It is quite frankly inexcusable how long it has taken me to write this blog. Nearly 9 months, I am quite ashamed to say, but it has been a bit of year with its own personal challenges. However, time elapsed gives us space to ruminate and that is exactly what I have been doing. Seeing Manchester Museum shortlisted for four awards in the 2024 Museum and Heritage Awards, for ‘Partnership of the Year’, ‘Permanent Exhibition of the Year’, ‘Sustainable Project of the Year’ and ‘Volunteer of the Year for Team Joe’ is exactly the kick up the bum I needed to finally get down to shaping this blog.
This April Manchester Museum marked its 1 millionth visitor just over a year since reopening following their £15 million ‘hello future’ transformation in February 2023, a project that, like many others, was complicated by Covid. It was back in June 2020 that I interviewed Esme Ward, in the midst of the capital project, as part of a series of ’20 Lockdown Interviews‘ with museum directors. We talked about the impact of covid, delays, rising costs and how to stay connected to your community and staff with Lockdowns and social distancing.
It felt a little surreal but entirely right to finally get to Manchester Museum in July 2023 to see for myself the transformation and I was very honoured that Esme had the time to give me a tour. Visiting on a day the museum was closed we got to wander the halls of an empty museum, a real treat as Esme explained the work that had gone on in the building. I returned the next day and enjoyed observing the visitors delighting in the displays and I stopped for museum cake and coffee in the café like the truly dedicated museum-obsessive that I am.
Toilets
When I met Esme we began our tour with the most important part of any museum visit, the toilets. In particular we discussed the Changing Places toilet, a vital necessity for any visitor with additional needs. Access to a Changing Places toilet can mean the difference on whether or not to visit a venue and it was lovely to hear how consultation with ‘Team Joe’ had been at the heart of the design. Esme explained that feedback had led them to immediately realise they needed a button to automatically open the door for visitors. Joe had always visited with a support worker who would open the door for him and it hadn’t occurred to them that it might be an access challenge for an independent visitor. Even with consultation the design needed to be altered.
As Esme put it, “It has been a lesson on co-design. Sometimes the ‘us’ needs to be bigger than you think it does. You can’t always be ‘everything’, but you can equip yourself to make the best decisions”.
I think this is really the heart of any big capital development that has worked with local communities on accessibility. It is vital that a multitude of voices are part of the process, what works for one individual won’t necessarily work for another. Having seen many lottery funded projects in my time on the Committee at the National Lottery Heritage Fund, plans will always need to be changed and adapted even when you think you have everything covered.
There is always compromise but Esme’s call to be driven by core values when making decisions can be the difference between a project that works for the local community as opposed to a project that works only for the museum.
“Give us all the options, let’s hear all of them, driven by our values as well as how much money we have got and then we will try and make the best decision.”
Picnic space
Just as I am starting to get a sense of the values at the heart of ‘hello future’ we moved to the Picnic space on the ground floor next to the Café. It was a welcoming area where families were invited to bring their own food. Esme explained how the space was being used.
“This is another space that is new. The idea behind it was – Can we put as much love and care into our picnic area as we do into our café? You shouldn’t have to feel like a second class citizen, going down to a basement to eat your own food. I love this space, it can be used by anyone. I think it is really important. People come at the weekend, sometimes they bring their own birthday cake because they know there is a space for them.”
As a parent to three kids I can totally get behind this ethos. On days when money is tight visiting a ridiculously expensive café just isn’t an option with three kids. Having to rush off home as everyone is tired and hungry also brings its own stress. Equally when you have kids with additional needs food choices can be limited, so having this space can make all the difference. At a time when families are facing crippling poverty Esme explained the research that was behind creating spaces that make everyone feel welcome.
“Partly this came out of the work we are doing around social justice, we have 15 staff who for the last 2 years have been training as social justice researchers working on a really amazing research programme called ‘Local Matters’ looking at family poverty. Within 2 miles of this museum we have 11,000 children living in poverty. What does that mean for us as a museum? What that means is a space like this, it means we open at 8am on Saturday morning, it means we have a social justice manager who has spent the past few months meeting and talking with local schools, partners and charities and our plans have adapted accordingly – so rather than creating a new club in the museum they asked us to develop our outreach programme and add value to the Breakfast Club offering already established.
