University of Cambridge Museums 2015-16 Highlights

2015-16 HIGHLIGHTS UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE MUSEUMS

Image Credit Front Cover: Twilight at the Museums © Martin Bond Inside Cover: Whipple Museum of the History of Science © James Linsell-Clark

In 2015-16 the University of Cambridge Museums:

Welcomed 988,943 up 5.2% visitors

on last year

99%

rating their visit as ‘good’ or ‘very good’

Engaged 24,045 35,142 11,293 children & adults through outreach activities

school children

higher education visitors

Enabled by 281

museum staff

449

volunteers

25,933 volunteer hours

Our year in numbers | 01

I’m delighted to present highlights of the work of the University of Cambridge Museums.

This is our fourth year as a consortium and as a Major Partner Museum service. Since 2012 the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) has transformed its offer to both audiences and the wider museums sector, and this report demonstrates how this progress has continued as the consortium goes from strength to strength. We are opening up the cultural and intellectual riches of Cambridge, reaching new and more diverse audiences, and enabling young people from all backgrounds to participate in our work. The UCM continues to develop as a resilient and flexible organisation, developing the future workforce and taking a national lead for the sector.

We are grateful to Arts Council England, the University of Cambridge, the Higher Education funding Council for England, Cambridge City Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and many other trusts and foundations for their continued support for the work of the University of Cambridge Museums and its individual collections.

Dr Liz Hide

University of Cambridge Museums Officer, July 2016

The University of Cambridge Museums comprises: - Cambridge University Botanic Garden - Museum of Zoology - Whipple Museum of the History of Science - Kettle’s Yard - The Polar Museum - Museum of Classical Archaeology - Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences - Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - The Fitzwilliam Museum

02 | introduction

Image Credit Detail of a ceiling painting by Macdonald Gill The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute

Engaging People This year we welcomed more than 988,000 visits across the eight museums and the Botanic Garden. This increase of 5.2% on last year, despite both the Museum of Zoology and Kettle’s Yard being closed for redevelopment, is matched by an increase in average visit time from 73 minutes to 103 minutes. Programmes such as Twilight at the Museums and Summer at the Museums encourage first time visits from families, and targeted marketing ensures we are reaching people from areas that are not currently well represented.

While the number of visitors with a disability increased marginally this year, disabled people are still under-represented in our current audiences. This year we have developed staff training, targeted programming, and other measures to improve the experiences of independent visitors with disabilities across our museums and the Botanic Garden.

Our community, lifelong learning and family programming, delivered by highly skilled specialist staff, increase social capital, community cohesion, improve peoples’ health and wellbeing, and decrease social isolation. We took our activities to seven community festivals in the city, reaching more than 2,500 people, including leading costume-making workshops for Arbury Carnival parade. Through our Cambridge Culture for Everyone programme, supported by the Cambridge City Council Communities Fund, we enabled some of the most disadvantaged City residents to enjoy our museums.

Visits by first timers are increasing, this year accounting for nearly two-thirds (64%) of UCM visits, an 18% increase on 2014 figures.

04 | Engaging People

Twilight at the Museums — when we invite families to explore our museums by torchlight after hours — saw a 25% increase in visits this year. More than half of the 13,000 visits were by people visiting one or more museums for the first time.

This is one of our family “must do again” events Twilight at the Museums participant Image Credit Twilight at the Museums © Martin Bond

Image Credit Treasured Possessions, The Fitzwilliam Museum

Exceptional Collections This year 44 exhibitions attracted over 700,000 visits, while 780 objects loans to more than 50 organisations ensured that many more people were able to enjoy and engage with our exceptional collections. Exhibitions included: Ronald Searle: ‘Obsessed with Drawing’, Watercolour - Elements of nature, and Following Hercules: the Story of Classical Art, all at the Fitzwilliam Museum; and The Power of Paper: 50 years of printmaking from Australia, Canada and South Africa at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.

Through our 4Cs programme, conservation and collections care staff continued to work together to ensure the highest standards of collections care, within our own museums and supporting museums in Cambridgeshire and across the East of England. We programmed and hosted the East of England SHARE Collections Care conference, attended by 65 delegates and with presentations from UCM, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Sedgwick and Polar Museum staff. Our specialist collection care courses and masterclasses in Dublin, West Dean College and the British Library trained more than 80 people from across Europe.

Treasured Possessions, a collaboration between the Department of History & the Fitzwilliam Museum, attracted more than 94,000 visits during six months, and received national critical acclaim with reviews and features in the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Economist and Woman’s Hour.

Working together, historians and curators have come up with a genuinely original exhibition Richard Dorment The Telegraph – Treasured Possessions

Exceptional collections | 07

International Scholarship Research lies at the heart of all our work, with the direct impact of collections-based research evidenced by the publication of books, specialist publications, exhibitions and conferences. This year, two international conferences hosted by the UCM have demonstrated the role we can also play in stimulating debate and raising standards within the museums and heritage sectors. In March 2015 the collections care conference Subliming Surfaces: Volatile Binding Media in Heritage Conservation demonstrated the international lead we are taking in this area.

Our collections continued to play a key role in undergraduate teaching and learning in both Cambridge and further afield; and this year we continued our partnership with the University’s AHRC Doctoral Training programme, enabling early career researchers to gain practical and transferable skills while exploring the work of our museums.

Our ‘Museum as Method’ conference (March 2016), in partnership with CRASSH, was the culmination of a longer investigation into what it means today to work with collections and to be a museum in a range of research contexts across the UK and the EU as well as in North America.

