museum news winter 2010

museumnewsHLF bonus 2Stoke’s admission charge plan 3University museums at risk 3English Heritage cuts 4Tullie House misses out on helmet 4Mander and Mitchenson’s new home 4Black museum confirmed for Brixton 4

local focus

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Wandsworth Museum andMusical Museum 20

nH deBaTe

Wandworth Museum 9Yorkshire Museum 10

Stuart Davies on the culture cuts 13

ACE to take on museums role

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Margate Contemporary 7Order of St John, Clerkenwell 8Holburne, Bath 12

MuseuM of THe year revisiTedNatural History Museum, London 11

nH profileStephen Deucher 6

naTional HeriTage guideA selective list of current and forthcoming museum and gallery exhibitions 14

privaTe visiTs

Arts Council England is to take over the duties of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which is to be abolished in March 2012.

Ministers and ACE officials have agreed details of the transfer, and it is expected to take on the transformation of Renaissance in the Regions – which survived the Comprehensive Spending Review with a 15% cut, the same as for national museums and galleries - with Hubs through which finding is channeled being replaced by core museums, and funding going directly to the smaller institutions.

Responsibilities would also include museums and libraries development work, including museum accreditation and designation, and statutory functions such as export licensing and the Acceptance in Lieu scheme for payment of taxes.

The government will give ACE £46m each year from 2012/13 to do the extra work, and £1.3m of funding will go directly to the British Museum to run the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This compares with current funding levels of nearly £60 million for the MLA, including £47 million for Renaissance.

The world says ‘Happy Birthday, Dulwich’Dulwich Picture Gallery, the first purpose built public art gallery, is to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2011 with a masterpiece a month, loaned from major galleries around the world. First up, appropriately, will be this portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Sir John Soane, the architect of the gallery. Each month a different masterpiece will be highlighted, including by Gainsborough, El Greco, Velasquez, Domenichino, Van Gogh, Hockney, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Ingres, Constable and Veronese. “We wanted paintings that would knock your socks off at 50 paces,” said Ian Dejardin, the gallery’s director.

“The work of the MLA is very important and it is necessary to take the time to ensure that any new arrangements will work smoothly and benefit museums and libraries, the wider cultural sector and the audiences they serve” said Alan Davey, chief executive of the Arts Council. “It is also important to ensure that, in assuming additional functions, the Arts Council is given the proper resources to do the best possible job.”

Meanwhile, the MLA has warned its 111 staff to expect redundancy, and told organisations in receipt of grant aid that it is in “detailed discussions” with ACE and DCMS to “identify the basis on which grants can be made”.

Museums Association director Mark Taylor has criticised the drawn out nature of the procedure – the abolition of the MLA was announced in July. “This uncertainty is very damaging,” he said. ”The MLA is losing staff and losing credibility. It doesn’t send out a good signal that the DCMS has thought about this or even that it cares very much”. He added that much of the discussion was taking place behind closed doors with no real consultation with museums.

THE JOURNAL OF NATIONAL HERITAGE l WINTER 2010l ISSUE 88 l

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Chairman’s letter HLF steps up grants for smaller projects

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In search of good news

Wedgwood collection saved?

The inevitable preoccupation with the impact on museums of the cuts announced in the October spending

review may have taken our eyes off recent and forthcoming achievements in our field. Some of these are recorded in this issue of Museum News, including the spectacular reopening of the Wandsworth Museum following the local authority’s decision to close it down, and in spite of the disastrous corruption of its records during the hand-over. Also among the good news we have noted is the reopening of the Museum of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell, the fact that the Black History Archive is to open in Brixton, the Culture Minister’s support for the Renaissance programme, the promise of more money for museums from the Heritage Lottery Fund as well as lowering the requirements for applicants to find matching funding, and the decision of the Art Fund’s director to go for growth at a time when all about us are having to cut back.

These are among some crumbs of comfort that show not everything is going to the dogs in the museum world. There is a resilience among museums and those who work in them that has overcome many crises during their existence, clearly reflecting the fact that museums are far from being the static and time-warped institutions that too many people assume. This is not to suggest that museums, and particularly regional and small museums, will inevitably overcome the difficulties they now face. Reductions in funding, whether from government or local authorities, will inevitably force museums to changes that are likely to set them back in a variety of ways: perhaps the introduction of, or increase in, entry charges, shorter opening hours or closures on particular days, reduction in the number of staff, pressure on curatorial standards, putting a break on collecting and a temptation to dispose of part of the collections. All these, and no doubt other, possibilities will face directors and curators during the next few years, and we at National Heritage must be prepared to play our part in doing all we can to protect the long-term interests of the museums and galleries, and of the visitors who help to keep them alive.

As our members will know, we too face problems if we are to survive long enough to continue to help in this museum world. As always, we welcome any observations, suggestions or local museum news that members wish to put to us. Please contact our Administration Centre at Rye Road, Hawkhurst. Kent TN18 5DW, e-mail: [email protected].

James Bishop

More money and lower matching criteriaThe Heritage Lottery fund is making it easier for applicants to get grants by cutting its requirements on match funding, and also is promising to make an extra £45m available next year.

Now, applicants looking for HLF Lottery cash will only have to raise 10% of the HLF grant from their own or other sources, instead of 25%. For smaller grants – under £1 million - the requirement is dropped from 10% to 5%.

The HLF has promised to ease conditions on management and maintenance costs and on requests for increases in grant. The heritage body will also consider requests for additional funding from organisations that have already received money “where the current economic climate is putting the achievements of a project we have previously funded at risk”.

HLF chair Jenny Abramski also promised an extra £45m for projects in 2011, thanks to an increase in National Lottery players

and a bigger share of the lottery profit made available to good causes. The overall budget is expected to rise to £250m, and the bulk of the extra money will fall to small projects.

“We think it’s particularly important to be increasing our investment in smaller grants having long seen the heritage benefits of people getting involved at a local level” she said. “Whether it’s a locally important historic building or church in desperate need of repair or a beautiful landscape that needs attention, we know that community involvement is the key to long-term success.”

Already £72m has been allocated to four community programmes. £23m is to go to the repair of churches, £21m for the small grants programme, Your Heritage, £17m for the Landscape Partnership scheme or conserving landscapes, and £11m to help regenerate historic areas in the Townscape Heritage initiative. The full list of grants in the £250m budget for 2011-12 will be announced in the spring.

The government has promised to step in to ensure the ceramic collection of the 2009 Art Fund Museum of the Year the Wedgwood Museum is secured for the nation if it comes up for sale.

Local MPs have also urged the government to intervene to prevent the sale of the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston. Because of its link with the Wedgwood company the museum risks having to pay off a £134 million pension fund deficit. Administrators are now waiting for a court ruling that may compel them to break up and auction off the museum’s collection. The hearing, originally scheduled for October, is now expected in January.

But in a House of Lords debate, peers have been told that although the government would not provide any further cash, it had been supporting the museum in what was described as “an extraordinary case”.

The Conservative peer Baroness Rawlings said that the DCMS would try to protect the collection. “We hope that museums will learn from this case and make certain that collections held in trust

have legal protection to safeguard their objects,” she said. “The court will determine whether the collection is available to an administrator and is put up for sale. DCMS will attempt to secure the collection for the nation. Clearly this is an extraordinary case. DCMS has helped all along, but it cannot provide further funding.”

Protests at Stoke museum admission charge plan

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Stoke City Council has drawn up plans to introduce admission charges to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, against vehement opposition. It is one of the council’s proposed measures to cut £33m from its budget next year.

The museum, which drew record visitor numbers last year when it displayed the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo Saxon gold, is a designated museum of national importance.

Local MP and historian Tristram Hunt has been joined by local heritage groups in attacking the suggestion. “The city’s history is one of its greatest assets and while I don’t feel that we exploit that to the full, I certainly don’t think the easy option of slapping admission charges on the Potteries Museum is the solution” he said.

I have recently spent a mainly extremely interesting afternoon visiting the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. The exhibition is very well laid out with plenty of space to observe these wonderful pieces from the past. My one problem developed as I moved from exhibit to exhibit. Each time I wanted to

Maureen Thomas, of the Stoke-on-Trent Archaeological Society, said she was appalled by the proposal. “I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that the council is proposing to charge people to go to the museum” she said. “All of the exhibits in the museum really belong to the city, so it doesn’t seem fair to charge people to see them.”

A report to the council suggests that up to 70 per cent of visitors - 43% of visitors are from low-income households compared to the national average of 29% - would stop using the museum if they had to pay. In 2009/10, 202,634 people visited, compared with a target of 140,748. More than 50,000 visits were attributed to acquiring part of the Staffordshire Hoard.

Council leader Mohammed Pervez said he had no wish to impose charges, but income reduction

may force the council’s hand. “We need to start thinking about how we can generate income. We have been delivering services while we could when our circumstances were financially sound. Now the budget is getting tighter, we need to take some very tough decisions. It is very much about biting the bullet and asking what the council should be in the business of providing.”

Local MPs have also urged the government to intervene to prevent the sale of the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston. Because of its link with the Wedgwood company, which went into administration in April, the museum risks having to pay off £134 million pension fund deficit. Administrators are now waiting for a court ruling that may compel them to break up and auction off the museum’s collection.

Letter: Labels at the V&A

Jones to leave V&ASir Mark Jones is to step down as director of the Victoria & Albert Museum to become Master of St Cross College, Oxford, in September 2011. He has been director at the V&A in succession to Alan Borg since 2001, masterminding the museum’s £120 million refurbishment and pushing visitor numbers to the highest level in its 150-year history.

Paul Ruddock, the V&A chairman, said that

Jones had helped to make the museum "the world's leading museum of art and design". Before joining the V&A, Sir Mark was director of the National Museums of Scotland from 1992 to 2001.

Meanwhile, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has won the competition to design the V&A’s new development in Dundee, due to be opened in 2014, above. To be called Design Dundee. It will be built in partnership with the

university of Dundee, University of Abertay Dundee, Dundee City Council and Scottish Enterprise at a cost of £45m, which it is hoped will come in equal shares from the Scottish government, the Heritage Lottery Fund and private sources. The V&A will not provide revenue funding for the new institution but will send at least two touring exhibitions a year.

read the description on the label I had to stoop and then focus carefully through my bi-focals. Not only are the labels at waist height, they also seemed to me to be dark. I suspect the labelling is laid out thus for the benefit of wheelchair users which is indeed very laudable, however I, as a 6ft spectacle wearing lady of middle

age, wished that the exhibition organisers had considered my plight and positioned another label higher up the wall. Can anything be done to remedy this?

Mrs Jane Hoole

(see page 2)


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University museums at risk in HEFCE cutsA 40% cut to the higher education teaching budget and scrapping of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) could mean the closure of a number of leading museums and reduced services in others, according to the Museums Association.

The budget cut from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014-15 announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review will certainly affect museums such as the Ashmolean in Oxford and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, which are seen as faculties of the universities and depend on HEFCE funding.

The decision follows recommendations in the recent Browne Report that universities be allowed to fix their own fees up to £9,000 a year, almost trebling the current charge, and receive funding through a centralised body.

Sally MacDonald, director of museums, collections and public engagement at University College London, told the MA’s publication Museums Journal: “All universities are being squeezed so it’s certainly the case that people expect mergers and cuts to non-core services. Unless museums have embedded well, they

could be at risk of being cut or merged”.A HEFCE spokesman said: “We receive a

substantial proportion of the higher education budget, so undoubtedly our funding will be cut. But by how much, and how this will be phased in, we simply don’t know yet”.

The funding body expects to receive its annual grant letter from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in December or January, but university museums are unlikely to have their individual allocations confirmed until March at the earliest.

Kate Arnold-Forster, director of the Museum of English Rural Life, part of the University of Reading, said the situation was very unclear for university museums. “We don’t know yet if universities are going to say ‘stop doing x or y’” she said. “Opportunities to get external funding are also going to become more difficult. We’re bracing ourselves, but it’s clear things are going to change”.

