Impact and Engagement: West Yorkshire’s Local Authority Museums 2018/19
Five years in partnership From John Roles, Head of Leeds Museums and Galleries, on behalf of the partnership.
When we first created the West Yorkshire Local Authority Museum Partnership (WYLAMP), back in 2014, we were motivated by the belief that we could and should be doing more with our services. We believed, and still do, that by working together and sharing strengths, we can provide the best possible museum offer for West Yorkshire.
Our museums are popular
Our museums support our schools through inspiring work with young people
In 2018/19, our museums were visited by 2,447,493 people.
In 2018/19, we engaged with 81,495 pupils with 11,967 teachers in visits to our sites and in workshops in other settings. 259,115 children and adults participated in our family activities.
Our museum visits contribute millions to the economy
Our museums are working actively with virtual visitors and audiences
Our museums bring in significant external funding
Attracting £9,645,161 between 2015/16-2018/19 (£2,411,290 per year).
We have a great staff team
Now, five years later, we can look back on our achievements together. Our museums are safe and welcoming community spaces which reflect our diverse communities, celebrating their many different cultures and traditions. We tell the stories about why we are here and what makes our cities, towns and communities distinctive and what they are today. They make us proud of our heritage and understand who we are and where we are from. Our sites cover everything from medieval castles and abbeys to working industrial museums, art galleries and history museums with collections often given directly by local people. They reflect West Yorkshire’s place in the world now and where we want it to be in the future. This year has seen a record-breaking 2.4m visits to our combined sites, contributing nearly £43M to the local economy. Our critical importance to the cultural economy of the Leeds City Region is unquestioned. None of this would have been possible without the joint marketing, sharing of expertise and collective advocacy that has been developed between us. This year has seen We Are West Yorkshire, our first joint exhibition programme, celebrating the people and places that make our county such a unique place. We expect other opportunities to support each other around high profile regional programmes such as Leeds 2023, Calderdale 2024 and more. This brochure gives a small taste of the impact our services make, inside and outside the walls of our amazing venues.
In 2018/19, our museums contributed £42,698,154 to the local economy. Supported 195 external jobs directly or indirectly. Generated a further £607,758 through the direct impact of their spending on local goods and services.*
Our websites attracted 3,118,411 page views and we have over 311,903 followers on social media.
Our museums cost relatively little to run
Our museums contribute to community health and wellbeing
£13,747,105 gross budget, including income and grants. £9,154,621 net budget.
Our 419 volunteers contributed 27,826 hours, worth £486,771.
We employ 362 staff (FTE), researching, preserving and celebrating our collections, providing great experiences for visitors and working with all our communities.
Our shops and commercial services are proving ever more popular with customers
Our 19 shops and cafés generated an income of £1,157,360 in 2018/19. Fees from room hire at our 24 sites brought in £234,826. *Using the AIM Economic Impact of the Independent Museum Sector toolkit 2014.
Addressing the issues of today Wellbeing, social exclusion, diversity, cohesion, sustainability and more
Army stories bringing communities together in Huddersfield
Bradford – a new partnership with schools
Putting the ‘H’ in Leeds’s LGBT History Month
A more sustainable approach to exhibitions in Leeds
A Lost Legacy - Muslim Roots in the British Army was an exhibition which premiered at Huddersfield’s Tolson Museum before going on tour in community centres across Kirklees.
Bradford Museums and Galleries are developing new ways of working to strengthen partnerships with local schools using their Museums & Schools (ACE/DfE) funding. One of these strands of work focuses on supporting literacy and oracy skills, allowing teachers together with museum and gallery staff to co-design and co-deliver workshop content, bringing Learning to Life and providing much needed first hand experiences for pupils. These immersive workshops support children’s learning journeys and have had positive impacts on outcomes for schools “We believe that the day at Bolling Hall has contributed to us achieving one of our highest phonics scores and has been a vital success in promoting our early reading” (from a Year 1 teacher at Bowling Park Primary School). Importantly this way of working is also informing future curriculum design shaped around sustainable local museum and gallery visits “We are reviewing our curriculum and this style of trip is really what we would like all our new curriculum visits to look like” Lead teacher Margaret McMillan Primary School.