90 international delegates discussed material culture, collections and research in university museums;

The case is now being made, through these meetings and others all across Europe, for the interdisciplinary research potential of museums, and university museums in particular Martha Fleming Programme Director, Centre for Collections Based Research University of Reading

08 | international scholarship

Image Credit Keyser Teaching Collection at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Our Just Arts programme, in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council Children’s Participation Service in Social Care, enabled us to provide a supported learning environment for 73 looked-after young people, through focussed visits and workshops.

It allows looked-after young people to come together in a new environment which for some can be quite daunting.

The project doesn’t just give them an Arts Award, it helps them develop many other skills.

New friendships are created; confidence grows along with selfesteem and team building skills Participation Worker Children’s Social Care Participation Service

Image Credit School workshop at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology © Martin Bond

Opportunities for Children & Young People Our comprehensive, cross-disciplinary, schools offer has enabled us to host more than 35,000 school student visits from more than 1,200 schools, and our off-site outreach programme reached more than 24,000 young people and their families. Working closely with teachers and trainee teachers, we have developed innovative engagement practice, contributing to our national and regional leadership in this field. Our Digital Learning research project involved consulting teachers about how they use and access resources, and this is informing the development of a fully user-oriented digital offer for schools.

Through our ChYpPs partnership with Cambridge City Council, 1,100 young people took part in our off-site drop-in activities in some of the least engaged areas of the city. This was complemented by our extensive family learning programme, including Summer at the Museums, in which the UCM worked with fifteen other museums and organisations to provide 110 events across the city and county during the school summer holidays.

14,800 young people and their families participated in Summer at the Museums, an increase of 17% on last year.

As an Arts Award Good Practice Centre we supported 209 young people in completing Arts Awards.

Opportunities for children & young people | 11

Developing our Staff & the Future Workforce We contribute to training and skills development within the cultural sector through an integrated and people-centred approach for people at all stages in their careers, and in both paid and voluntary roles. Through our Opening Doors programme, we hosted three apprenticeships, enabling young people to benefit from a wide-ranging on-the-job training programme while also working for an NVQ. We hosted two paid internships, while 93 young people participated in Work Experience opportunities.

Our Equality Action Plan ensures principles of diversity and equality drive our programmes and operations, and we are working with the University’s Equality and Diversity team to diversify our workforce and governance. Our staff contribute expertise to the East of England SHARE regional training and support programme, and benefit from the training programme that it provides.

449 volunteers contributed 25,933 hours of their time to supporting our museums.

This apprenticeship has provided me with all the right stuff for the working world Creative Apprentice

12 | developing our staff & the future workforce

I learnt about things and jobs that I never knew existed Work Experience Taster Day Participant

Image Credit University of Cambridge Museums at the Big Weekend Š Josh Murfitt

Working together we aim to embed the arts and culture in the development of the city for the benefit of residents, workers and visitors From Inspiring Cambridge: A shared vision for arts and culture developed by the Cambridge Arts and Cultural Leaders group.

Image Credit University of Cambridge Museums at the Big Weekend Š Josh Murfitt

Working in Partnership We are committed to addressing local and regional development priorities, in particular ensuring that new communities and fast-growing populations have access to high-quality cultural opportunities and experiences, while also working to reduce gaps in equality of opportunity and aspiration. We do this by working in collaboration with the University, local authorities, the Local Enterprise Partnership and partners in the cultural, health and education sectors. We lead the Museums in Cambridgeshire network and play a key role in other sector networks, as well as Subject Specialist networks regionally and nationally.

We convene the Cambridge Arts and Cultural leaders group, which brings together key policy makers and strategists in the region, taking a leading role in the development of joined-up cultural provision in the city, county and beyond. We also place enormous value on the wide range of organisations that work with us to reach and engage more people with our collections. These include local charities, clubs, networks, community groups as well as our colleagues in museums across the region.

As always, participating in Summer at the Museums has widened our ‘net’, helping the museum to reach new visitors and broaden our audiences to include people living further away. Being included has also increased the perceived ‘quality’ of the visitor experience at Burwell Museum Manager Burwell Museum

Working in partnership | 15

Museums Fit for the Future Ambitious capital developments are enabling us to continue to improve access, collections care, research and learning opportunities. We have carried out an initial feasibility study for a proposed Centre for Material Culture will bring the UCM’s unique collections together in a purpose-built store, providing opportunities for cross-disciplinary research, and audience engagement with issues of collections care and conservation. Our aim is to ensure our individual museums, as well as the UCM consortium itself, are resilient and sustainable in the long term.

The Fitzwilliam Museum is working with architects MUMA to develop a masterplan which will increase the museum’s resilience and capacity in relation to city and university growth.

The new Museum of Zoology, opening in 2017 at the heart of a new international Conservation Campus, will showcase biodiversity through collections, including those of the Botanic Garden.

The museum is enthusiastically embracing this unique redevelopment opportunity to display the extraordinary richness of our collections in superb new spaces to the benefit of everyone Professor Paul Brakefield Director of the Museum of Zoology

16 | Museums fit for the future

The Kettle’s Yard redevelopment, completing in 2017, will create a new Education Wing, beautifully designed, sustainable exhibition galleries and greatly improved visitor facilities.

It’s a huge opportunity for us in terms of how we engage with the community, schools and with our colleagues in the University of Cambridge Andrew Nairne Director of Kettle’s Yard

Image Credit View towards Gallery 2, Kettle’s Yard Development Plans © Jamie Fobert Architects

University of Cambridge Museums Office The Fitzwilliam Museum Trumpington Street Cambridge CB2 1RB W www.museums.cam.ac.uk E info@museums.cam.ac.uk @Camunivmuseums Cambridge University Museums

Image courtesy of The Museum of Classical Archaeology