University museums received a total of £10.5m from HEFCE for the academic year 2010/11, up from £10.25m the previous year.

English Heritage outreach threat from cutsEnglish Heritage’s outreach department could become the first victim of the swingeing 32% cuts imposed on its budget by the government.

A spokesman for English Heritage has confirmed that “regrettably, there are proposals to disband the outreach team within English Heritage. The consultation process with staff affected by this proposal, and with our trade unions colleagues, has started, during which all options will be fully considered”.

The heritage body has announced that it expects to lose more than 200 jobs and to slash grants to other organisations by a third following a government cut in its budget of a third.

There are about 14 members of staff in the outreach department of English Heritage, which was set up in 2003 to work with communities who traditionally do not access heritage.

Chair Baroness Andrews said: “What we do for England is crucial and the changes that we will be making in the next year secure our ability to continue the essential work that only we can do” she said. “English Heritage will emerge as a smaller, but none-the-less effective organisation and our expertise will be more crucial than ever to local authorities throughout the country as their funding declines.

“We will set out more detail in our corporate plan which will be published in the next few months.”

Ashmolean’s angelsOxford’s Ashmolean Museum has acquired the “Hoard of Angels”, the 210 stash of old angels and half-angel coins found in a Cotswold village during building work three years ago. The required £280,000 was raised following an appeal when the hoard was declared treasure in April this year.

The coins date from between 1470 and 1526, and might have been hidden during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and include some rare pieces. Angels and half-angels were first minted in 1465, bearing the Archangel Michael slaying the dragon on the obverse. On the reverse the design is a cross with the inscriptions: - Per Crucem Tuam Salva Nos Christe Redemptor, Through thy cross save us, Christ Redeemer (on the angels); O Crux Ave Spes Unica - Hail! O Cross, our only hope (on the half-angels).

Questions over saleof Roman helmetEminent archaeologist Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn has called for more help for museums bidding for rare antiquities found by treasure hunters, after Carlisle’s Tullie House museum was outbid for the Crosby Garrett Roman helmet by an anonymous bidder.

The 2nd century helmet was found near the Cumbrian village of Crosby Garrett by a metal detectorist, and was sold for £2m by a bidder who beat the museum’s top bid of £1.8m.

"It is strange that a national treasure can be sold at public auction by an anonymous vendor to an anonymous buyer" Lord Renfrew told the House of Lords.

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Black museum to open in Brixton

The country’s first museum devoted to Britain’s black heritage has got the go-ahead with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant confirmed, and support from London mayor Boris Johnson.

The Black Cultural Archive, founded almost 30 years ago, has had a £4m HLF grant confirmed, and £1m from the mayor’s recourses, ensuring the new museum will open in a former Liberal club, Raleigh Hall, provisionally in 2014.

The lease on the large building, opposite Lambeth Town Hall on Windrush Square in Brixton, has been given by the council which is also providing a revenue funding package of almost £1m over five years.

Since 1981 the archive has been developing and documenting a unique record of the lives, history and heritage of people of African and African-Caribbean descent in the UK. Now numbering almost 8,000 items, there has always

Theatre collection’snew Bristol homeThe unique Mander & Mitchenson Theatre Collection, which has been on partial display in Trinity College of Music, is to be given a permanent home in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, creating one of the world’s largest theatre history collections.

The collection consists of more than 2,000 archive boxes containing playbills, posters, programmes, engravings, cuttings and production photographs of London and regional theatres. There are files on every actor and actress of note in the British theatre, and sections on circus, dance, opera, music-hall, variety, dramatists, singers and composers, together with many engravings and pictures.

For almost ten years, the collection has been held within the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts as part of the Trinity Laban campus at King Charles Court, Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It was built up over a lifetime by two actors, the late Ray Mander and Jo Mitchenson.

William Tayleur, chairman of the Mander & Mitchenson Theatre Collection said: “Ray and Joe would be delighted to know that their passion for collecting theatre material is honoured by the accession of their material into the University of Bristol’s collections. The Trustees of the Mander & Mitchenson Theatre Collection know this will safeguard the collection for future generations to enjoy and use, through the fantastic research facilities available both online and in person at the University of Bristol.”

London is to get a new Zaha Hadid designed public art gallery as part of the Serpentine Gallery, thanks to a gift from the Sackler Foundation. The size of the gift has not been disclosed, but it is the biggest in the Serpentine’s 40-year history. The new Serpentine Sackler Gallery will be created by the award-winning Hadid in the Grade II listed The Magazine in Kensington Gardens. Built 200 years ago as a munitions depot in case of revolution or foreign invasion, but in the event was mostly used for storage. It will be devoted to new work, concentrating on new Serpentine commissions, opening in time for the 2012 Olympics.

been a strong focus on community involvement and it is anticipated that once the archive is established in its permanent home donations of important records of both contemporary and the 20th-century black experience will come from organisations, families and individuals.

The current collection, which has limited public access, is predominantly post-1945 with a smaller number of items from before that time.

Paul Reid, director of the Black Cultural Archives, said:”This announcement is a major milestone achievement for people of African descent - we want to tell our stories from our own perspectives” he said. “We’ve worked so hard to get here and there’s still a lot to do to reach our remaining fundraising target of £1.5millon. I’m confident that we will be able to achieve this and build a centre that we can all be proud of.”

Portsmouth Dockyard celebratesHMS Warrior, 150 years old next year, will lead a series of anniversaries for Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in 2011.

Warrior represents a key moment in the evolution of warship design, the first ship to combine an iron hull, steam propulsion and armour plating, and when launched was the largest and most powerful warship in the world. Her revolutionary design marked the start of a new era in naval architecture and maritime strategy.

In August 1979 Warrior was rescued from serving as an oil fuel hulk on the Cleddau River in Wales and towed to Hartlepool to undergo the most complex and successful ship restoration ever undertaken. The Maritime Trust emerged from the operation, and later the Warrior Preservation Trust was formed to take ownership

of the ship. Restored, Warrior returned to her home-port of Portsmouth in June 1987, where she remains afloat as a permanent feature.

The Dockyard Museum was opened in June 1911 at the end of the great Ropehouse, in the space now occupied by the Victory Restoration, to recognize the heritage of the sailing navy in a steam age, and relics such as 40 warship figureheads were collected and displayed. Some objects were taken in 1937 to the new National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, but key items, such as the figureheads, remained in Portsmouth and can still be seen in the National Museum of the Royal Navy that replaced it. Other donated collections have since been added.

Housed in the magnificent Boathouse Number 6, Action Stations opened in May 2001 and brings the modern Royal Navy directly to visitors with a mix of physical challenges, simulators and technological experiments.


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Curator’s championStephen Deuchar, director of The Art Fund

The director of the Art Fund comes from a sound museum background: after his PhD he had 13 years at the National Maritime Museum and then 12 years as director of Tate Britain, so he knows the territory for which the charity he heads provides the biggest prize in the world, the annual £100,000 Art Fund Museum of the Year Award.

Stephen Deuchar is also well aware of the perils that face museums in the current funding crisis. “I come from a long museum background where I have wrestled every year with potential budget cuts. I know how difficult a 5% cut is, how incredibly painful 10% and that anything above 15% is genuinely devastating” he says. It is a relief that the government has limited the cuts to 15% for national museums, and that the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council has kept the regional museums’ grant cut to the same watershed, but with the pincer movement of national and local government cuts confronting museums up and down the United Kingdom, he knows the battle is very much one for survival.

“To people who feel the arts lobby is simply whingeing and there’s a lot of fat, I would acknowledge anything up to 15% can be done, anything beyond it would not just

be fundamental but permanently damaging”.But he is also wary of successful charities

like the Art Fund being looked to as a replacement funding source, and he feels uneasy whenever he meets the culture minister, and is greeted as “Ah, Mr Money Bags!”.

“There’s something a little worrying there” Deuchar says. “There’s this successful membership organisation making £5m a year available to museums and galleries to buy art. But it is not here to replace subsidy”.

Stephen Deuchar became curator of paintings at the National Maritime Museum in 1985 and by the time he left in 1998 had organised a series of major exhibitions, including the blockbuster Armada, and masterminded the creation of the Neptune Court that re-orientated the whole museum. He became director of Tate Britain (British and foreign modern art) as the transformation of the Tate brand was being planned – the Tate Gallery was to become Tate with the opening to Tate Modern (contemporary art) downriver. Deuchar’s job was to keep Tate Britain’s profile up against Tate Modern’s, mastermind a £30m physical extension and transformation of the galleries, and step up the exhibitions programme.

The Art Fund, formerly the National Art Collections Fund, had been restructured by David Barrie as director, but latterly there had been a perceived lack of focus about the fund. When the job came up, Deuchar had no hesitation in throwing his hand in the ring. “At the Art Fund I would be able to work on a broad stage within the arts world on behalf of several institutions, and I’ve always been quite motivated by the wider public and what they get out of museums” he says. He has been working on a new five-point strategy which suggests he’s aware of the blurred focus the organisation has had.

He wants to “sharpen our identity so everyone knows what the Art Fund is, what it does, and supports its objectives”; to clarify what the programme is, buying art – it has £5m a year available - but also running projects like the Art Fund Prize for museums and the Artists Studios tour (the Anthony D’Offay collection of the work of some of the finest modern artists of the late 20th century which the Art Fund not only helped acquire for the nation but whose perpetual tour it has organised); he wants to increase the membership – “It’s great we have 80,000, expanding, but we want that expansion to continue because the more members we have the more we can do in the world”; and he wants to increase its financial resources so that when emergencies like the hugely expensive Titians come up for the National Gallery the fund can respond realistically. He is particularly proud that while they could only put £300,000 into the campaign to rescue the Staffordshire Hoard of Saxon treasure from export, the Art Fund organised the appeal that raised the other £3m that was needed. Finally, he wants to “make sure we’re as efficient as we can be in running ourselves”, which might mean moving from Millais’s former home in South Kensington to somewhere more appropriate for a 21st century concern with a staff of 40.

Deuchar is deliberately going for growth because in the months and years ahead the art and museum world are going to need the fund more than ever. “Not everyone would say it’s the right way forward, but we feel that collecting works of art and developing the way people enjoy art are the reasons for our existence, and if we’re going to continue we’ve got to work harder because museums will be less able to acquire and less able to deliver.

He’s worried that the cuts will affect not only purchase power but the quality of curatorship. “We need a flourishing curatorial force, and I’m happy to say there are experts across the country in regional as well as national museums. But nobody is talking optimistically about replacing them when those people leave, and the curatorial body is diminishing already.

“Cuts now on a major scale could be devastating for curatorial skill, and that’s an area where we’ve got to fight particularly hard.”

Making Margate contemporarySimon Tait on Turner Contemporary, opening April 16, 2011


The Turner Contemporary project should, by rights, have been long forgotten by now, a lovely but wholly unpractical dream whose costs spiralled out of sensible planning. The fact that it is opening in April, on time and on budget, and is a tribute to the funding bodies that kept faith and the director who wouldn’t let the dream die.

The dream was to mark the importance of, arguably, England’s greatest painter by making a gallery on the spot of his best inspiration, but dedicated to contemporary work, just as he was beginning to represent the avant garde 200 years ago.

J M W Turner first came to Margate in 1786 at the age of 11, sent to school in Love Lane. He returned when he was 21 to sketch and stay on the seafront at Mrs Booth’s Guesthouse. Captivated by the charms of Mrs Booth, who became his mistress, Turner was just as enchanted by the light and the views, telling his mentor John Ruskin "...the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe". More than 100 of his works, including some of his most famous seascapes, were inspired by this coast, and he kept coming for the rest of his long life.

Turner isn’t alone in being beguiled by this coast. Rosetti is buried here, Sickert taught here, Pugin lived and died down the road in Ramsgate. Eliot wrote part of The Wasteland overlooking the Margate seafront.

Turner Contemporary is a triumph, not least for the architect David Chipperfield who overcame enormous geological as well as engineering obstacles to design the building that will become the signature for Margate – no architect easily builds on sand. And he listened to local opinion which, for instance, persuaded him to make the prevailing light come in from the sea.