It is just about being a good neighbour.
Yes, you can do a Breakfast Club, but it is like Breakfast Club Plus, because you can feed the kids and they have a whole museum to play in and it’s in a university. I am really interested in the convening power of somewhere like this – we’re cool with toddlers, residents and parents, we are also pretty good with Profs as policy makers – what if we do all of that? All those perspectives have fed into this space.
We have a commitment to inclusion, if we are serious about the museum being somewhere everyone belongs, we’ve got to build spaces that enable that, and this is one of those spaces.”
Belonging Gallery
As we moved through the museum the first gallery we came to was the ‘Belonging Gallery’ where comics from 20 local, national and international artists and writers tell stories of belonging. It feels like a fresh first step into contemplating what a museum is, what collections are for and a vital question for our times – where have the collections come from?
“Belonging is fundamental to who we are and what we do, it is curated by our Curator of Indigenous Perspectives, Dr Alexandra P. Alberda, using comics. It is about trying to find ways in to open up a conversation around what belonging might mean – whether that is about collections or individuals – what does that mean? It is thinking about repatriation and where things belong, it is about borders and our sense of belonging. It looks at our relationship with the natural world and kinship. The opportunity for visual story telling that cartoons present feels like a great way to set the tone for visitors exploring what it means to belong.”
It is in this space, talking to Esme, that I start to really get the feel for what is – ultimately – a university museum. Manchester is a vibrant city which draws together individuals from all across the world to study and to learn. For many young adults it might be their first time leaving home, perhaps it is the first time they have truly felt lonely or even contemplated what it means to belong. They are exploring what community is and Manchester Museum is trying to find spaces to help frame that experience.
The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery
For our next stop Esme introduced me to ‘The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery’ –
“The Chinese Culture Gallery is multi-lingual, it is designed to build empathy and understanding between the UK and China and particularly Manchester and China. Manchester has 10,000 Chinese students, often quite isolated, post-Covid facing quite a lot of discrimination. This is a collaboration with an amazing group of researchers at the university called the Manchester China Institute and it also showcases not just collections from this museum but collections from across the whole city that have never really been seen. It has unearthed these stories about Manchester and China. All of it is trying to think about humanising that relationship, not global geo-politics but people, the realities of people thinking around empathy and what that actually means and how we build that and what that looks like. It is funded by Dr Lee whose quote really sums up the intention behind the gallery – ‘If there is no dialogue there is no understanding, if there is no understanding there is no trust, if there is no trust there is no harmony, if there is no harmony there is no peace.’”
The gallery has a very contemporary feel as interpretation includes videos from Manchester University students who explore what it means to be British Chinese and what it means to be Chinese in a city like Manchester.
On the day I visit it is graduation day for many of the students and the Chinese Gallery is full of families, proud parents and proud young people, keen to show their city off and show how their heritage is represented. The gallery feels unique to Manchester, it is a Manchester story and just one of the ways that the ‘hello future’ transformation is making sure the museum works for the communities it sits at the heart of. Esme explains how the gallery is not a sterile, static display, it is also thinking about the world we live in and the challenges we face.
“We are all the way through trying to think about the shared challenges we face, so particularly in these polarised times there is a lot of fear particularly around China, is there another way that we can move forwards?”
South Asia Gallery
From stories of China we move to the award-winning South Asia Gallery, a partnership with the British Museum, which has already garnered a lot of coverage for its new approach to curation working with the ‘South Asia Gallery Collective’, a group of community leaders, educators, artists, historians, journalists, scientists, musicians, students and others from the South Asian diaspora.
“Like the Chinese Culture Gallery there are multi-lingual elements throughout. The gallery is not traditionally curated, it is co-curated throughout. This could have been just another South Asia Gallery but that is not Manchester, we had this one chance to not be a South Asia Gallery telling a chronological history, we could literally be a gallery that starts to really think about diasporan experience, culture and contribution and the ‘collective’ tell that story.”
Co-curation is not a simple process but a step change as Esme went on to explain.
“We have had to ask ourselves – how do we have to shift to do that and are we even equipped to do that? You have to cede a lot of control and we really did that. This project has changed so radically from the outset, it required a very, very, different approach to working with collections that is story led. It is designed to evolve; this is the first iteration and we will recruit more collective members so it will be like passing on a baton, existing collective members will mentor the new ones. Lead Curator Nusrat Ahmed had a critical role in leading the project and the co-curation.
