However much funding is made available, it's unlikely that we're ever going to come up with the absolutely perfect resolution to the historic building/accessible museum conundrum.
On the one hand, there is the desire to work responsibly, but creatively within the constraints of buildings that are often outstanding exhibits in their own right; on the other, the demands of funders, museological fashion and, most importantly, public expectation can often mean that some of the building's integrity has to be sacrificed.
The challenges of reconfiguring the three linked Newarke Houses, which date from the 16th to the late-18th centuries, into an accessible museum that is now advertised as telling 'the story of 20th-century Leicester and the history of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment' must have been formidable - and to have achieved as much as they have with a budget of only £1.5m is a credit to the staff of Leicester Museums and Galleries.
It's a pity that Leicester City Council's road improvements mean that improved accessibility within the museum isn't matched, at the moment, by access to it from the city centre. But the warmth of the welcome the front-of-house staff managed to extend, in a rather confined but encouragingly crowded entrance hall, was wonderful.
That really set the tone for the entire visitor experience because this is, above all, a museum in which the people - and specifically the people of Leicester - win hands down, even if the objects occasionally tend to lose out.
The two new 'dedicated community galleries' are housed in some of the earlier parts of the building, so the available rooms are less than ideal. The sense of limited space isn't helped, though, by full-height introductory text panels set diagonally, for unfathomable reasons, just inside each entrance; so access for a mum and a buggy meant a bottleneck for everyone else.
Once inside the My Home gallery, visitors are offered a variety of ways of engaging with the experiences of people who have made their homes in the city, largely since 1945.
There's no doubt that the artefacts here are displayed very much as illustration to the stories, and unless you take the time to read all the in-case personal narratives, the selection of objects can seem arbitrary and voiceless.
That said, absorbed grandparents were dutifully reading at length to grandchildren, though often oblivious to the fact that the grandchildren had given up on the narrative and moved over to the audio-handsets or the interactive screens.
The graphic layout of some text panels is disconcerting; in the interests of commendably short, left-justified sentences, they've ended up looking rather like poetry, which they emphatically are not.
The objects in the second of the community galleries, Moving Here, are particularly resonant and often extremely moving - once you've disentangled them.
The display units themselves are, imaginatively, in the form of travelling trunks, but each trunk holds objects significant to individual travellers from several communities of origin, which means, again, that a visitor with limited time could easily make some bizarre false associations.
Growing Up offers recorded lullabies from around the world, a dressing-up rail and here, and in the interactive-rich Toys and Games, there were excellent laminated books explaining the much more traditionally object-based displays. These invited further engagement via questions such as 'What would you like to know more about?' or 'Is there anything we have not covered?'
In such a quirky building, it would have been almost impossible to direct visitors around a pre-determined chronological narrative route and from here on in it's very much a pick and mix approach that seems to work best.
So you can marvel at the enormity of Daniel Lambert, peek through the windows of the shops in Leicester's mini-Kirkgate and compare the ways in which the same living room was occupied by, first, a post-war English family and, decades later, a family of Ugandan Asians.
Great pragmatic use is made of normally dead spaces such as corridors and staircases and the orientation panels throughout are plentiful and clear.
Upstairs is another world. The galleries devoted to the history of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment and to the experiences of Leicester people during the two world wars are, in the main, more traditional and object rich, though none the worse for that.
There was a surprisingly atmospheric recreation of a first world war trench and in the second world war kitchen there were lots of outlets for both play and learning.
What was clearly the greatest draw in these rooms, however, was the opportunity to trace forebears who had fought or died in past conflicts. Here, as nowhere else I can recall, I watched the social history curator's holy grail of genuine intergenerational engagement in near-perfect action.
What of the display of the building itself? Well, downstairs the 17th-century Panelled Room is pretty much as I remembered it (though new interpretation panels are a considerable help), and throughout there are elegant and judiciously-placed steel panels describing the key stages in the building's evolution and history.
In the end, though, the prize must go to the vastly improved physical access afforded by the refurbishment project.
Carefully placed lifts, stairlifts and ramps appear to have necessitated few irreversible compromises to the historic fabric and I wish the planning team could have been there when the person in a motorised wheelchair to whom I spoke in the regimental galleries came very close to tears at his delight in being able for the first time to get 'up close and personal' with his father's wartime experiences.
So the people of Leicester really have won a truly accessible new museum; let's hope the museum wins the long
term cross-community local support it is working so hard to attain.