There is no permanent collection and all the exhibitions will be temporary, so that the large naturally lit spaces Chipperfield has created will be a constantly changing wonder. He has given them an opaque glass exterior, so that the building will absorb and reflect light. Local wisdom also persuaded him not to put the café terrace on the sea side, where the prevailing north-easter coming off the North Sea would ensure it was rarely used. Instead, the café society will face the old town as it develops. And there will, of course, be extensive education facilities, now as vital a part of a new arts venue as the shop.

The scheme began ten years ago as the armature on which the town’s recovery from recession, from the effects of several tides of immigrants and from the disappearance

of the holiday trade, could be built. Margate Regeneration’s other major project is the revival of Dreamland, the permanent funfair, which is to become a funfair museum.

“Lots of things came together at same time, lots of people wanted to do something for the better here” says the gallery’s director, Victoria Pomery. “The idea of Turner came out of local pressure, particular John Crofts who wrote to Sir Alan Bowness, who was the director of the Tate, but there was a long gestation period.”

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The idea finally became concrete when Kent County Council, the regional development agency, SEEDA, and the Arts Council added their support, and Pomery, who had been senior curator at Tate Liverpool, was appointed in 2002. She had never been to Margate until the second round of interviews.

She started from scratch, with no audience research having been made, and with one assistant, and a proposal that, in hindsight, could never have succeeded. The gallery was to be built offshore, as if Turner might have been gazing out to sea at it from Mrs Booth’s parlour window.

“If it had happened it would have been quite extraordinary, it would have brought people from all over the world to look at an amazing architectural accomplishment” says Pomery, “but we would have had real problems managing it - just how would you get people in and out of the building at high tide?”

Creating a public structure of this size on the beach was a big enough structural engineering challenge, to build it in the water was too much. The cost projections went up vertiginously, until

2006 when, at £50m, the KCC called a halt. But only on that plan; they looked for an alternative and from a shortlist picked Chipperfield. The cost of realising his scheme is just £17.4m.

Without a permanent collection Pomery’s exhibition programme will have to be precise and unfailingly intriguing if the new gallery is going to work. She is well connected, and Turner Contemporary is already part of the select group that is Plus Tate, the co-operative group of 18 galleries, so there will be loans and

swaps as well as self-generated expositions. Her first main exhibition will be around

a single painting, Turner’s The Eruption of Mount Soufriere on the island St Vincent in 1812. Turner is known for his painting en plein, and travelled Europe to do it, but this one, full of drama and horror, was done entirely from someone else’s sketches and diary notes. Artists have been commissioned respond to it.

“It’s very unusual in Turner’s overall oeuvre, it’s very much him imagining the scene” Pomery says. “We think we understand his work but I’m not sure that we do, and artists imagine all the time so that sometimes what is fact and what is fiction becomes very blurred. So we’re asking artists to play around their imaginations, pick up a bit of Turner perhaps, but not necessarily.

“It’s a celebration of being aware of the wonder of the natural world, but also standing in a amazement staring at this natural phenomenon. Building a gallery in Margate you’re aware of this sort of wonder and awe here too, and it’s the potential of the place to give people a sense of it too that is so exciting.”

Gateway to history


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Museum of the Order of St John

Discreetly tucked into a medieval gateway in Clerkenwell is a story of ancient chivalry, of ferocious battles and of modern humanitarianism. It is told in a museum which reopened on November 7 after a sensitive £3.7m refurbishment. The story has its roots in the Middle East, but so much of it is a part of this corner of London that even the gateway is a prime exhibit.

The Knights of St John have a history which goes almost beyond record, to the mid-11th century when pilgrims made the journey of a lifetime to worship at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and often fell ill. The order, part monk and part warrior, was created to care for devout travellers, decades before the first Crusade brought their role to the fore. They took their name from the church next to the Holy Sepulchre, devoted to St John the Baptist according to tradition, where they built their first hospital.

Later they established a headquarters priory in England, a large estate in what is now Clerkenwell, and only part of the priory church, with its Norman crypt, and the grand gatehouse of 1504, remain.

From the distant days of Edward the

Confessor to the 200,000 volunteers of the St John Ambulance Brigade of today, there is much mythology surrounding the long history of the order - but much of it is wrong, according to the order’s official librarian, the former director the Victoria & Albert Museum Dr Alan Borg.

“They were not the Templars, which were a quite different order set up to protect Crusaders, and there is no connection whatever with the Freemasons either; the Hospitallers were wholly devoted to healing and care, as their descendents still are today” he says.

As were the Templars, the Hospitallers were expelled from Jerusalem by Saladin in the 12th century, and they established themselves first in Rhodes, from where they took their distinctive cross badge, and later in Malta, where their warrior instincts were brought into service as they withstood a ferocious siege at the end of the 15th century by the Ottoman forces.

When the Knights Templar were disbanded early in the 14th century, the Pope gave their property to the Hospitallers, making the order fabulously wealthy. In England, it owned buildings all over the countryside, many of which still stand and bear the distinctive emblem in their masonry. St John’s Wood in London takes its name from them.

Their wealth allowed the Hospitallers to build a magnificent London priory, much of it destroyed by 19th century road building and 1960s planning. The church, a replica of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, had become a parish church when it was badly bombed in the second world war. A new façade was put on it in the 1950s “so that no-one knows it’s a church” says Dr Borg. It reverted to being the priory church used only two or three times a year for ceremonial occasions, but it is to be opened to the public, with pictures and banners festooning the walls, and the 12th century crypt – “one of the finest Norman buildings left in London” says Dr Borg, a medieval historian The crypt is now open, with the magnificent 16th century tomb effigy, by Esteban de Jordan of Don Juan Ruiz de Vergara who died in 1575.

Despite a brief resurgence during the reign of Mary I, the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John went into abeyance, until the 1880s when they were revived by Queen Victoria as a corps of voluntary trained first-aiders who gave valiant service in both world wars and spread throughout the empire, so that today they are in most parts of the world and in some, such as New Zealand, provide the only ambulance service.

The gatehouse had had a chequered career. At one time it housed the offices of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and its parliamentary reporter, Samuel Johnson, worked on his articles in the room above the arch that is now the main meeting room. Since then, the gatehouse had been a pub, but it was reacquired by the order in the 1880s to be its headquarters.

Now the iconic gatehouse is the main entrance to the museum. The objects to be seen are a wonderful mixture from the order’s history, from the two panels of the late 15th century Weston Triptych discovered in a domestic attic in the last century, to the 17th century souvenir models of the Holy Sepulchre, to the cope designed for the order by Arts & Crafts designer Sir Ninian Comper at the end of the 19th century and worn both by Pope John Paul II during his visit here and Archbishop Carey, to the armour of the 1480s found hidden in the Maltese fortifications the order had built. And it includes, of course, the heroic story of the St John Ambulance of the 20th century, the largest voluntary aid organisation in the world.

The Museum of the Order of St JohnSt John’s Gate, St John’s LaneLondon EC1M 4DA020 7324 4005www.museumstjohn.org.ukMon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 10am-4pm. Closed Dec 24 - Jan 3 inclusiveAdmission: free to all but donations (£5, £3.50 concessions) are requested for tours. Guided tours (on Tues, Fri & Sat at 11am & 2.30pm).


The private story of Wandsworth

local focus

Wandsworth Museum has reopened after being rescued by a local millionaire

Four years ago Wandsworth Museum became a cause célèbre when the local authority decided to close it to save money, and a growing local campaign took on national proportions. Wandsworth Council would not be moved, and the row was only defused when a local millionaire philanthropist stepped forward to offer £2m to take it over. This autumn it reopened.

But there was an almost symbolic near-disaster in the hand-over. As the Wandsworth Council IT team was transferring the manifest of the collections from one system to another, it became corrupted. “It was all irretrievably destroyed, records of 25,000 objects” said Andrew Leitch, director and chief executive of the new museum. “In moments the whole thing was lost, and we had to spend 18 months completely reconstructing it.”

They had to go back to the oldest paper records they could find, and the acquisitions record, it turned out, was kept in a safe found under some debris in a basement store. No-one knew the combination, and Leitch had to call in a safe-cracker.

Every object had to be completely reassessed, but it turned out to be an important part of the rebirth of this local museum whose story is a century old and saved at the 11th hour by Michael Hinze. Several site options were on the table for a new home - the best seemed to be the historic Youngs Brewery in the town centre and negotiations were far advanced with the owners when their development plans hit the rock of planning objections.

Instead, the decision was made to move the central library out of its home in West Hill and into the Garrett Lane courthouse which had been the museum’s home since 1995, a swap which saved the council £1m a year.

Leitch has had 25 years in museums and associated businesses in the UK, Canada, the United States and South America, latterly in the high-powered role as the Science Museum’s head of major projects. “Part of what attracted me was the chance to get back to being a curator” he says. “I drove by here every day, and I often had conversations with national museum colleagues about fate of small museums. and I was afraid – I’m still afraid – that small to medium museums in this country will disappear, and we’ll just have satellites of national museums.

“It was a chance to re-template what a small museum can be about, a terrific opportunity, but with a risk.”

The risk is in the terms of the deal which says that the museum has to be paying its own way after a year. The building has been given by the council on a 20-year lease, with the first five years’ rent - £20,000 a year – waived. That figure happens also to be the annual cost of running the place.

There has to be a charge to get in, in the form of an £8 annual subscription. “There have been one or two objections from people who felt they shouldn’t have to pay for their local museum, and they have a point - but we have no choice, so I don’t have a problem with it”. He hopes to have had 30,000 visitors in the first year.

Starting from scratch in June 2008 with no charitable status, no staff, no collections yet, no budget, and working out of his Surbiton front room, Leitch was nothing more than a one man private company. Gradually, and with stout support from the Hinze family, the pieces began to fall into place. But with all the negotiations and complexities of local government/private sector, it was March

this year before Leitch and his team could get on site. The building cost £600,000 to prepare, £1.1m to convert, and Leitch has a bit more than £200,000 left for a safety net.

The enforced re-cataloguing has meant that Leitch and his small team – at half dozen, half the size of the old museum’s staff – have an intimate knowledge of the collections, 60% of which is two-dimensional and includes a wonderful set of watercolours painted over three centuries.

The museum has been arranged with space and pragmatic use of materials. Some cases have been recycled – Leitch persuaded the V&A to let him have the cases used for the Leonardo exhibition of four years ago. The lighting is all LED now, using 10-15% of the power the old lighting did. There is a large cafeteria which doubles as a gallery, with a recreated local chemist’s shop in one corner.

Instead of the old timeline treatment, the main gallery has three layered themes, the human story, the cultural landscape and the natural landscape. There have been many finds on the borough’s Thames embankment, including the bronze age shield which is the museum’s main treasure. There are loans from the BM, the Natural History Museum and the Museum of London to back up objects like the mammoth skull found here in the mid 19th century, and the magnificent 1614 portrait of William Brodrick, King’s Embroiderer and local philanthropist. Leitch intends to change the displays regularly, with 75% of the collections being seen in a year.

“I’m a great believer in the organisational cultural well-being of a place. Being a Wandsworthian is identifying with the place, and I think we have got something here to bring that sense of identity out of Wandsworth’s people.”

Wandsworth Museum, 38 West Hill, Wandsworth, London, SW18 1RZ0208 870 6060www.wandsworthmuseum.co.ukTue-Sat 10am-5pm, closed Dec 24, 25, 26, 27 and Jan 1 Admission: Daily: £3 adults, £2 concession (over 65 etc), Free for children under 5. Annual: £8 adults, £6 concession (over 65 etc) £5 youth (6-18), free for children under 5, £24 family ticket (2 adults with 2 children).

local focus


A new light on York

Curators have been brought more and more to the fore in our museums, to tell the stories of their collections in a way that makes traditional labelling almost irrelevant. At the Yorkshire Museum in York, with 180 years of its own history to come to terms with, the curators have gone even further in addressing themselves to public wants and interests.

