Barnsley has one of the smartest town halls I’ve ever seen. This proud symbol of the town was built in the 1930s in Portland stone and features a striking tower.
Outside, stylish planting surrounds fountains set into crisp paving, with happy children splashing away. Office workers eat their lunches on benches. It’s a lovely spot to rest a while and enjoy the summer sunshine; a bright August day is not the most popular time for museum visiting.
But inside, Barnsley’s new museum is busy, bustling with people of all ages. Experience Barnsley is the overall name for the museum and other new features in the town hall that now invites people to visit an archive and reading room, called the Discovery Centre, a Learning Lab, shop, cafe, temporary exhibition gallery and displays throughout the building.
It’s a clever move to weave the museum and archive through the working town hall. It brings people into the building and it makes museum visiting feel part of normal life when you pass a notice reading: “Please do not throw confetti inside the town hall entrance, including the steps.”
Just inside the door, the shop and cafe are well located to serve a wider audience than just museum visitors. After passing them you go along a corridor listening to local hero Ian McMillan’s Barnsley Poem, unfortunately slightly hard to hear over the background noise.
The floor is embellished with the names of areas of Barnsley, including TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite, Penistone (it’s all in the pronunciation).
Peopling the museum
Then you’re straight into Barnsley Stories, the museum’s main gallery. Front-of-house staff are often positioned sentry-like by the entrance of museums but here they move around, pointing things out to visitors and engaging them in conversation.
In the centre, a large full-height showcase houses a variety of objects; some hang from the top of the case, others are at floor level.
A television screen scrolls through photographs of people holding the item they lent or donated to the museum – an effective way of peopling the collection and suggesting the lives behind the things.
Throughout, displays are bright and attractive, object rich, but not overwhelming. There are plenty of seats, many with armrests, which helps people with limited mobility sit and stand.
At one corner there’s Barnsley in Sound and Film, where you can get a taste of the audiovisual material available in the archive. In front of a screen there’s a couple of comfy chairs and there’s rich, room-filling sound. In another space, films show actors recreating four characters from 1690-1999.
Technology is integrated well, with several touchscreens (all with seats) round the gallery augmenting the information given in the showcases, which is admirably brief, prompting thought rather than overwhelming with information.
The displays have been designed for flexibility, with easy-to-replace labels and graphics and minimal use of mounts. There’s an ambition to change 30-40% of what visitors see each year. Listening posts are also intended to be easy to reprogramme.
Work and social lives
One wall looks a bit less flexible. It’s a rather graphics-heavy chronological display, culminating in a model of Will Alsop’s striking proposal to develop the town centre as if it was a 21st-century version of a medieval Italian hill town. This dates from 2002 – I’d be interested in what’s happened since then.
The rest of the displays are themed in a fairly familiar way, including work, domestic life, leisure, and Barnsley and the world. The latter is smaller than you might expect for South Yorkshire, but Barnsley has had surprisingly little immigration (its population is 95% white British), perhaps because the main local industry was coalmining rather than, say, textiles.
Mining features heavily in the displays, especially the 1984-85 miners’ strike and its effects. With presentation of “great Barnsley minds” from centuries past and the decline of manufacturing, there can be a slightly sentimental, nostalgic air.
But that might be appropriate. One of the themes that came through in consultation was the importance of work to people’s social lives.
Extensive consultation underpinned the museum’s content – and produced most of the collection, which didn’t exist five years ago. Museum staff held 28 roadshows so people could offer things for display.
Most are on loan and will be returned when they are removed from the galleries. The museum takes the view that “the reserve collection is still in people’s houses and lofts”.
Recent years
Barnsley is presented as a good place to live, with a strong tradition of gutsy anti-establishment radicalism – but it came across as a place still licking the wounds of deindustrialisation and pit closures and struggling to move on.
The tone is affectionate but not propagandist and there are plenty of pessimistic comments in a film about the town’s future. Admirably, some of the people interviewed have mild learning disabilities.
A children’s interactive area leads off the main gallery, although when I visited most children were finding plenty to do in the main space. Others were busy in a workshop in the Learning Lab. Along the corridor adults could be seen working in the archives study room – the whole place was a hive of activity and learning.
There are further displays throughout the town hall building, including thoughtful explanations of local democracy and what goes on in the council chamber, the history and symbolism of the building and memorials to mining disasters.
Experience Barnsley’s weakness is that its stories stutter to a halt before it reaches 2013. There are very few objects from the past 10 years; a last-day-of-school-shirt covered in friends’ signatures dates from 2000 – literally a lifetime ago for many children. Even the story of Barnsley Football Club ends in 2008, the year it knocked out Liverpool and Chelsea to get to the FA Cup semi-final.
I found it hard to get a sense of what’s happened in Barnsley since the last pit closure of 1994 and what the town’s like now. There are generalised comments about the problems of youth unemployment and the decline of town-centre shopping, but little that felt locally specific.
Perhaps the real issue is that people’s lives in British towns are getting less and less distinctive, which will be a challenge for local museums that want to engage with contemporary issues.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
Outside, stylish planting surrounds fountains set into crisp paving, with happy children splashing away. Office workers eat their lunches on benches. It’s a lovely spot to rest a while and enjoy the summer sunshine; a bright August day is not the most popular time for museum visiting.