All the way through, the Collective were able to explore their passions and interests, as well as the broader story, there is this really lovely mix of local stories and big global stories. We wanted warmth, we wanted it to feel quite domestic not intimidating. It feels quite different for a gallery space.”
One of the stand out pieces in the gallery is a brightly coloured rickshaw that is impossible to miss. Esme explained the story behind its inclusion.
“We had the opportunity to borrow a rickshaw from the 1970s but it would have been in a glass case, it is very expensive to buy a glass case, that is a waste of money when no one wants a rickshaw in a glass case. We then wondered how much it would cost to import a rickshaw, if we built one from scratch, if we are importing one shall we import two. So we actually have two, one is being decorated with schools. The design and décor of this rickshaw was a collaboration between Manchester Museum and Uronto Artist Community as part of the British Council’s Our Shared Cultural Heritage (OSCH) project. Syed Ahmed Hossain, a traditional rickshaw artist from Dhaka in Bangladesh visited Manchester Museum and worked alongside young artists, sharing his skills and expertise.
I love it! You have Manchester one side, South Asia on the other and Bollywood and ‘Bend it like Beckham’ down the middle. All of it was co-designed. I love what it represents, that exchange and collaboration.”
The gallery has also given space for the Collective to explore their own heritage and bring those stories to Manchester Museum to share with visitors.
“A really lovely example of this is from Talat, one of the Collective. I remember him coming to the museum with a suitcase, he opened it up, he told us he had gone back to his family home in Pakistan and some straps were hanging from the ceiling and he asked his Uncle: ‘What is it? Is it a horses bridle?’ He said ‘No, it’s your Great Grandfather’s World War I uniform.’ So we worked with him, we conserved it, and we have not only been on an amazing curatorial journey but he has been on a personal journey which is extraordinary. You can hear Talat talking about the discovery in the exhibition.“
“What I have found amazing doing this, that actually if you focus on building relationships and community rather than some weird consensus, extraordinary things happen and people’s generosity of spirit is unbelievable.”
When I returned to the South Asia Gallery after my tour with Esme I was struck at how different the space feels, with the wood detail on the ceiling and rattan chairs it has a warm inviting space. It welcomes you in and wants to be a comfortable space to share stories.
I was very interested in the outcome of the co-production on the interpretation as I have been involved in a number of co-produced exhibitions at the Horniman Museum and the V&A. I think one of the hardest things with a co-produced exhibition (or indeed any exhibition) is to convey the depths of conversations that go into exhibition themes when you are faced with the limited word count of museum labels.
Sometimes I felt there was an expectation that visitors understood or knew about topics that were being covered. For example in a section on Exploitation that used an image of the collapsed Rana Plaza building from 2013 but there was no further information about this image. I felt like the Collective had that knowledge and that discussion was had outside the gallery space.
The Rana Plaza disaster was an eight storey building – housing factories, and apartments, that collapsed resulting in the deaths of 1,134 people. It is emblematic of the sweatshop factories where workers have no rights and work for a pittance while producing clothing for Western consumers. Brands including UK high street staples Matalan and Primark had garments made at the Rana Plaza. I am not sure of the level of awareness an average visitor to the gallery will have of this event. In the interpretation, the photo is used almost as window dressing but it needs more scaffolding around it to help visitors make the connections between exploitation that began with the British Empire. I think that is where the wealth of a community of knowledge needs the careful balance and expertise of a curator to come to labels with a fresh eye.
I know how frustrating it is that hours of conversation have to be distilled into 70 or 150 words. But when the themes are this important I felt it needed more explanation.
One of the last things I saw at the gallery was Talat’s Grandfather’s uniform, such a wonderful personal story and so relatable to those who are on journeys to discover their own family histories. It brings a personal touch to the gallery that is both tender and inspiring. I hope it does encourage visitors to take their own steps to finding those hidden family stories.
Top Floor and space to dream
One of the final stops on our tour was the Top Floor and it is one of the areas that has stayed with me long past my visit to Manchester Museum. Esme explained the ethos behind the space.