“We discovered that lots of people didn’t know that the museum wasn’t private, or that as residents they could get in for free” said Janet Barnes, the museum’s chief executive. “We felt it was time to let the light in.”

The Yorkshire Museum reopened in August after a £2m refurbishment in which the staff have cleared the interiors and started again. In the two months following, the museum had as many visitors as in the whole of 2009.

Now, the main theme is York’s Roman heritage, but the five main galleries also have strong medieval displays, the first gallery dedicated to natural history to be installed in it, a cinema/lecture theatre in which an eight minute film gives the city’s full history, and a new library with 42,000 volumes on the upper “learning level” along with learning rooms.

Objects on show include the most complete Anglo Saxon helmet ever found in Britain, the exquisite Middleham Jewel, the most significant Viking Hoard to be found in 150 years and one of Britain’s biggest ichthyosaurs. Some of the treasures have returned from the British Museum where they had been on display to highlight the forthcoming reopening, the first time the BM has ever dedicated a gallery to a regional museum.

But the Yorkshire Museum staff have made the many of the changes themselves, right down to hammering nails in the partition walls, covering the gallery walls and taking the photographs themselves.

The hands-on approach was not only the

result of having to make do with half the money they were hoping for. “We wanted to know the building properly again” explained head curator Andrew Morison, “and the best way to do that was to do an awful lot of the job ourselves”.

So during the ten month closure, archaeologists became woodcarvers, curators became plasterers and Morison himself got up at 5am to capture Ilkeley Moor at dawn in photographs for the display boards. “We have all learned a lot of new skills on the way, but the most fantastic feeling for staff is that they can look at a display or a painted wall and say ‘We did that’” he said.

Windows have been unblocked, false ceilings removed and the halls decorated to bring back their sense of the original Georgian Grade I listed building. Objects that have lain disregarded in stores have been brought back on display, and the library, including full runs of scientific journals dating back to the 1850s, are now available to public view.

The museum also asked volunteers to help. There was a series of talks for local groups throughout the city and the surrounding villages, and there was an intense regional press and media campaign.

The project, which saw the museum close in November 2009, has had many of the relatively modern interior walls removed to create a more open and welcoming space. The visitor is greeted by the statue of the Roman god of war, Mars, the finest example of Romano British sculpture ever found. The hall also contains a huge map of the Roman Empire and significant loans from the British Museum’s collections from the classical world.

The rest of the museum is split into the following sections:

Roman York – Meet the people of the Empire. The power of the Roman Empire explored through the museum’s internationally

significant collection of Roman artefacts and, thanks to new research, the true picture of life in Roman York brought to life with examples of the people that lived there, such as the Ivory Bangle Lady from North Africa.

Medieval York: The power and the glory. From a bustling Anglian city and royal Viking capital to the second city of the kingdom wielding immense ecclesiastical power, York was a microcosm of the vibrant medieval world. The colour, music, romance and spirituality of the medieval period come to life among the unique ruins of St Mary’s Abbey.

Extinct: A way of life. Why so many species have disappeared through time - and what took their place. Towering two metre birds and enormous sea monsters give evidence of the five great extinctions.

As well as the three exhibitions there are two other new areas:

The History of York. An immersive audio-visual experience that takes visitors on a journey through the history of the city in the 300 seat Tempest Anderson Hall.

The Learning Level. This area provides visitors with the chance to delve deeper into the past through hands-on activities, displays, workshops and meeting the experts. On special days people can also access the museum’s Victorian library.

Yorkshire Museum, York

Yorkshire MuseumMuseum GardensYork YO1 7FRTelephone: 01904 687687www.yorkshiremuseum.org.ukdaily from 10am - 5pm, except for 25 and 26 December, and 1 January, and will be closing at 2.30pm on 24 and 31 DecemberAdmission: Adults £7, Concessionary adults £6, children under 16 & residents with York card free

Natural History Museum


MuseuM of THe year revisiTed 1980

In each issue we look at winners of National Heritage’s Museum of the Year Award and what has happened to them since.

The changes in the Natural History Museum since it won the Museum of the Year Award 30 years ago could hardly have been more profound. Then, it was officially The British Museum (Natural History) and formally no more than a faculty of the parent institution three miles across London. It was funded differently from other national museums.

Almost all that remains of the museum as it was is the neo-gothic Waterhouse building and its central hall with its stately staircase on which a bust of Charles Darwin has pride of place. Richard Owen as secretary – and an implacable opponent of Darwin - established it in South Kensington in 1881, but his successor and the first director, the former army surgeon William Flower, was the more enlightened museum-maker. In a contentious public speech in 1889 he said: “What a museum really depends on for its success and usefulness is not its building, not its cases, not even its specimens, but its curator”, a view very much against the prevailing one but the one that has lasted.

It was not until 1987 when its independence was formerly established, and a year later Neil Chalmers, a zoologist, became its director.

Chalmers developed the museum on two fronts: as a family visitor attraction and as a recognised scientific research centre – he sent staff to Disneyland in Florida to learn from the expertise in public rapport to be found there. The NHM took over the Geological Museum next door and in 1997 turned it into the Earth Galleries.

But Chalmers’s principle vision was what became the Darwin Centre, a new building to bring the never-ending progress of research in the museum into the public gaze.

A £78m project, the centre was to house, not only the 100 paleontologists, botanists, and zoologists on the museum’s strength in state of the art laboratories, but the vast collection of bottled specimens. Here, the boffins not only carry out their experiments but explain what they do, with a fully-equipped public lecture theatre dedicated to Sir David Attenborough, the most famous living natural historian of them all.

Within the Darwin Centre is the Cocoon which not only houses the NHM’s 20 million specimens but puts some of its young experts forward via video installations and hands-on interactive programmes to go into

detail about what exactly it is that they do. Sir Neil retired in 2004 with his vision

only half realised when the first phase of the Darwin Centre had opened in 2002, and there was another, western, phase of the centre to be completed. It opened under his successor, Michael Dixon, in September 2009. As Neil Greenwood, the museum’s programme director for the Darwin Centre, explained then: “Many people love the Natural History Museum for its iconic Victorian Waterhouse building. However, through the Darwin Centre, we wanted to challenge this traditional perception and highlight the work of our scientists and the importance of our collections. The Darwin Centre is set to be a truly inspirational addition”.

But there is more innovation to come, in the shape of the NHM’s exhibitions, and for the first time its staff has presented a programme to the public to underline their new priorities.

The centenary of Captain Scott’s historic expedition to Antarctica, sex in nature and the world of dinosaurs will usher in a new era of exhibitions, all based on the museum’s own scientific research.

The museum is also to open its first permanent gallery devoted to the arts of science, emphasising the importance art still has in the understanding of botany and anatomy, with its exhibitions changing every few months to show new aspects of its art collection. “There are still important aspects that an artist can bring out that the latest photographic technology can’t, as much as 30 years ago” said the NHM’s Judith Magee. The gallery will open in January.

The exhibition underlines how depth of knowledge enables the museum to address subjects which may seem very familiar but which have unexpected new aspects. Opening in February, Sexual Nature will take a provocative view of the birds and the bees. Eye-opening facts, such as that a barnacle’s penis is up to 30 times its own body length

and the male blue wren’s testicles represent 25% of its weight is intended to attract much public intrigue. The exhibition, devised to show that anything goes in the animal kingdom, will also see the return to Guy the Gorilla, the silver back alpha male who was once a star at London Zoo but who died in 1978, and is now reincarnated with the help of a taxidermist.

The Age of the Dinosaur opening in April will continue a perennially popular theme, but this time looking more closely at the world in which dinosaurs lived and the creatures and vegetation that surrounded them 65 million years ago, as deduced by the resident paleontologists.

Scott’s Last Expedition opening in January 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to Antarctica in the Terra Nova, examining the scientific research and discoveries made by Scott’s team.

“They effectively invented meteorology on that expedition” said Sharon Ament, director of public engagement, who has herself visited the Antarctic where NHM scientists are doing new research, “and their reports are still the basis of modern work on the ozone layer and climate change”.

But as well as breaking moulds, revolution can come full circle. Completing Sir William Flower’s quote of 1889 shows how much has changed and how much is owed to the pioneers of 130 years ago, as he talked about the curator: “He and his staff are the life and soul of the institution, upon whom its whole value depends: and yet in many – I may say in most – of our museums they are the last to be thought of”. So the Natural History Museum has changed out of all recognition, but at the same time is now able to realise the dreams of one its most enlightened founders.

Bath’s gem wins its marathonHolburne Museum, Bath

MuseuM re-opening


After more than 12 years of campaigning, fund raising, negotiating, planning and designing, Bath’s museum of 18th and 19th century art, the Holburne, will reopen on May 14 next year with a new extension and 60% more of its collection on display. The development has cost £13.8m.

It will open with an exhibition called Peter Blake: A Museum of Myself in which the Royal Academician will present his own extraordinary collection of art, memorabilia and curiosities as well as his own works.

But it will also open with a spectacular new collection which has been given to it, the playwright Somerset Maugham’s 18th century theatrical paintings he collected over most of his lifetime. The 21 pictures – 15 oils and six watercolours – include works by leading 18th century artists Johan Zoffany, Francis Hayman and Samuel de Wilde. The other nine of the 30 in the collection are going to the Theatre Royal Bath. In Maugham’s own words, his collection is “second only to that of the Garrick Club”. He died in 1965 and to avoid it being dispersed after his death, he left it to the as yet un-built National Theatre. But the NT had neither the space not the curatorial expertise to do it justice, and part of the collection was loaned to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, which closed in 2007.

The collection includes this masterpiece by Zoffany, a close friend of David Garrick’s, showing Garrick and the actress Susannah Maria Cibber in Thomas Otway’s play Venice Preserv’d, put on at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1762, below. Nine pictures of lesser quality but fascinating subject matter from the collection will go on permanent

exhibition at the Theatre Royal Bath. The Holburne has probably the most

delightful approach of any museum. As you cross Pulteney Bridge and stroll between the magnificent Georgian terraces of Great Pulteney Street, it beckons from half a mile away at the end of the avenue. The former Sydney Hotel from Bath’s fashionable heyday of two centuries ago, the Holburne belongs firmly, as its director says, in both the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming a museum in the 20th.

The refurbishment turns it into a museum for the 21st century, with an ambitious development programme to present it as both a modern attraction and a showcase for the life, art and society of the Bath of Georgian and Regency days.

The Holburne’s story is a chequered one. It owes its existence and its name to Sir William Holburne, grandson of a distinguished admiral who followed the family business and left his Bath family home in 1805 to serve at Trafalgar. He resigned from the navy in the year of Waterloo, succeeded to the baronetcy in 1820 and with his three sisters - none of them married - spent the rest of his life in their Cavendish Crescent home, filling it with an extraordinary collection of paintings, bronzes, silver, ceramics, books and prints.

He died in 1874 leaving 7,000 works of art to

his sister who, in her will, set up trustees who would use the collection to “form the nucleus of a museum of fine art in Bath”. The elegant Sydney Hotel was acquired and adapted, and the museum eventually opened in 1916 with the collection developing organically from the original Holburne holdings. It is a uniquely intact survival of a collection assembled for a Victorian gentleman’s townhouse.

Sir William collected Old Masters, Italian bronzes, like the famous Susini once owned by King Louis XIV, majolica, porcelain, glass, furniture and portrait miniatures. Landscapes by Guardi and Turner, portraits by Stubbs, Ramsay, Zoffany and Gainsborough, who spent sixteen formative years in Bath, have been added. Bath connections are also well represented by Angelica Kauffmann's portrait of Henrietta Laura Pulteney, Hone's miniature of Beau Nash, the city's famous Master of Ceremonies, and Joseph Plura's Diana and Endymion, made in Bath in 1752.

By the 1950s, however, the family endowment that had sustained the museum had run out. For a while it was landlord to a crafts centre alongside its displays, and later the University of Bath took some funding responsibilities. But local authority commitment shrank, funding reserves had run dangerously low

and by 1999 when David Posnett, a retired art dealer, became chairman closure threatened.