For a long time, Leeds Museums and Galleries been wanting to make a weightier contribution to LGBT History Month (LGBTHM) which takes place in February every year. In 2018/19, we believe we have made a significant advance in how we engage with LGBT+ communities and portray their histories and lives.
In July 2018, Leeds City Museum opened a new exhibition celebrating beautiful things made by animals. 'Beavers to Weavers: the wonderful world of animal makers' showcased how animals use what they find around them. We decided to put sustainability at the heart of this exhibition, considering our loans and transport, environmental conditions, design and build, interpretation, marketing, learning activities and community engagement. The results informed the whole exhibition.
The exhibition told the WW1 and WW2 army stories of family members of young Huddersfield Muslims. It was based on family research carried out by the young people themselves, supported by Kirklees Museums and Galleries staff. The idea for the exhibition came from a partnership between the British Army and the Huddersfield Pakistani Community Alliance (HPCA), who were looking for ways to promote the positive contributions of British Pakistanis and their ancestors in the two world wars. It enhanced and linked perfectly with Tolson Museum's existing gallery, Huddersfield's First World War Stories, and its status as a war memorial, giving visitors a new understanding of the huge scope of involvement of Muslim soldiers. The project and the exhibition were supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and the exhibition was all part of a wider programme of community activity.
Thanks to the engagement of partners from across the city we were able to host Leeds’s debut as a Hub City for OUTing the Past, the national festival of LGBT+ history on 7 February 2019 at Leeds City Museum. They day involved speakers and talks on a huge variety of aspects of LGBT+ history – local and national – together with performances and celebrity appearances. More importantly, it was part of an integrated programme of art, events and displays through the month and the year, cementing LGBT+ history within our core programming.
More sustainable options we used included using recycled paint; recycled and recyclable alternatives to foam board; using old bobbins and cotton reels as plinths; printing some labels with Leeds Industrial Museum’s Albion printing press; making homemade paper from waste materials as a community activity, and using this for labels; using materials sourced from Scrap, a creative-reuse supplier for learning activities; and making cushions from recycled coffee sacks and foam offcuts. We included information about sustainability and our impact on other animals throughout the exhibition. We hope that more sustainable options will be standard in future exhibitions across LMG sites.
©Lookout Point/HBO
Kirklees Museums and Galleries – in a tent
Taking centre stage in a BBC blockbuster
A museum hub at Featherstone Rovers Stadium
Museum in a Tent is a novel project to bring artefacts into the heart of Kirklees’ communities.
Halifax’s own Anne Lister has been storming the TV ratings in Gentleman Jack - the new BBC/HBO dramatisation of her life.
Wakefield Museums and Castles have opened a new community museum hub at Featherstone Rovers RLFC Stadium. The hub, which opened in February 2019, is the first permanent display by the service in Featherstone.
It is a brightly-coloured and attractive tent, featuring prints and drawings of some of the highlights of Kirklees’ collections. The tent is about the same size as a large gazebo and has three sides. During winter months, Kirklees’ museum sites have reduced opening hours. The service has addressed this by creating a series of pop-up museums which have also proven popular in summer months at fairs and cultural events. Museum in a Tent builds on this success, since it can be used outdoors more easily, and gives protection from inclement weather. As well as images of objects on the tent, it provides a setting for the display of handling objects and also craft activities. It has been in operation since summer 2017 and is typically crewed by one staff member together with volunteers. To date it has engaged with over 2000 people from a wide range of communities, to promote Kirklees Museums and Galleries and bring learning, fun and inspiration to hard-to-reach audiences.
