It seems like me and my museum service, the East Riding of Yorkshire, have always been part of the Humber Museums Partnership, which now consists of four organisations – us, lead partner Hull, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire.

We will always want to be part of the Humber Museums Partnership, with or without Arts Council England (ACE) funding. We have been a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) since 2018 and, with an uplift in our ACE funding for 2023-26, the partnership extended to North East Lincolnshire. So, it’s a bit like a successful marriage – one cannot imagine life without it. However, it was not always like this.

The proposal came out of the blue when Simon Green, then the director of Hull Museums, suggested that we should team up to submit a funding proposal to ACE. I quickly agreed, without having fully contemplated what this might entail. What it did entail was an extraordinary amount of hard work. We had to learn to cope with a whole set of new emotions swirling around in many new contexts, as we moved from taking ACE project funding to becoming a Major Partner Museum and then an NPO. 

Given that the beginnings of this new relationship had as its backdrop the beginning of austerity, certain members of staff (including myself at various points, I’m ashamed to say), viewed the Humber Museums Partnership as a dastardly plot by senior officers in both councils for Hull Museums to swallow up East Riding museums whole. It was only after a few years, when we noticed that this still hadn’t actually happened, that my staff and I began to relax.

The other issue we had was that we didn’t really understand what sort of organisation we were; it took many years for the penny to drop. We put undue emphasis on the word “partnership”, believing that all our organisations had to meld together at every level like clouds of mayfly drifting together to form one indivisible entity. This put a terrible burden on curatorial staff, who had to create exhibitions that would somehow fit different sites, audiences and spaces and slot into pre-existing exhibition timetables. 

This couldn’t be done, so after much head scratching and formidable debate, we decided we were a federation – separate museums services that do things in different ways but are bound together by the same arts council goals and investment principles.

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And of course, following the time-honoured British tradition of biting the hand that feeds you, we all spent every waking hour bemoaning the amount and type of data ACE required (while at the same time agreeing that ACE needed this data to make its case to government – I didn’t say this was logical). This problem was easily solved by appointing NPO leads in each of the four services, who have the time and focus to cope with the amount of data required. 

So, after 10 years of “storming, norming and forming” what do we have for our efforts? We have a regional structure that allows us to put the Humber region on the map and support the independent museums of the area; we have an enormous pool of talent and expertise to draw on; we have a vast and diverse range of output with which to engage a large and diverse audience; and we have tried-and-tested relationships that I am confident will allow us to keep on growing and developing together over the next 10 years – still arguing, still debating but, most importantly, still talking.

Nial Adams is the museums and archives manager at East Riding of Yorkshire Council