Instead, a new programme of exhibitions and development plan were instituted. In 2003 Posnett and the former director, Christopher Woodward, walked from Hyde Park Corner to Bath commemorating the walk to Bath Gainsborough took to make his fortune – Bath had more than 160 artists’ studios in those days - and they were able to add more than £60,000 to the endowment fund. Then came a promise of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which eventually amounted to more than £4m, and the fundraising programme has so far realised a £9m.

That year, too, Eric Parry was appointed the architect to create an extension facing Sydney Gardens behind the museum, and in 2005 Sturgis replaced Woodward as director.

New galleries have been created on the top floor, with top lighting, and a family-learning centre. The staircase has been shifted to allow a lift to service all four levels. The high-ceilinged rooms at the rear of the house have been halved longitudinally to give intimate exhibition spaces for the many smaller pictures in the collection. A garden café has been created in the extension on the ground floor along with a shop, and in the basement is the reserve collection and new library, archive and study centre.

But the long term will bring a re-establishment of the connection between the house and the magnificent Sydney Gardens behind it, the last surviving 18th century public park in which a canal and Brunel’s Great Western Railway line have been cunningly cut into the landscape by Industrial Revolution ingenuity. It is hoped that it will be restored in collaboration with the council.

naTional HeriTage deBaTe


The cuts cultureAs Christmas comes into sight we can be fairly confident that 2010 will go down as a significant year for the cultural heritage in England. A new government has announced changes that will deeply influence our sector for some time to come. The full tariff of public sector cuts has fallen upon English Heritage and Arts Council England. The national museums and galleries have got off with “only” a 15% cut.

The Renaissance programme has survived though it, too, will lose 15% and is likely to be subject to a major shake-up. Less fortunate are the 10 regional museums who will cease to be directly funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (thus mostly ending an awkward funding anomaly of the past 30 years) and the hardworking staff of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which is abolished. The National Heritage Memorial Fund survives and stays with the Heritage Lottery Fund, which looks to be more important than ever to the museums world. Other museums will suffer as the “collateral damage” of cuts in higher education and the Ministry of Defence.

The detailed consequences of these announcements are largely unknown at present. What is already clear is that equally important – and possibly even more far reaching – are the cuts to local government. Most authorities seem likely to lose between one quarter and one third of their government grants, perhaps up to 10% of their entire budget. The impact on hundreds of local authority and independent museums is going to be huge.

Councils everywhere are drawing up plans

for cuts that are going to close many local museums and reduce hundreds to impotent static exhibits that are grateful to be able to open their doors now and again. Some are consulting their residents about where the axe should fall hardest. Museums are losing out badly in these polls to wheelie bin collections and street lighting. A number of authorities are carrying out “efficiency reviews” or seeking to “transform” what their museums do and cost. Yet more are desperately investigating the viability of offloading museums into charitable trusts. All this could result in a serious retreat from the value to local communities which the museums sector was beginning to deliver over the past decade.

We are told that this is all for the greater good. The deficit must be reduced. Sadly the first year of public sector savings (that means job losses) is allegedly going to do no more than provide Britain’s contribution to bailing out the Irish economy and the Royal Bank of Scotland (again). Is that acceptable to the public? Apparently. If you believe the media, they are more interested in royal weddings than the well-being of our citizens.

Museums traditionally fight shy of politics. Received wisdom is that getting involved in that dirty world will only lead to grief. That may be true. But museums are also supposed to be places of knowledge and wisdom. When things are happening which seem quite wrong, should they not be standing up to be counted?

Stuart Davies

Holburne Museum of ArtGreat Pulteney St, Bath, Somerset BA2 4DB01225 466669 www.bath.ac.uk/holburneMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5. Admission to museum free. See National Heritage Guide for information on their inaugural exhibition, Peter Blake: A Museum for Myself.


ABBOT HALL ART GALLERY Kirkland, Kendal, Cumbria LA9 5ALTel: 01539 722464www.abbothall.org.ukMon-Sat 10.30-4. Admission £5.75, students & children free. Drawn from Life: Green Cardamom (15 Jan-26 Mar 2011)A look at an expanded idea of drawing across time, continents & media, bringing together works by more than 40 artists from South Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Europe & the US. The exhibition includes new commissions by contemporary artists, inspired by the objects, architecture or surroundings of Abbot Hall.

ABERDEEN MARITIME MUSEUMShiprow, Aberdeen AB11 5BYTel: 01224 337700www.aagm.co.ukTues-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-3. Closed 25-28 Dec & 31 Dec-4 Jan. Admission free.Seamarking(19 Feb-21 May 2011)Beacons, buoys & lighthouses mark safe passages & points of danger, helping to preserve the lives of mariners. Their story is told with items from the Museum’s own collection & that of the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, Fraserburgh.

ABERYSTWYTH ARTS CENTREAberystwyth University, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 3DE Tel: 01970 622882www.aberystwythartscentre.co.ukMon-Sat 9.30-8, Sun 12-5.30. Christmas & New Year closing to be arranged. Admission free.At the Edge: British Art 1950-2000 (until 22 Jan 2011)Henry Moore, Frank Auerbach, Jacob Epstein, John Bratby, Elisabeth Frink, Andy Goldsworthy, Patrick Heron & Lucien Freud are among 37 artists in this exhibition, which explores British art from the second half of the 20th century. It draws on sculpture, ceramics, painting & print works from four public art galleries—Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale & Preston—& describes the challenges they face obtaining funding & trying to reverse hostile public opinion towards contemporary art.

THE AMERICAN MUSEUM IN BRITAINClaverton Manor, Claverton, Bath BA2 7BDTel: 01225 460503www.americanmuseum.orgTues-Sun 12-4.30. Admission £8, concessions £7, children £4.50; family (2+2) £21.50.Marilyn—Hollywood Icon (12 Mar-30 Oct 2011)Major loan exhibition featuring 20 of the screen goddess’s gowns, plus photographs posters & many personal items from the collection of British Marilyn-memorabilia-collector David Gainsborough Roberts.

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16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QATel: 0117 917 2300www.arnolfini.org.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 11-6. Admission free.Cosima von Bonin (19 Feb-25 Apr 2011)This first UK exhibition for Cosima von Bonin, one of the most prolific artists working in Germany today, is part of the Arnolfini’s ‘Lazy Susan’ series. Incorporating sculpture, installations, painting, textiles, performances, sound & film, von Bonin creates notions of sloth & fatigue that are balanced between seriousness & fun, concrete & fictitious, & endowed with wit & melancholy.

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM Beaumont St, Oxford OX1 2PHTel: 01865 278000www.ashmolean.orgTues-Sat & bank-holiday Mons 10-6, Sun 12-5 (29 Dec, 10-5). Closed 25, 26 Dec. Admission free. Lucien Pissarro in England: The Eragny Press 1895-1914/British Drawings in the Age of the Eragny Press (both 8 Jan-13 Mar 2011)A celebration of the work of painter, engraver & printmaker, Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944). One exhibition focuses on his Eragny Press, set up by the artist in 1894. The second comprises a selection of drawings by British artists many of whom who were Pissarro’s friends & contemporaries.Images & the State: Graphics In China in the 1960s & 70s (8 Mar-3 July 2011)Visual imagery in China during the Cultural Revolution was limited to officially-sanctioned subjects & styles. Posters on show feature the ubiquitous representations of Mao Zedong, using simple graphics, bold colours & political slogans.

BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Chamberlain Sq, Birmingham B3 3DHTel: 0121 303 2834www.bmag.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5 (Fri from 10.30), Sun 12.30-5. Closed 25 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission to museum free.The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours (29 Jan-15 May 2011)This major survey places loans from public & private lenders—including previously unexhibited drawings by Rossetti, Holman-Hunt & Burne-Jones—alongside works from the Museum’s own world-class collection. It features watercolours, paintings, works in pen & ink & pencil, stained glass, textiles & ceramics alongside their original designs, as well as portraits & caricatures the artists made of one another. Admission £6, seniors £5, concessions & children £2; family (2+2) £12. Booking via website, or on 0121 303 1966.

BOWES MUSEUM Newgate, Barnard Castle, Co Durham DL12 8NPTel: 01833 690606www.thebowesmuseum.org.ukDaily 10-5. Closed 25, 26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission £8, concessions £7, children free.Damien Hirst: Print Maker (until 27 Feb 2011)The exhibition explores this contemporary artist through more than 40 print works—many tht have never been on public display—loaned by Northern collectors.

BRITISH MUSEUM Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DGTel: 020 7323 8000www.britishmuseum.orgDaily 10-5.30 (Thurs, Fri until 8.30). Closed 24-26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission to museum free.Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (until 6 Mar 2011)The exhibition presents mythical and spiritual ideas of life and death. Coffins, masks, amulets, jewellery & figurines are shown alongside the Museum’s large collection of Book of the Dead papyri, containing spells thought to equip the dead with knowledge & power to guide them through the dangers of the hereafter. Admission £12, accompanied children free.Afghanistan: Crossroads of the ancient world (3 Mar-3 July 2011)Rare objects from the National Museum, Kabul, highlight Afghanistan’s historical connections with ancient Iran, India, China & more distant Greece & Rome. This major exhibition features more than 200 objects; highlights include a gold hoard from Central Asia, limestone sculptures from Greece, plus gold ornaments & ivory furniture. Hidden during the Soviet invasion in 1979 & the subsequent civil war, these preserved treasures convey the importance of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage & the achievements of these past civilisations. Admission £10, accompanied children free.

BROOKLANDS MUSEUM Tel: 01932 857381Brooklands Drive,Weybridge, Surrey KT13 0SLTel: 01932 857381www.brooklandsmuseum.comDaily 10-4 (from 1 Apr, 10-5).

A selective list

of current &

forthcoming

museum

& gallery

exhibitions.

From Bowes Museum: Damien Hirst, Memento

of this cavalry regiment from its initial formation to the present day.

GUERNSEY MUSEUM & ART GALLERYCandie Gardens, St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands GY1 1UGTel: 01481 726518 www.museum.guernsey.netDaily 10-5. Admission £3.50, seniors £2.50, children free.Mervyn Peake’s Sark (30 Apr-11 Sept 2011)Centenary exhibition for writer & artist Mervyn Peake, who lived & worked for some years in Sark—the setting for his book The Story of Mr Pye. It includes Peake’s original sketches made in Sark, plus oils & other works. HARRIS MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Market Sq, Preston, Lancs PR1 2PP Tel: 01772 258248 www.harrismuseum.org.uk Mon-Sat 10-5 (Tues from 11). Admission free.Shirley Craven & Hull Traders: Pop Fabrics & Furniture 1957-80 (15 Jan-5 Mar 2011)Leading designer for Hull Traders, a Lancashire-based post-war design company known for bold textiles in eye-popping colours, Shirley Craven produced abstract designs that captured the exuberance of the Swinging Sixties. Other artists who designed for the company include Eduardo Paolozzi, Ivon Hitchens & Althea McNish.

HAYWARD GALLERY South Bank Centre, London SE1 8XX Tel: 08703 800 400www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-artsDaily 10-6 (Fri until 10). Admission £8, seniors £7, students £6, children 12-18 years £5.50British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (16 February-17 Apr 2011)Paintings, sculpture, installations, video, film, performance & other media by 39 artists & artists’ groups

COURTAULD GALLERYSomerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RNTel: 020 7848 2526www.courtauld.ac.ukDaily 10-6 (24 Dec, 10-4; 13 Jan, 10-9). Closed 25 & 26 Dec. Gallery admission £6, concessions £4.50, students & children (& everyone Mon 10-2) free.Cézanne’s Card Players (until 16 Jan 2011)From the US, Paris & St Petersburg come some of Paul Cézanne’s most iconic paintings depicting French countryfolk playing cards. The series occupied the artist for several years, & inspired later generations of avant-garde painters such as Picasso, Léger & Wall. The exhibition will be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, from 8 Feb to 8 May 2011.