This has given Shibden Hall, Anne’s home, a chance to shine before an international audience. Filming an eight-part television series is not something that just happens. There is a lot of preparatory work before the producers will decide to use your site. Then you have to negotiate closing dates, fees, locations, use of facilities, security and other details, like can they have fires in the fireplaces. You have to trust the crew coming in to your site and they have to trust that you will allow them to film a multi-million pound production on site.
The hub consists of a large display cabinet filled with images and objects celebrating the history and successes of the club, together with a supporting AV interactive. The contents have been selected with the assistance of fans and the local community.
We are really pleased with the end result and the impact on visits to Shibden.
The display is situated in the Featherstone Rovers Shop at their grounds. This has the added advantage that it is open throughout the week when the main stadium is closed. The museum hub has been made possible thanks to National Portfolio Organisation funding from Arts Council England, but it is now so well embedded in the community that Wakefield are confident of its longer term sustainability.
The idea sprang from the museum service’s desire, to develop new audiences within communities and parts of the district which have not tended to visit the main museum sites.
How museums are supporting weight management programmes in Wakefield Art in Mind is a programme created through a working partnership between two Wakefield Council departments (Museums and Castles and Health Improvement). Weekly sessions offer health and weight loss information using a ‘stealth health’ approach. Participants are identified as needing more support within the Weight Management programme. The programme utilises museum objects and quality art activities to support the participants in the first steps of their weight loss journey. One session uses the museum collection to show the increase in size of dinner plates from the 18th century to modern day to highlight changes in portion size, with participants designing and painting their own plate. The programme attracts many first-time museum visitors and those vulnerable to a range of wellbeing issues including social isolation, low mood and anxiety. The programme was shortlisted for a Hearts for the Arts award in 2018.
Art, Health & Wellbeing in Calderdale Bankfield Museum, Halifax, has been working towards implementing health and wellbeing themed sessions into its current roster of public programmes. The project involved four pilot sessions in partnership with Healthy Minds Calderdale. These involved a range of health and wellbeing focused activities in each of the sessions, to increase participants’ exposure to the range of possible activities, and therefore collect data on the most and least popular, which would then inform our future programmes. Thanks to the partnership, we were able to access their existing service users, who were not previously Bankfield Museum visitors. We had an average of 15 participants per session. Many of them suffered from extreme stress, depression or anxiety, and mentioned that now they had visited the museum in a relaxed and supportive atmosphere, they would like to return on their own terms. These sessions were piloted as part of the ACE Resilience-funded project and we aim to offer similar workshops in the future.
A1
8
Keighley
6
1
5 11
Bradford
16
13 15
12
14
23
Leeds
4
24
M1
M621
9 3 17
Hebden Bridge
Halifax
2
M62
21 22
Castleford 26
Dewsbury 10
M62
7
25
Wakefield
18 19
Pontefract
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A1
Huddersfield M1
How to Find Us 1. Abbey House Museum LS5 3EH
14. Leeds Discovery Centre LS10 1LB
2. Bagshaw Museum WF17 0AS
15. Leeds Industrial Museum LS12 2QF
3. Bankfield Museum HX3 6HG
16. Lotherton Hall LS25 3EB
4. Bolling Hall BD4 7LP
17. Oakwell Hall and Country Park WF17 9LF
5. Bradford Industrial Museum BD2 3HP
18. Pontefract Castle WF8 1QH
6. Cartwright Hall Art Gallery BD9 4NS
19. Pontefract Museum WF8 1BA
7. Castleford Museum WF10 1BB
20. Sandal Castle WF2 7DS
8. Cliffe Castle Museum BD20 6LQ
21. Shibden Hall HX3 6XG
9. Heptonstall Museum HX7 7NB
22. Smith Art Gallery HD6 2AF
10. Huddersfield Art Gallery HD1 2SU
23. Temple Newsam LS15 0AE
11. Kirkstall Abbey LS5 3EH
24. Thwaite Watermill LS10 1RP
12. Leeds Art Gallery LS1 3AA
25. Tolson Museum HD5 8DJ
13. Leeds City Museum LS2 8BH
26. Wakefield Museum WF1 2DD