“The top floor is an experiment, it has never quite worked in the past, it has always had this amazing green house, which we love. But what could it be? What if we really opened it up? We know what our mission is, we are here to build understanding between cultures in a sustainable world. We are really driven by environmental action and social justice. What would it look like if we opened up a whole floor to that, really opened up the museum. It was important that it didn’t become a veneer of inclusion on our terms.
It is based on a few things I have seen over the years, it started in the early days with PINC College, a specialist college for creative education focussing on neurodivergent 16-25 year olds, they got in touch and said they would like a desk, which has now become half a floor.
PINC is both a headquarters space and a classroom, they now have Creative Learning Studios based in 13 heritage sites. Alongside that we have an artist studio, at the end we have a therapy room, we have a therapy dog and an arts therapist, and we have a young people’s mental health co-ordinator based here. That really emerged out of the conversations we had with PINC about what the future of education looks like. There is a lounge where museum staff can mingle with co-workers from partner organisations, we have a really beautiful seminar room, spaces people can use, we also have a class room space.
Ultimately the top floor is asking the question – how can we be useful to the city? How do we become the museum the city needs? Where are the spaces in the city to bring people together? What it ends up looking like is co-working spaces. We have 15 charities and social enterprises who work with us, from Ardwick Climate Action, who are a local community group, who we work with to close roads and plant better hedges, through to Olympias Music Foundation.
I feel like the world shifted during Covid, the world shifted for me personally, but I think institutionally for us the museum shifted too. I remember having a conversation here with all the staff about what are we going to prioritise, what does the future look like? If you have shared values and shared vision, I am interested in how you find your fellow travellers.
It is also a really good business model, lots of them pay us! The public can come up here between 2-4pm from Tuesday to Friday. There is a messy space that they use during the week and we use it at weekends to run family workshops, there are toilets and loads of storage, all the things you need!
I think this is a game changer. All of it really is about the future of education, so it is interesting how Manchester University views it. The University want their sustainability research team to be based here, they gave an award to PINC as a model of inclusive education. We have just got funding from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) to work on neurodivergent perspectives on our new exhibition. That was also at the heart of the ‘Golden Mummies’ exhibition, we got a AHRC innovation grant. It literally feeds into everything we do.
I remember we had conversations with environmental activists and organisations in the city during Lockdown and we asked them what they needed and wanted. They said we were like an Environmental HQ for the city, they said they wanted our collections, our stories, our spaces and visitors, they wanted to be in the building doing cool stuff! Sometimes with us, sometimes, not. They wanted to work with us to amplify what they were doing and we wanted to build a more sustainable Manchester together. And our response was – Let’s do that.
We can only see how it goes but I feel like we are on the right track.”
I felt very inspired visiting this space at the end of our tour, as a parent to three children, two who are autistic, it has been very evident to us over the last few years how the education system fails those who don’t fit into its traditional rigid structures.
It feels so much more than about offering up a space for someone else to use in the museum. Maybe because Manchester Museum is a university museum it feels like a meeting place – a meeting of minds, ideas and a space to talk and think and have fun. It feels like a safe space for the ‘give and take’ that is missing in today’s society where opinions are rigid weapons to beat the opposition with.
It is so much more than just a physical space, with 15 charities co-working here there is a meld and mix of people, a cross-fertilization that flowers in the Manchester Museum garden. Museum staff are very much a part of the mix, the formal and informal mesh of ideas that support people to make change, Esme calls it a ‘game changer’ and I am apt to agree.
Reflections on Covid
As our tour came to an end I returned to that first conversation we had in June 2020 to ask Esme now with some distance what did she feel the impact of Covid had been on the ‘hello future’ transformation.
“Covid sort of stopped us in our tracks but it also meant we had to stop and think what mattered. We won’t slip back to the old ways because we can’t, because we’ve built a space that won’t let us, we’ve built ways of working that don’t let us. I love that. It is a challenge and financially it is exhausting, new ideas are lovely but they are a lot of work to get money for. People have to make leaps of trust and imagination, and that is part of the relationship building as well, building relationships with funders. So we can say this is a risk worth taking. Help us do something different, not for the sake of it, but because we think this is what we need now. That is the hard bit, balancing the ambition with realities of capacity that is always going to be quite challenging for me!