CRAVEN MUSEUM & GALLERYTown Hall, High St, Skipton, N Yorks BD23 1AH Tel: 01756 706407www.cravenmuseum.orgMon, Wed-Fri, & bank holidays 12-4 (from 1 Apr, 10-4), Sat 10-4. Admission free.Shakespeare Folio (from 25 Mar 2011)One of fewer than 50 remaining copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, printed about 1623, is to go on permanent view in a specially-constructed display area of the Museum. Its pages will be turned regularly to give visitors glimpses of the 36 plays it contains.

DORSET COUNTY MUSEUMHigh West St, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1XA · Tel: 01305 262735www.dorsetcountymuseum.orgTues-Sat 10-4 (from 1 Apr, Mon-Sat 10-5). Admission £6.50, concessions £5. Two children admitted free with each adult; additional children £2.Georgian Faces: Portrait of a County (15 Jan-30 Apr 2011)A major exhibition of portraits featuring people who lived in & influenced Dorset during the 18th century, ranging from landowners to architects, from artists to a deer-catcher. Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough & Allan Ramsay are represented, plus Dorset-born artists James Thornhill, Giles Hussey & Thomas Beach.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY Gallery Rd, London SE21 7ADTel: 020 8693 5254www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.ukTues-Fri 10-5 (24 Dec, 10-4); Sat, Sun & bank-holiday Mons 11-5. Closed 25-28 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission £5, seniors £4, other concessions & children free.Norman Rockwell’s America (until 27 Mar 2011)America’s best-known & best-loved illustrator for more than six decades of the 20th century, Rockwell was astonishingly prolific in his output. His 322 covers for the Saturday

Evening Post, with his countless other magazine illustrations & advertisements, captured images of everyday American life with a humour & power of observation that spoke directly to the public.

ESTORICK COLLECTION 39A Canonbury Sq, London N1 2AN Tel: 020 7704 9522www.estorickcollection.comWed-Sat 11-6 (Thurs until 8), Sun 12-5. Admission £5, concessions £3.50, students & children under 16 free.From Morandi to Guttuso: Masterpieces from the Alberto della Ragione Collection (12 Jan-3 Apr 2011)This collection, donated to the city of Florence in 1969, spans key movements & tendencies from Futurism to the Scuola Metafisica, Novecento & Corrente, & includes works by de Chirico, Marini & Severini.

GEFFRYE MUSEUM 136 Kingsland Rd, London E2 8EATel: 020 7739 9893www.geffrye-museum.org.ukTues-Sat 10-5, Sun & bank holiday Mons 12-5. Closed 22 Apr. Admission free.At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House (22 Mar-29 Aug 2011)The exhibition uses photographs & objects to show contemporary urban homes in Japan, looking at private lives as well as decoration, display, furniture, eating, sleeping, worship & hygiene.

GRANTHAM MUSEUMSt Peter’s Hill, Grantham, Lincs NG31 6PYTel: 01476 568783 www.lincolnshire.gov.ukMon-Sat 10-4. Closed 24-26 Dec, 31 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free.The Queen’s Royal Lancers (until 29 Jan 2011)An exhibition commemorating the 250th anniversary of the raising of the 21st Light Dragoons in 1760. Displaying uniforms, weaponry, medals & silver, it charts the history

Closed 24-28 Dec. Admission £9, seniors & students £8, children £5.50; family (2+3) £25.Brooklands in the Battle of Britain (until Sept 2011)At the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, motor racing at Brooklands ceased & the site was taken over by Vickers-Armstrong & Hawker for aircraft production; 2,515 Wellington bombers & 3,012 Hurricanes, were assembled here. This change of use, as well as the distinctive shape of its 1907 racing circuit, made the place a prime target for the Luftwaffe. The exhibition shows the efforts made to camouflage & defend the site, using photographs & artefacts, plus a few real planes, to tell the stories of those who worked here. CITY ART CENTRE2 Market St, Edinburgh EH1 1DETel: 0131 529 3993 www.edinburghmuseums.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5. Closed 25-28 Dec & 1-3 Jan. Admission free.Window to the West: The Rediscovery of Highland Art (until 6 Mar 2011)Major exhibition drawing on both historical & contemporary works to examine how art relates to Gaelic language & culture, how memory & history are represented, & how artists respond to geography & cultural change. THE COLLECTIONDanes Terrace, Lincoln LN2 1LPTel: 01522 550990www.thecollection.lincoln.museumDaily 10-4. Closed 24-26 Dec, 31 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission to collection free.The Moment Has Passed (11 Dec 2010 to 6 Mar 2011)Sketchbooks are creative spaces in which ideas are jotted down by artists, architects & designers, offering fascinating insight into the creative process. The exhibition features notebooks of contemporary artists Grayson Perry & Simon Faithful, as well as historic sketchbooks from the Usher Gallery’s collections, & others contributed by artists from the UK, the US & mainland Europe. Admission £3.50

COMPTON VERNEY Kineton, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwicks CV35 9HZTel: 01926 645500www.comptonverney.org.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 11-5. Admission £8, seniors £6, students £4, children £2; family (2+4) £18.Alfred Wallis & Ben Nicholson: Back to the beginning (26 Mar-5 June 2011)The exhibition looks at the dialogue, both written & visual, between these two artists & at the influence of Wallis’ work on the younger Nicholson. Seen in the context of Compton Verney’s British Folk Art Collection, the exhibition also explores the relationship between an untrained folk artist such as Wallis & established modern artists.


From Courtauld Gallery: Paul Cézanne, The Card Players

show how contemporary British art tries to shed light on the present. Using the comet as a harbinger of change, measure of time & marker of historical recurrence, their work proposes alternative ways of thinking about the here & now.

HEREFORD MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Broad St, Hereford HR4 9AUTel: 01432 260692www.herefordshire.gov.ukTues-Fri 10-5, Sat 10-4. Admission free.Society of Wood Engravers: 73rd Annual Exhibition (12 Feb- 6 Apr 2011) Travelling exhibition showcasing top-quality wood engravings by artists from Britain & abroad, selected from an open submission.

HMS BELFAST Morgan’s Lane, Tooley St, London SE1 2JHTel: 020 7940 6300http://hmsbelfast.iwm.org.uk/Daily 10-6 (Thurs, Fri until 8; from 1 Nov, daily 10-5). Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission £12.95, seniors & students £10.40, disabled £7.80, children free.Launch! Shipbuilding Through the Ages (until 31 Dec 2010)A family-orientated exhibition on board this 1938 warship, using hands-on displays to demonstrate techniques of shipbuilding in Britain, from the age of sail to modern prefabrication methods.

HOLBURNE MUSEUM OF ART Great Pulteney St, Bath, Somerset BA2 4DBTel: 01225 466669 www.bath.ac.uk/holburneMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5. Admission to museum free.Peter Blake: A Museum for Myself (14 May-4 Sept 2011)The museum reopens after a three-year closure, now with a new contemporary extension. Its inaugural exhibition is devoted to a personal collection, made since his childhood by one of the country’s most enduringly popular artists. It includes works by his artist friends & pop ephemera, collage & folk art, showbiz memorabilia & marching troupes of toy elephants. Alongside these are some of Blake’s own works relating to the objects he collects. Admission charge to be arranged.

HOVE MUSEUM & ART GALLERY 19 New Church Rd, Hove BN3 4AB Tel: 01273 290200www.virtualmuseum.infoMon, Tues & Thurs-Sat 10-5; Sun 2-5. Closed 24-28 Dec, 1 Jan & 4-7 Jan. Admission free.Picturing Stories (until 1 Mar 2011) A family-friendly exhibition of narrative paintings from Brighton & Hove Museums’ collections, showing the variety of ways in which visual images can illustrate & inspire storytelling. There are also creative workshops for children, & drop-in storytelling sessions.

IDEA GENERATION GALLERY 11 Chance St, Shoreditch, London E2 7JBTel: 020 7749 6850www.ideageneration.co.uk/generationgallery.phpMon-Fri 10-6; Sat, Sun 12-5. Closed 20 Dec-3 Jan. Admission free.Mick Rock: The Man Who Shot The 70s (until 16 Jan 2011)Having launched his career almost 40 years ago with portraits of an unknown David Bowie & intimate documentation of Syd Barrett, Mick Rock has shot everyone from Lou Reed, Queen, Talking Heads & Blondie to Michael Stipe, Karen O & Kate Moss.Bran Symondson: The Best View Of Heaven Is From Hell (28 Jan-28 Feb 2011)Having been a serving British soldier in Afghanistan, Bran Symondson returned there on a photographic commission for The Sunday Times Magazine. His images document the relationship between the British Army & the Afghan National Police, & the daily struggle of the ANP in the fight to defeat the Taliban.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM Lambeth Rd, London SE1 6HZTel: 020 7416 5320www.iwm.org.uk Daily 10-6. Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission to museum free.Lord Ashcroft Gallery: Extraordinary Heroes (opened 12 Nov 2010)A new permanent gallery contains the world’s largest collection of Victoria Crosses. It comprises 162 of the gallantry awards, ranging from the Crimean to the Falklands wars, displayed alongside 48 VCs & 31 George Crosses (for gallantry in civilian life) already held by the Museum. The personal stories behind each are related via touch-screens & multimedia platforms.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM NORTH The Quays, Trafford Wharf Rd, Manchester M17 1TZ Tel: 0161 836 4000 www.iwm.org.ukDaily 10-6 (from 1 Nov, 10-5). Admission free.All Aboard (until Apr 2011)A large-scale exhibition looks at life at sea in wartime, from World War I

to the present. Visitors can try naval clothing, learn about animals that have sailed the oceans, discover the naval origins of many everyday words, & hear moving stories of bravery, adventure, suffering & survival.

JEWISH MUSEUM 129-131 Albert St, London NW1 7NBTel: 020 7284 7384www.jewishmuseum.org.ukSun-Wed 10-5, Thurs 10-9, Fri 10-2 (14 Dec, 11.30-5). Closed 25-27 Dec. Admission £7, concessions £6, children £3; family (2+4) £17.Morocco: Photographs by Elias Harrus & Pauline Prior (until 6 Mar 2011)Evocative images by Elias Harrus from the 1940s & 50s, when a significant Jewish community lived in the Atlas Mountains & Sahara oases, reflect the deep links that existed between Morocco’s Jewish & Muslim communities. Photographer Pauline Prior visited the same areas in 2008 to record what remained of the Jewish heritage.

KELVINGROVE ART GALLERY & MUSEUMArgyle St, Glasgow G3 8AGTel: 0141 276 9599www.glasgowmuseums.comMon-Thurs & Sat 10-5; Fri & Sun 11-5 (31 Dec, 11-12.30). Closed 25, 26 Dec, & 1, 2 Jan. Admission free.Scottish Glass (until 2012)To celebrate the 400th anniversary of glassmaking in Scotland, this exhibition shows off more than 70 beautiful glass pieces from Glasgow Museums’ extensive collection. It includes early bottles, Venetian-inspired designs, fine engraved glass, & late-20th-century art glass as well as a selection of glass paperweights.

KETTLE’S YARD Castle St, Cambridge CB3 0AQTel: 01223 748100www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons: gallery 11.30-5; house 2-4. Admission free.Lucia Nogueira (15 Jan-13 Mar) installations & drawings from the 10-year career of this Brazilian-born artist, who died in London in 1998. Nogueira collected, adapted & juxtaposed everyday, & often unprepossessing, objects found in the street or in junk shops, imbuing them with magic or malignancy.

LADY LEVER ART GALLERY Lower Rd, Port Sunlight Village, Wirral, Merseyside CH62 4EQTel: 0151 478 4136 www.ladyleverartgallery.org.uk Daily 10-5 (24 Dec, 10-2). Closed 25, 26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free. Old Master Drawings: Guercino, Rubens, Tintoretto (until 2 May 2011)Through 31 works from the Old Master collections of the Lady Lever & Walker Art Galleries, the exhibition considers why artists draw— whether it is as a warm-up exercise before starting a painting

or sculpture, or as part of the creative process.

