and young people, all of whom have an interest in what the gallery might be.”
The gallery, which is still very much in development, will also have a performance space at its heart. This will be co-produced with the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. Text will be translated into six South Asian languages.
“We’re building it from scratch,” Ward says. “Will it just be written? Will it be oral? How will we do this? Those are exactly the questions we’re asking now. We have researchers with Multilingual Manchester who are part of the team thinking about what that looks like. We’ve also got students offering multilingual tours. After all, there are 200 languages spoken in this city.”
First encounters
Ward’s inclusive outlook has been informed by her first experiences visiting museums. “I hadn’t been to a museum at all, or not that I remember, as a child. I think I was 19 before my first trip – I remember it really clearly. It was then the Tate, now Tate Britain, and I remember being really scared. The big steps up to the building are imposing and I had threshold anxiety.
“I remember seeing that everyone just knew what they were doing, following unwritten rules on how to act in a gallery, so I just copied them. It suddenly struck me that the world is quite a lot bigger than I realised, and it was that encounter that fired my obsession with museums.”
“He wrote back and said, actually, we haven’t got any voluntary work, but we might have some paid, so my first ever paid job in museums was coordinating the gallery talks at the V&A.” Ward then took a change of course when she became the budget administrator at the museum.
“I always thought it was important to have a creative side, but I’m also interested in how you build up an administrative base, and I was canny enough to think it’s a really useful job. I could have all the best ideas in the world, but if I can’t manage a budget, no one is going to give me a job to do anything.”
“Some would say that Alistair Hudson, the current director of the Whitworth, is my partner in crime – we have a shared series of values, ethos and vision around the role of museums,” she says. “We are working on a shared vision around the civic role of our museums in the city.”
It’s this joined-up thinking that dominates every part of Ward’s mission at Manchester. She’s already made changes around the institution. “My colleagues working on the South Asia Gallery no longer sit in teams – you have a conservator next to a marketing person all sitting together. It sounds such a minor thing, but actually, in museums, that’s quite a big thing.”
Taking care
With the capital project in full swing, Ward is also keen to make sure her staff are well looked after. “We have a wellbeing programme for staff called Boost that runs alongside our programme, because it’s the right thing to do,” she says.
“I think all capital projects should have a staff wellbeing project as part of them. Many of the activities are run by staff, for staff. I’ve done bhangra dancing, there’s a choir, and there’s been a hill walk around Hebden Bridge. If it’s your idea of hell, that’s fine as well, but it’s the fact we’re trying to acknowledge how much work goes into a redevelopment and making sure our staff are cared for.”
She is slowly but surely working to flatten the structure of the institution. Part of this involves getting staff to spend time on the floor of the museum talking to visitors. “I have really tried to distribute leadership and introduce less hierarchy,” Ward says. “We now also have a group called The Museum Cabinet that draws in the whole organisation.”
The museum is also trying to get as many objects as possible out and about to engage new audiences – an Indian peacock has sat in the middle of an Indian restaurant, Egyptian shabti funerary figurines have gone out to schools, and Maharaja, the museum’s Indian elephant, will make an appearance in a procession through the streets of Manchester in June in the run up to an India versus Pakistan cricket match taking place at Old Trafford.
Ward is full of ideas on how to reinterpret the collection and reach new audiences. She is also bursting with enthusiasm. Future plans include getting the museum to campaign more for sustainability. She also wants to open up the conversation around ageing – on the side, she’s the strategic lead for Greater Manchester Ageing Hub and Age Friendly Manchester – and she’s targeting grandparents as volunteers to kick start some generational cohesion.
“Museums are empathy machines,” she says. “They have an extraordinary ability to unlock parts of ourselves that we’d forgotten, or amplify bits of ourselves that we hadn’t realised were there.”
Esme Ward is the first female director of Manchester Museum.
She did a BA in history at University College London and an MA in French revolutionary cultural theory. She then volunteered at Dulwich Picture Gallery before being appointed gallery talks coordinator for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She later became a freelance educator, working with the National Trust and regional museums.
In 1998, Ward was appointed the first ever education officer at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester. She was later promoted to the head of learning and engagement at the gallery and Manchester Museum.
She completed a Clore Fellowship in 2017 and took the role of director of Manchester Museum in 2018. Ward is the strategic lead for culture for the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub and Age Friendly Manchester.
Manchester Museum is run by the University of Manchester, England’s first civic university.
The collection of the manufacturer John Leigh Philips was bought by a group who set up the Manchester Natural History Society in 1821. The museum was the main focus of the society. The collections grew and in 1850 the museum absorbed the Manchester Geological Society collection.
In 1868, the museum was transferred to Owens College, which later became the university. The college asked the architect who designed London’s Natural History Museum, Alfred Waterhouse, to design a museum building, which was opened to the public in 1890.
The £13m Hello Future project is happening over the next three years, opening in 2021. A two-storey extension will house new galleries, entrance and shop, and the scheme includes a South Asia Gallery and Chinese Culture Gallery.
One of the core aims of the project is to be as collaborative as possible. Ward says the museum is working with the Manchester China Institute and the university on the creation of the Chinese Culture Gallery, which she hopes will help develop understanding between the UK and China. The museum is also consulting widely for the new South Asia Gallery.
“If this really is the UK’s first gallery to explore South Asian diaspora communities and their experiences, we need to know what to interrogate,” Ward says. “So, we have met with around 100 researchers, faith leaders, artists and community leaders and young people, all of whom have an interest in what the gallery might be.”
The gallery, which is still very much in development, will also have a performance space at its heart. This will be co-produced with the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. Text will be translated into six South Asian languages.