I think because of Covid it was probably a better project. I think Covid was an existential crisis for so many of us in so many different ways, I know it was personally but I think also collectively, we got to a point when I remember thinking – I am not mucking around here. Why are we doing this? Would I really choose to grow our museum 25% at just this moment in time. No, I wouldn’t. But we are doing it, so if we do it we have to squeeze every last bit of value out of it. If we do it, it has to be more useful than we had ever imagined. It has to mean something and not just to us and a small number of visitors. It has to mean something to a much wider range of visitors.
In a way Covid did really help us articulate what mattered, and certainly from my perspective it made me a little bit impatient, it made me very prepared to say no, we aren’t doing that anymore, we don’t need to do that. No, that is not the most important thing, actually that thing is. That is what we are going to do.
The funders were amazing, the university was amazing. They believed in us. If anything it helped us hold our nerve. I think part of the holding the nerve was because, it is not just you as a small core group of museum staff holding your nerve anymore, it is you, and a collective of 30 people, and all our networks, and communities, you and all your top floor partners.
I love collections, I love stuff, but actually it is about the people and if you are really serious about building relationships, that means creating teams who will take ideas where ever they come from, and make them fly.
We are big enough to get noticed but small enough to be agile. The work now is that we have set something in motion but how do we sustain it? Even if that Top Floor is an utter failure and doesn’t work it has already done something extraordinary, I know it has. It has already built relationships, it has already helped us conceive differently what the museum might do in the world.”
As a final salvo I tried once again to get any final advice and words of wisdom from Esme to other museums undergoing such a transformation.
“I hate giving advice, I think I said this last time, it hasn’t changed…. Really work out what you are for, what you care about, and what values drive you, and treat them like a North Star. Check in with yourself on a regular basis. If you have made a wrong decision, and you will know, because you will feel sick, you will feel out of kilter, it will not feel right if you make a decision that does not align with them. Sometimes you have to, you don’t have a choice, I am not completely delusional. But make sure you have a plan to get yourself back on track. That is it basically! Just hold to those values, not just you but everyone, build a sense of collective endeavour. It’s all of you, it’s not just me, that would be horrendous for me and everyone else! It’s all of us, we should be in it together because it is all our lives.”
On my return to an open and busy Manchester Museum the next day I had plenty of time to think over Esme’s words. It was a very joyous time in Manchester, seeing smartly dressed graduating students in their caps and gowns, a time for celebration and family. Many were bringing loved ones into the galleries, many were visiting from far away and you could see the pride Manchester students had showing relatives around the China Gallery and South Asia Gallery. Esme’s final words came to mind…
“One of the absolute joys was seeing the people in the museum, I wanted to make the museum feel like out there. However it is out there, and it is really diverse and there are all different ages, all shapes and all sizes. That is what it needs to be in here and I can honestly say, yes – We do reflect Manchester.”
As I looked out of the window and watched memorable moments being captured and compared those scenes to inside the gallery I could see no difference. Manchester Museum has found its purpose, a heady mix of past, present and future, the hard graft done and the promise of tomorrow just beginning.
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With huge thanks to Esme Ward for the interview and Judith for arranging.
Find out more about Manchester Museum here – https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/
Further reading:
M+H Advisor – ‘Manchester Museum celebrates 1 million visitors since reopening’, 10 April 2024, https://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/news/manchester-museum-celebrates-1-million-visits-since-reopening/
South Asia Gallery: a British Museum Partnership, YouTube Manchester Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgMZBPYcKRk
Vogue India – ‘The Manchester Museum’s South Asia Gallery is a salve to the wounds dealt by Britain’s imperialist past’, Sadaf Shaikh, July 2023 https://www.vogue.in/content/the-manchester-museums-south-asia-gallery-is-a-salve-to-the-wounds-dealt-by-britains-imperialist-past
Design Week – ‘Designing the UK’s first permanent gallery dedicated to South Asian culture’, Sophie Tolhurst, February 2023, https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/20-february-24-february-2023/manchester-museum-south-asia-gallery-design/
Guardian – ‘Reopened Manchester Museum gives voice to south Asian diaspora’, Safi Bugel, February 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/16/reopened-manchester-museum-gives-voice-to-south-asian-diaspora
Museums Association – ‘Manchester Museum reopens after £15m redevelopment’, Simon Stephens, February 2023, https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2023/02/manchester-museum-reopens-after-15m-redevelopment/
Tincture of Museum 