THE LOWRY Pier 8, Salford Quays, nr Manchester M50 3AZ Tel: 08432 086000 www.thelowry.comSun-Fri 11-5, Sat 10-5. Christmas & New Year closing to be aranged. Admission free. Invitation to the Ballet: Ninette de Valois & the story of the Royal Ballet (until 6 Mar 2011)A tribute to one of the towering figures of 20th-century ballet, drawn largely from photographs & costumes in the collections of the Royal Opera House. It tells the remarkable story of the young Irish dancer, who was born Edris Stannus and who started her career impersonating Anna Pavlova in English seaside-pier theatres. As Ninette de Valois, she went on to found one of the world’s leading dance companies.

mima Centre Square, Middlesbrough, N Yorks TS1 2AZTel: 01642 726720www.visitmima.comTues-Sat 10-5 (Thurs until 7), Sun & bank-holiday Mons 12-4. Closed 25 & 26 Dec. Admission free.Drawing in Progress (until 20 Mar 2011) Some 40 post-war American drawings, now part of mima’s permanent collections, feature influential artists noteworthy for having moved drawing beyond its historical conventions & parameters. The exhibition includes a major new commission for the 500-square-metre glass façade of the building by New York artist Lawrence Weiner.

MODERN ART OXFORD 30 Pembroke St, Oxford OX1 1BPTel: 01865 722733www.modernartoxford.org.ukTues-Wed 10-5, Thurs-Sat 10-10 (24 & 31 Dec, 10-3), Sun 12-5. Closed 25-28 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free.Thomas Houseago: What Went Down (11 Dec 2010-20 Feb 2011)Recent sculptures compose the first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery for this British artist. Working primarily with carved wood, plaster & bronze, Houseago creates monumental figurative sculptures charged with energy & vitality.

MODERN MASTERS GALLERY 23 Cork St, London W1S 3NJTel: 020 7734 9246www.modernmastersgallery.comMon-Fri 10.30-6.30, Sat 12-5. Christmas & New Year closing to be arranged. Admission free.The Unseen Dalí: Drawings, Paintings, Sculptures (until 28 Feb 2011)A show consisting of around 50 rarely-seen works curated by Dalí’s confidant & secretary, Enrique Sabater y Bonany, with collector Beniamino Levi. It includes three-dimensional sculptural pieces, plus

Hereford Museum: WeiminHe, Morning Exercise

naTional HeriTage guide


paintings, drawings & watercolours from private collections.

MUSEUM OF ISLAND HISTORY Guildhall, High St, Newport, Isle of Wight PO30 1TYTel: 01983 823366www.iwight.com/museumsDaily 10.30-3. Christmas & New Year closing to be arranged. Admission £2, concessions £1.20; family (2+2) £5.Rowlandson’s Tours of the Isle of Wight (until 27 Feb 2011)A selection from the Museum’s collection of Thomas Rowlandson watercolours from the 1790s, depicting locations he visited on tours around the island. Objects on display are inspired by some of the subjects seen in the paintings.

MUSEUM OF LONDON DOCKLANDS No 1 Warehouse, West India Quay, Canary Wharf, London E14 4ALTel: 020 7001 9844www.museumindocklands.org.ukDaily 10-6. Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission free.London under siege: Churchill & the anarchists, 1911 (18 Dec 2010-11 Apr 2011)The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the Houndsditch Murders & the subsequent siege of Sidney Street, setting both events in historical & social context. In this ethnically-mixed area of London, in December 1910, three policemen were killed while tackling armed Latvian revolutionaries attempting to break into a jeweller’s shop. Two weeks later, on 3 Jan 1911, 200 armed police & a detachment of Scots Guards laid siege to number 100 Sidney Street, where two of the gang were believed to be hiding. Winston Churchill was the Home Secretary of the time.

NATIONAL GALLERY Trafalgar Sq, London WC2N 5DNTel: 020 7747 2885www.nationalgallery.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Fri until 9). Closed 24-26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission to gallery free.Venice: Canaletto & his Rivals (until 16 Jan 2011)More than 50 major loans from Europe & North America of works by Canaletto, Carlevarijs, van Witell, Marieschi, Bellotto, Guardi & others typify the 18th-century Venetian “view” paintings that grew up to meet the demand from those making the British Grand Tour. Sainsbury Wing. Admission £12, seniors £11 (£6, Tues 2.30-6), students £6, children under 12 years free.Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance (23 Feb-30 May 2011)Sensuous nudes, religious subjects & classic portraits are among over 50 paintings by 16th-century Flemish artist whose works have undergone a re-examination. Sainsbury Wing. Admission £10, seniors £9 (£5, Tues 2.30-6), students £5, children under 12 years free.

Bridget Riley: Paintings & Related Work (until 22 May 2011)Recent paintings—two of them executed directly onto the walls of the exhibition space—demonstrate how one of Britain’s most significant & innovative artists has been influenced by the Gallery’s collection. Alongside copies made by Riley of works in the Gallery are related paintings by Mantegna & Raphael. Sunley Room.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELANDMerrion Sq West & Clare St, Dublin 2, Irish RepublicTel: +353 1 661 5133 www.nationalgallery.ieMon-Sat 9.30-5.30 (Thurs until 8.30), Sun 12-5.30. Admission to gallery free.10-5). Admission free.Colour & Light: Caring for Turner’s Watercolours ((1-31 Jan 2011) The Gallery’s 31 pristine watercolours by JMW Turner were bequeathed in 1900 by a collector who stipulated that they be put on show only in January, when natural light levels are at their lowest. This year’s display looks at how they have been cared for, & at conservation methods from Victorian to contemporary times.

NATIONAL GLASS CENTRELiberty Way, Sunderland, Tyne-&-Wear SR6 0GLTel: 0191 515 5555www.nationalglasscentre.comDaily 10-5; closed 25 & 26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free.Waste Not, Want Not (until 6 Feb 2011)At the end of the working day, factory glass-makers were free to use the left-over molten glass, & often experimented with colouring & detail to create intricate ornamental items. The exhibition shows many such pieces—known today as Friggers or Whimsey Glass—including glass walking-sticks, rolling-pins, & even shoes.

NATIONAL MUSEUM CARDIFF Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NPTel: 029 2039 7951www.nmgw.ac.ukTues-Sun 10-5. Closed 24-26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free. Artist in Focus: Merlyn Evans (until 6 Feb 2011)A centenary display for Merlyn Evans, born in Cardiff in 1910. His early work is often associated with Surrealism, but by the 1940s he was satirising the failure of contemporary politics in paintings full of complex symbolism. Later, printmaking became an important element of his work as his paintings became increasingly abstract.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERYSt Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HETel: 020 7306 0055www.npg.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Thurs, Fri until 9; 31 Dec until 7). Closed 24-26 Dec & 1

Jan. Admission to gallery free.Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power & Brilliance (until 23 Jan 2011)The exhibition of more than 50 portraits from collections around the world, including The Royal Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Palace of Versailles & the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the work of an influential 19th-century artist. Admission £12, concessions £10 & £9Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio & Street (17 Feb-30 May 2011)Almost 150 images, bring together society, studio & street photographs by EO Hoppé, one of the most important photographers of the first half of the early 20th century. The exhibition includes portraits of society figures & significant figures, including George Bernard Shaw, Margot Fonteyn, David Lloyd George & members of the royal family. Also on view are Hoppé’s photojournalism studies of British people ranging from street musicians & circus performers to bus drivers & postmen. Admission £11, concessions £10 & £9. NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM Cromwell Rd, London SW7 5BDTel: 020 7942 5000/5011www.nhm.ac.ukDaily 10-5.50. Admission to museum free. Sexual Nature (11 Feb-2 Oct 2011) From the eye-watering to the eye-popping, this is a provocative look at the birds & the bees. Anything goes in the animal kingdom, & visitors will be asked to leave preconceptions at the door while discovering the science of sex via a multi-sensory journey showing

the diversity of methods exploited in seduction & reproduction. More than 100 of the Museum’s specimens reveal how potential mates maximise reproductive potential & how mate choice has evolved in humans. Admission £8, concessions £4, schoolchildren £3.50; family (2+2) £21.

NORTHAMPTON MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Guildhall Rd, Northampton NN1 1DPTel: 01604 838111www.northampton.gov.uk/museumsMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 2-5. Closed 25-28 Dec & 1-3 Jan. Admission free.My Shoes are Killing Me: An investigation of shoe crime (until 6 Feb 2011)From stolen shoes to footprints used as evidence, this is a look at the way footwear has solved or has featured in crime.

OCTOBER GALLERY 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N 3ALTel: 020 7242 7367www.octobergallery.co.ukTues-Sat 12.30-5.30. Closed 23 Dec-3 Jan. Admission free.Golnaz Fathi: Liminal—Subliminal (until 22 Jan 2011)New solo exhibition by an Iranian artist who creates large-scale, free-flowing acrylic paintings in the tradition of Persian calligraphy.

PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY9 North Pallant, Chichester, W Sussex PO19 1TJTel: 01243 774557www.pallant.org.ukTues-Sat 10-5 (Thurs until 8), Sun & bank holidays 12.30-5. Closed 25, 26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission

National Gallery London: Follower of Jan Gossaert, The Magdalen


£7.50, students £4, children £2.30; family (2+2) £17. Half-price for all, Tues 10-5 & Thurs 5-8.Gods & Monsters: John Deakin’s Portraits of British Artists (until 10 Jan 2011) Iconic portraits of British artists by Vogue photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) are paired with major paintings by each artist, providing a unique view of bohemian post-war Soho. Subjects include Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud & Eduardo Paolozzi. Contemporary Eye: Crossovers (until 6 Mar 2011) Displays in the 18th-century house & the new wing explore traditional craft techniques—such as ceramics, textiles, wood carving, glass & taxidermy—by international contemporary artists such as Grayson Perry, Damien Hirst & Polly Morgan.

PLYMOUTH CITY MUSEUM & ART GALLERYDrake Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AJTel: 01752 304774 www.plymouth.gov.ukTues-Fri 10-5.30, Sat 10-5. Admission free.History Matters: Plymouth’s Archives Revealed (22 Jan-26 Mar 2011)Ten items from the city’s archives include an 1190 document, a sealed 1554 charter granted by Queen Mary, a 1509 recipe book containing the earliest known reference to a Cornish pasty, & an 1815 diary featuring a vivid description of Napoleon Bonaparte during his imprisonment in Plymouth Sound.

PM GALLERY & HOUSE Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, Ealing, London W5 5EQTel: 020 8567 1227www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse

Tues-Fri 1-5, Sat 11-5. Closed 25-29 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free.Sharpe’s Wood (until 8 Jan 2011)Dramatic night-time photographs by Liza Dracup, taken in woodland illuminated solely by the light of the moon.

RIVER & ROWING MUSEUMMill Meadows, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1BF Tel: 01491 415600www.rrm.co.uk Daily 10-5. Closed 24, 25 & 31 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission £7.50, concessions & children £5.50; family (2+2) £22.Escaping the city: Victorian Pursuits on the River Thames (11 Dec 2010-2 May 2011)Paintings & artefacts show the importance of the Thames as a holiday destination & an escape from the chaos of Victorian city life. The exhibition analyses the role that London life, wages, holiday entitlement & the railway played in encouraging people to spend leisure time up-stream, bringing

custom to boat-builders, hoteliers & publicans. It also celebrates regattas, boating fashions & the way the river became a source of artistic inspiration.