Nichola Johnson is the director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
in Norwich
Project data
Cost: £1.5m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £1m, Royal Leicestershire Regiment £250,000, Leicester City Council £250,000
Exhibition designer: Haley Sharpe
Project manager: Nick Ladlow
On the one hand, there is the desire to work responsibly, but creatively within the constraints of buildings that are often outstanding exhibits in their own right; on the other, the demands of funders, museological fashion and, most importantly, public expectation can often mean that some of the building's integrity has to be sacrificed.
The challenges of reconfiguring the three linked Newarke Houses, which date from the 16th to the late-18th centuries, into an accessible museum that is now advertised as telling 'the story of 20th-century Leicester and the history of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment' must have been formidable - and to have achieved as much as they have with a budget of only £1.5m is a credit to the staff of Leicester Museums and Galleries.
It's a pity that Leicester City Council's road improvements mean that improved accessibility within the museum isn't matched, at the moment, by access to it from the city centre. But the warmth of the welcome the front-of-house staff managed to extend, in a rather confined but encouragingly crowded entrance hall, was wonderful.
That really set the tone for the entire visitor experience because this is, above all, a museum in which the people - and specifically the people of Leicester - win hands down, even if the objects occasionally tend to lose out.
The two new 'dedicated community galleries' are housed in some of the earlier parts of the building, so the available rooms are less than ideal. The sense of limited space isn't helped, though, by full-height introductory text panels set diagonally, for unfathomable reasons, just inside each entrance; so access for a mum and a buggy meant a bottleneck for everyone else.
Once inside the My Home gallery, visitors are offered a variety of ways of engaging with the experiences of people who have made their homes in the city, largely since 1945.
There's no doubt that the artefacts here are displayed very much as illustration to the stories, and unless you take the time to read all the in-case personal narratives, the selection of objects can seem arbitrary and voiceless.
That said, absorbed grandparents were dutifully reading at length to grandchildren, though often oblivious to the fact that the grandchildren had given up on the narrative and moved over to the audio-handsets or the interactive screens.
The graphic layout of some text panels is disconcerting; in the interests of commendably short, left-justified sentences, they've ended up looking rather like poetry, which they emphatically are not.
The objects in the second of the community galleries, Moving Here, are particularly resonant and often extremely moving - once you've disentangled them.
The display units themselves are, imaginatively, in the form of travelling trunks, but each trunk holds objects significant to individual travellers from several communities of origin, which means, again, that a visitor with limited time could easily make some bizarre false associations.
Growing Up offers recorded lullabies from around the world, a dressing-up rail and here, and in the interactive-rich Toys and Games, there were excellent laminated books explaining the much more traditionally object-based displays. These invited further engagement via questions such as 'What would you like to know more about?' or 'Is there anything we have not covered?'
In such a quirky building, it would have been almost impossible to direct visitors around a pre-determined chronological narrative route and from here on in it's very much a pick and mix approach that seems to work best.
So you can marvel at the enormity of Daniel Lambert, peek through the windows of the shops in Leicester's mini-Kirkgate and compare the ways in which the same living room was occupied by, first, a post-war English family and, decades later, a family of Ugandan Asians.
Great pragmatic use is made of normally dead spaces such as corridors and staircases and the orientation panels throughout are plentiful and clear.
Upstairs is another world. The galleries devoted to the history of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment and to the experiences of Leicester people during the two world wars are, in the main, more traditional and object rich, though none the worse for that.
There was a surprisingly atmospheric recreation of a first world war trench and in the second world war kitchen there were lots of outlets for both play and learning.
What was clearly the greatest draw in these rooms, however, was the opportunity to trace forebears who had fought or died in past conflicts. Here, as nowhere else I can recall, I watched the social history curator's holy grail of genuine intergenerational engagement in near-perfect action.
What of the display of the building itself? Well, downstairs the 17th-century Panelled Room is pretty much as I remembered it (though new interpretation panels are a considerable help), and throughout there are elegant and judiciously-placed steel panels describing the key stages in the building's evolution and history.
In the end, though, the prize must go to the vastly improved physical access afforded by the refurbishment project.
Carefully placed lifts, stairlifts and ramps appear to have necessitated few irreversible compromises to the historic fabric and I wish the planning team could have been there when the person in a motorised wheelchair to whom I spoke in the regimental galleries came very close to tears at his delight in being able for the first time to get 'up close and personal' with his father's wartime experiences.
So the people of Leicester really have won a truly accessible new museum; let's hope the museum wins the long
term cross-community local support it is working so hard to attain.
Nichola Johnson is the director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
in Norwich
Project data
Cost: £1.5m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £1m, Royal Leicestershire Regiment £250,000, Leicester City Council £250,000
Exhibition designer: Haley Sharpe
Project manager: Nick Ladlow