But inside, Barnsley’s new museum is busy, bustling with people of all ages. Experience Barnsley is the overall name for the museum and other new features in the town hall that now invites people to visit an archive and reading room, called the Discovery Centre, a Learning Lab, shop, cafe, temporary exhibition gallery and displays throughout the building.
It’s a clever move to weave the museum and archive through the working town hall. It brings people into the building and it makes museum visiting feel part of normal life when you pass a notice reading: “Please do not throw confetti inside the town hall entrance, including the steps.”
Just inside the door, the shop and cafe are well located to serve a wider audience than just museum visitors. After passing them you go along a corridor listening to local hero Ian McMillan’s Barnsley Poem, unfortunately slightly hard to hear over the background noise.
The floor is embellished with the names of areas of Barnsley, including TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite, Penistone (it’s all in the pronunciation).
Peopling the museum
Then you’re straight into Barnsley Stories, the museum’s main gallery. Front-of-house staff are often positioned sentry-like by the entrance of museums but here they move around, pointing things out to visitors and engaging them in conversation.
In the centre, a large full-height showcase houses a variety of objects; some hang from the top of the case, others are at floor level.
A television screen scrolls through photographs of people holding the item they lent or donated to the museum – an effective way of peopling the collection and suggesting the lives behind the things.
Throughout, displays are bright and attractive, object rich, but not overwhelming. There are plenty of seats, many with armrests, which helps people with limited mobility sit and stand.
At one corner there’s Barnsley in Sound and Film, where you can get a taste of the audiovisual material available in the archive. In front of a screen there’s a couple of comfy chairs and there’s rich, room-filling sound. In another space, films show actors recreating four characters from 1690-1999.
Technology is integrated well, with several touchscreens (all with seats) round the gallery augmenting the information given in the showcases, which is admirably brief, prompting thought rather than overwhelming with information.
The displays have been designed for flexibility, with easy-to-replace labels and graphics and minimal use of mounts. There’s an ambition to change 30-40% of what visitors see each year. Listening posts are also intended to be easy to reprogramme.
Work and social lives
One wall looks a bit less flexible. It’s a rather graphics-heavy chronological display, culminating in a model of Will Alsop’s striking proposal to develop the town centre as if it was a 21st-century version of a medieval Italian hill town. This dates from 2002 – I’d be interested in what’s happened since then.
The rest of the displays are themed in a fairly familiar way, including work, domestic life, leisure, and Barnsley and the world. The latter is smaller than you might expect for South Yorkshire, but Barnsley has had surprisingly little immigration (its population is 95% white British), perhaps because the main local industry was coalmining rather than, say, textiles.
Mining features heavily in the displays, especially the 1984-85 miners’ strike and its effects. With presentation of “great Barnsley minds” from centuries past and the decline of manufacturing, there can be a slightly sentimental, nostalgic air.
But that might be appropriate. One of the themes that came through in consultation was the importance of work to people’s social lives.
Extensive consultation underpinned the museum’s content – and produced most of the collection, which didn’t exist five years ago. Museum staff held 28 roadshows so people could offer things for display.
Most are on loan and will be returned when they are removed from the galleries. The museum takes the view that “the reserve collection is still in people’s houses and lofts”.
Recent years
Barnsley is presented as a good place to live, with a strong tradition of gutsy anti-establishment radicalism – but it came across as a place still licking the wounds of deindustrialisation and pit closures and struggling to move on.
The tone is affectionate but not propagandist and there are plenty of pessimistic comments in a film about the town’s future. Admirably, some of the people interviewed have mild learning disabilities.
A children’s interactive area leads off the main gallery, although when I visited most children were finding plenty to do in the main space. Others were busy in a workshop in the Learning Lab. Along the corridor adults could be seen working in the archives study room – the whole place was a hive of activity and learning.
There are further displays throughout the town hall building, including thoughtful explanations of local democracy and what goes on in the council chamber, the history and symbolism of the building and memorials to mining disasters.
Experience Barnsley’s weakness is that its stories stutter to a halt before it reaches 2013. There are very few objects from the past 10 years; a last-day-of-school-shirt covered in friends’ signatures dates from 2000 – literally a lifetime ago for many children. Even the story of Barnsley Football Club ends in 2008, the year it knocked out Liverpool and Chelsea to get to the FA Cup semi-final.
I found it hard to get a sense of what’s happened in Barnsley since the last pit closure of 1994 and what the town’s like now. There are generalised comments about the problems of youth unemployment and the decline of town-centre shopping, but little that felt locally specific.
Perhaps the real issue is that people’s lives in British towns are getting less and less distinctive, which will be a challenge for local museums that want to engage with contemporary issues.
Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association
Project data
- Cost £4.4m
- Main funder Heritage Lottery Fund £2.6m, ERDF £1.5m, Barnsley MBC £300,000
- Exhibition design Redman Design
- Audiovisuals Centre Screen
- Audiovisual hardware DJ Willrich
- Fit-out works Wood Mitchell
- Interactives Sirias Interactives
- Display cases ClickNetherfield