ROYAL ACADEMY Piccadilly, London W1J 0BDTel: 020 7300 8000www.royalacademy.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Fri until 10, exept 31 Dec). Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission charges vary.Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900 (until 30 Jan 2011)Some 100 oil paintings & 50 works on paper by James Guthrie, EA Hornel, George Henry, Joseph Crawhall & Arthur Melville. Alongside pictures from Glasgow Museums’ collections are loans from public & private collections across the country. Admission £10.50, seniors £9.50, students £8.50, children £5 & £4. Booking via website (booking fee), or by phone.Modern British Sculpture (22 Jan-7 Apr 2011)A chronological examination of 20th-century works by Epstein, Hepworth, Moore, Caro, Long & others highlighting the way Britain’s links with Empire, continental Europe & the US have helped to shape its art. Works on show include loans of Indian, African & Native American sculpture from the British Museum & the V&A. Admission £12, concessions £10, students £8, children £4 & £3. Booking via website (booking fee), or by phone.

ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENSKew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3ABTel: 020 8332 5655www.kew.org.ukDaily 9.30-4.15 (from 6 Feb 9.30-5.30). Closed 24 & 25 Dec. Admission £13.50, concessions £11.50, children free.Marianne North Gallery (reopens 26 Dec 2010)After restoration & refurbishment, the densely-displayed collection of botanical art by Marianne North (1830-90) is once again on show. North travelled the globe recording the world’s flora with her paintbrush; 832 paintings line the walls of this purpose-built gallery, its construction financed by the artist herself.

ST FAGAN’S NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUMSt Fagan’s, near Cardiff CF5 6XBTel: 029 2057 3500www.museumwales.ac.ukDaily 10-5. Closed 24-26 Dec & 1 Jan. Admission free.Childhood in Wales (until 2 Mar 2011)Covering the themes of toys & games, leisure, education, health & religion, this exhibition looks at how times have changed for Welsh boys & girls, yet also acknowledges that the pleasures & pains of growing up are timeless & everlasting. From sunny days & ice-creams, to mumps, measles & school reports, the process is never without its challenges.

SCIENCE MUSEUM Exhibition Rd, London SW7 2DDTel: 0870 870 4868www.sciencemuseum.org.ukDaily 10-6. Closed 24 & 25 Dec. Admission to museum free.Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life (until 2 Apr 2011)Exploring the workings of the unconscious mind, this exhibition celebrates psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge & as a treatment. It focuses on a key concept—how the unconscious can be interpreted through everyday experiences & in artefacts. Watt’s Workshop (opens 23 Mar 2011) A reconstruction of James Watt’s workshop, with tools & mementoes, reveals its owner as his successors saw him—as the first hero of the Industrial Revolution. It shows Watt as one of the first scientific entrepreneurs, taking the emerging science of the 18th century & turning it into new business enterprises in many fields.

SOUTHAMPTON CITY ART GALLERY Civic Centre, Commercial Rd, Southampton, Hants SO14 7LPTel: 023 8083 2277www.southampton.gov.uk/artMon-Fri 10-4; Sat, Sun 11-4. Easter & May bank-holiday closing to be arranged. Admission free. Artist Rooms: Andy Warhol (27 Mar-26 June 2011)Touring exhibition of works that represent all phases of Warhol’s career & a cross-section of media. From 50 early works on paper, to his late diptychs, it includes the celebrated four-part Camouflage, & a series of Polaroid self-portraits. The collection is complemented by 126 posters from all periods of Warhol’s career.

SUTTON HOO Tranmer House, Sutton Hoo, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DJTel: 01394 389700www.nationaltrust.org.ukSat, Sun 11-4 (27-31 Dec & 21-27 Feb, daily 11-4; from 2 Mar, Wed-Sun 10.30-5). Closed 20-26 Dec. Admission £6.20, children £3.10; family (2+2) £15.70.Captured on Camera: The summer of 1939 (until 20 Mar 2011)Photographs taken on holiday by two women schoolteachers in 1939, shortly after the discovery of the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, capture a phase of the excavation that received little public attention: the investigation of the construction of the Anglo-Saxon craft. Images reveal the research methods used, & the fashions of the time, & feature archaeologist Basil Brown & a visit made by Princess Marie Louise.

TATE MODERN Bankside, London SE1 9TGTel: 020 7887 8008www.tate.org.uk/modernDaily 10-6 (Fri, Sat until 10). Admission to gallery free. Paul Gauguin : Maker of Myth


naTional HeriTage guide

Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens: Marianne North, Native Vanilla hanging from the Wile Orange, Praslin, Seychelles

Royal Academy: Philip King, Genghis Khan

(until16 Jan 2011)Landscapes of Brittany & sumptuous portrayals of women in Tahiti fill this exhibition dedicated to the master French Post-Impressionist. Scenes of daily life around Pont-Aven are seen alongside decorative works, such as the carved wooden door-panels around the artist’s hut in the Marquesas Islands. Admission £13.50, concessions & children £10. Booking via website Miró (14 Apr-11 Sept 2011)First major London retrospective in nearly 50 years for this great Surrealist painter, who filled his works with luxuriant colour. More than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures & prints from six decades of Miró’s career show a language of symbols that reflects his personal vision, sense of freedom, & energy. Admission £15.50, concessions £13.50, children under 12 free. Booking via website.

TURNER CONTEMPORARY Margate, Kent CT9 1HBTel: 01843 294208www.turnercontemporary.orgHours & bank-holiday closings to be arranged. Admission free.Revealed: Turner Contemporary opens (16 Apr-4 Sept 2011)The inaugural exhibition of this dramatically-sited seafront gallery is centred on a painting by Turner of an 1812 volcanic eruption on the island of St Vincent, which he created from a sketch by an eye-witness. The show explores the themes of imagination, discovery, wonder & the creative spirit, & features six contemporary artists whose work illustrates the relationship between imaginings & reality.

ULSTER MUSEUM Stranmillis Rd, Botanic Gardens, Belfast BT9 5ABTel: 028 9038 3000www.ulstermuseum.org.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission free. A New Order: 20th-Century Irish Art (until 1 May 2011)Based on the themes of Figure, Place & Imagination, this exhibition contains many of the Museum’s most important & best-loved 20th-century works, alongside some notable new acquisitions. These include works by Willie Doherty; a series of 40 photographs of Belfast; & Ghost Story, a video installation first shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUMCromwell Rd, London SW7 2RLTel: 020 7942 2000www.vam.ac.ukDaily 10-5.45 (some galleries open Wed, & last Fri of month, until 10). Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission to museum free.Peter Rabbit: The tale of the tale (until 8 Jan 2011)Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit has sold 40 million copies worldwide. Drawing on the

collections of the Museum & of Potter’s publisher, the exhibition traces the story of Peter Rabbit from its beginnings as an illustrated letter in 1893 to its publication by Frederick Warne & Co in 1902, & beyond. Original illustrations from the book are shown alongside the text of the storyImperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City (until 27 Feb 2011) The exhibition shows three centuries of historic royal robes worn by the emperors & empresses of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the last rulers of China. Alongside them are elaborate hats, shoes & children’s clothes, & information about the complex rules covering what should be worn on different court occasions. Admission £5, concessions £3, children under 12 years free; family (2+2) £13.

V&A MUSEUM OF CHILDHOOD Cambridge Heath Rd, London E2 9PATel: 020 8983 5200www.vam.ac.uk/moc Daily 10-5.45. Admission free.Food, Glorious Food (29 Jan-8 May 2011)A look at the place of food in British culture, the exhibition compares diet today with those of the last 100 years, through Edwardian, World War II & post-war periods, & the 1980s. It also reveals how food is grown & where it comes from, who does the cooking, changing methods of food preparation, & the pleasure of eating.

WALLACE COLLECTION Hertford House, Manchester Sq, London W1U 3BNTel: 020 7935 0687www.wallacecollection.orgDaily 10-5. Admission free. Esprit et Vérité: Watteau & His

Circle (12 Mar-5 June 2011)Two exhibitions celebrate Antoine Watteau, an artist who died in his prime yet changed the course of French painting, & Jean de Jullienne, his publisher & one of France’s greatest collectors. They feature Watteau canvases from the Collection, & 17th- & 18th-century masterworks by Rembrandt, Rubens, Greuze & Vernet.

WELLCOME COLLECTION 183 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BETel: 020 7611 2222www.wellcomecollection.orgTues-Sun 10-6 (Thurs until 10, except 23 Dec); bank-holiday Mons (& 27-31 Dec) 12-6. Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission free.High Society (until 27 Feb 2011)From morning coffee in European cities to kava in Pacific villages, & from betel nut in Asia to coca leaf in the Andes, the rituals of drug use are universal, & stretch back through centuries. The exhibition explores the role of mind-altering drugs in history & culture, challenging the perception that drugs are a disease of modern life.

THE WOMEN’S LIBRARY London Metropolitan University, Old Castle St, London E1 7NTTel: 020 7320 2222www.thewomenslibrary.ac.ukMon-Fri 9.30-5.30 (Thurs until 8; 21 & 22 Dec, & 2 Jan, until 5), Sat 10-4. Closed 24 Dec-3 Jan. Admission free.Hand Made Tales: Women & Domestic Crafts (until 20 Apr 2011)With making cupcakes, knitting, & ‘growing your own’ back in fashion, this exhibition provides an insight into the domestic crafts practised by women over the past 100 years. It explores the changing motivations

behind making objects for family & home, even though buying them is usually cheaper & less time-consuming.

The details in this guide were correct at the time of going to press, but may be subject to change.

For a more comprehensive guide visit our website -www.nationalheritage.org.uk

Material for possible inclusion in the next listings (May-Sept 2011) may be sent to [email protected]


Ulster Museum: John Luke, The Three Dancers

WANDSWORTH MUSEUM, 12 Apr at 6.15pm

To: Liz Moore National Heritage Administration Centre Rye Road, Hawkhurst, Kent TN18 5DW (01580 752 052) [email protected]

Name..............................................................................................................

Address ........................................................................................................

.........................................................................................................................

......................................................................................................................... Tel number .................................................................................................

Email .............................................................................................................

!

Wandsworth Museum tells the story of the modern borough and its surrounding area from 25,000 years ago to the present. Key exhibits include a Bonze Age shield. Opening in September, over the past year the new and state-of-the-art museum has been created from the old West Hill Library. It retains the best from the original building and its fabric while updating and improving the site to meet modern regulations and requirements. The museum team decided early on to make it an exemplar of sustainability and have put in place systems to ensure the building is able to run at the most efficient and lowest costs possible. It is the first museum in the world to have all its lighting provided by LED lamps. Recently, the Museum was awarded a Green Tourism Award for London as an exemplar for sustainability in our construction and operations.

MUSICAL MUSEUM 399 High Street, Brentford, Middlesex TW8 0DU Tuesday, 7 June 2011 at 6.15pm

Reopened in 2007, the Musical Museum has one of the world’s foremost collections of automatic instruments. From the tiny clockwork musical box to the self-playing ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ theatre organ, the collection embraces a comprehensive array of sophisticated reproducing pianos, orchestrions, orchestrelles, residence organs and violin players.The museum’s new home in Brentford High Street is arranged on three floors in which there is space to demonstrate instruments once found in large houses of the wealthy; a street setting with shop windows full of music, musical toys and street instruments; an explanation on how music was captured and how instruments were powered; and a changing exhibition of related themes of either instruments and music or other local interests.There is also a concert hall seating 230, complete with stage and an orchestra pit from which the Wurlitzer console rises to entertain, as it did in 1930s cinemas.

MUSICAL MUSEUM 7 June at 6.15pm

To: Liz Moore National Heritage Administration Centre Rye Road, Hawkhurst, Kent TN18 5DW (01580 752 052) [email protected]

Name ...........................................................................................................

Address .......................................................................................................

.........................................................................................................................

........................................................................................................................ Tel number .................................................................................................

Email ............................................................................................................

!WANDSWORTH MUSEUM 36 West Hill, London SW18 1RZTuesday, 12 April 2011 at 6.15pm

Please send me ............. tickets at £12.50 each for the visit to Wandworth Museum on Tuesday 12 April at 6.15pm. I enclose remittance and stamped addressed envelope.

Please send me ……. tickets at £12.50 each for the visit to the Musical Museum on Tuesday 7 June at 6.15pm. I enclose remittance and stamped addressed envelope.

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