“We’re building it from scratch,” Ward says. “Will it just be written? Will it be oral? How will we do this? Those are exactly the questions we’re asking now. We have researchers with Multilingual Manchester who are part of the team thinking about what that looks like. We’ve also got students offering multilingual tours. After all, there are 200 languages spoken in this city.”
Ward emphasises that this collaborative working process has always been central to the museum’s approach. “When the museum opened, back in 1890, it was presented as an appeal to the civic spirit, the scientific curiosity and the devotion of the townsfolk of Manchester,” says Ward. “That is what we need to do now more than ever.”
First encounters
Ward’s inclusive outlook has been informed by her first experiences visiting museums. “I hadn’t been to a museum at all, or not that I remember, as a child. I think I was 19 before my first trip – I remember it really clearly. It was then the Tate, now Tate Britain, and I remember being really scared. The big steps up to the building are imposing and I had threshold anxiety.
“I remember seeing that everyone just knew what they were doing, following unwritten rules on how to act in a gallery, so I just copied them. It suddenly struck me that the world is quite a lot bigger than I realised, and it was that encounter that fired my obsession with museums.”
Sparked by another visit to a museum, Ward, who is from a family of teachers, had another idea. “I’d slightly followed this school group around the museum and seen this young lad at the back. A sculpture had caught his eye but the class had got moved on and this lad was torn on what to do.
"I remember feeling really conflicted thinking I have nothing to do with them, but I wanted to take him to that sculpture. And the idea of education in museums suddenly dawned on me. It was a light-bulb moment.”
From there, Ward wrote to museum directors asking for education work with them. “I wrote a really cheeky letter saying, basically, I need you, you need me.”It was David Anderson, who is now the director general of Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), then working for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, who gave Ward her first job in museums.
“I always thought it was important to have a creative side, but I’m also interested in how you build up an administrative base, and I was canny enough to think it’s a really useful job. I could have all the best ideas in the world, but if I can’t manage a budget, no one is going to give me a job to do anything.”
Ward was appointed the Whitworth art gallery’s first ever education officer in 1998, working with schools all over Manchester, which included many people who had never been to a museum before.
She was then promoted to be head of learning and engagement for Manchester Museum and the Whitworth, where she worked with director Maria Balshaw, now the director of Tate, on the transformation of the gallery. Ward has a great affection for the Whitworth and still works closely with the team there.
“Some would say that Alistair Hudson, the current director of the Whitworth, is my partner in crime – we have a shared series of values, ethos and vision around the role of museums,” she says. “We are working on a shared vision around the civic role of our museums in the city.”
It’s this joined-up thinking that dominates every part of Ward’s mission at Manchester. She’s already made changes around the institution. “My colleagues working on the South Asia Gallery no longer sit in teams – you have a conservator next to a marketing person all sitting together. It sounds such a minor thing, but actually, in museums, that’s quite a big thing.”
Taking care
With the capital project in full swing, Ward is also keen to make sure her staff are well looked after. “We have a wellbeing programme for staff called Boost that runs alongside our programme, because it’s the right thing to do,” she says.
“I think all capital projects should have a staff wellbeing project as part of them. Many of the activities are run by staff, for staff. I’ve done bhangra dancing, there’s a choir, and there’s been a hill walk around Hebden Bridge. If it’s your idea of hell, that’s fine as well, but it’s the fact we’re trying to acknowledge how much work goes into a redevelopment and making sure our staff are cared for.”
She is slowly but surely working to flatten the structure of the institution. Part of this involves getting staff to spend time on the floor of the museum talking to visitors. “I have really tried to distribute leadership and introduce less hierarchy,” Ward says. “We now also have a group called The Museum Cabinet that draws in the whole organisation.”
The museum is also trying to get as many objects as possible out and about to engage new audiences – an Indian peacock has sat in the middle of an Indian restaurant, Egyptian shabti funerary figurines have gone out to schools, and Maharaja, the museum’s Indian elephant, will make an appearance in a procession through the streets of Manchester in June in the run up to an India versus Pakistan cricket match taking place at Old Trafford.
Ward is full of ideas on how to reinterpret the collection and reach new audiences. She is also bursting with enthusiasm. Future plans include getting the museum to campaign more for sustainability. She also wants to open up the conversation around ageing – on the side, she’s the strategic lead for Greater Manchester Ageing Hub and Age Friendly Manchester – and she’s targeting grandparents as volunteers to kick start some generational cohesion.
“Museums are empathy machines,” she says. “They have an extraordinary ability to unlock parts of ourselves that we’d forgotten, or amplify bits of ourselves that we hadn’t realised were there.”
Esme Ward at a glance
Esme Ward is the first female director of Manchester Museum.
She did a BA in history at University College London and an MA in French revolutionary cultural theory. She then volunteered at Dulwich Picture Gallery before being appointed gallery talks coordinator for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She later became a freelance educator, working with the National Trust and regional museums.
In 1998, Ward was appointed the first ever education officer at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester. She was later promoted to the head of learning and engagement at the gallery and Manchester Museum.
She completed a Clore Fellowship in 2017 and took the role of director of Manchester Museum in 2018. Ward is the strategic lead for culture for the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub and Age Friendly Manchester.
Manchester Museum at a glance
Manchester Museum is run by the University of Manchester, England’s first civic university.
The collection of the manufacturer John Leigh Philips was bought by a group who set up the Manchester Natural History Society in 1821. The museum was the main focus of the society. The collections grew and in 1850 the museum absorbed the Manchester Geological Society collection.
In 1868, the museum was transferred to Owens College, which later became the university. The college asked the architect who designed London’s Natural History Museum, Alfred Waterhouse, to design a museum building, which was opened to the public in 1890.
Manchester Museum now holds 4.5m objects and operates a vivarium. It is run by more than 90 staff members.
