Behind-the-scenes shots of a press event at the British Museum. It was the launch of the new exhibition ‘Treasures From Medieval York: England’s Other Capital’
All of the treasures are from our own Yorkshire Museum collection. It’s the first time the BM has displayed another museum’s collection in this way. Very exciting.
Lady Cockburn and Her Three Eldest Sons
Yorkshire’s Tourism Event of the Year!
That was the accolade given to the Trust’s ‘Grand Tour in York‘ at Welcome to Yorkshire’s awards ceremony at the Royal Armouries last night.
It was a good night for York all round as the Theatre Royal and National Railway Museum also won awards. And to top it all, prizes were handed out by our very own Archbishop, Dr John Sentamu, who only seemed to lose concentration a little when Pub of the Year was announced (Ye Old Sun Inn at Colton, in case you’re interested).
Every recession brings new opportunities, though usually for scrap merchants, insolvency practitioners and other scavenger occupations. York, England, has opened up some of those opportunities to the wider creative community.
Like most places York’s retail economy has been hit hard lately. The sight of dingy, empty shops is a real problem for a city that relies on its picturesque streets to attract more than 4m visitors a year.
A call went out for ideas and York Museums Trust responded with ‘Windows of Opportunity’. The thinking was: we want to change how these shops look but it’s very tricky to get permission to work inside them, so let’s just work with the surface. Vinyl was our solution. We would cover them up with giant, printed vinyls, like the ones advertising the new exhibition at the Castle Museum.
But what to put on them? These would be big, visible statements on the high street. Initially we played around with using actual statements – literature, poetry, quotations – but then broadened it out to any digital imagery.
We also broadened the pool of potential contributors by going world wide and inviting anyone to pitch in with their design. ‘WOO’, as it became known, was put on the web, initially on flickr and recently on a dedicated site.
The response has been excellent – dozens of brilliant ideas, all very well executed. All of them go on display on the website and a few of them win the ‘prize’ of being posted up in the real world. For the launch we chose three very different pieces of work to demonstrate the potential range of the project, and were ready to go.
But getting the first vinyls actually onto the windows was less straight-forward. It took weeks of haggling with various parties to get the permissions sorted out. In the meantime two of the empty shops found tenants. So another round of permissions was needed. It was sorted eventually and the first three windows were dressed at the end of August, to a universally positive response.
Funding has come from the City Council and the tourism body, Visit York, have put in a lot of the leg-work. You can see why they’re involved, but what’s in it for the Museums Trust?
The answer is a few different things. Some good publicity, of course, and some close working with key partners for the benefit of the city, which can’t be bad.
But what it also does is show that when museums use their traditional knowledge and skills to step outside their walls the results can be really interesting. A world of opportunities awaits…
Shooting a replica pistol from the Dick Turpin era – the early 18th century.
This afternoon was the first time this demonstration was done live in front of visitors and luckily it worked first time (the gun is not that reliable).
No stagecoach customers were harmed – the pistol was loaded with real gunpowder but fired only balls of tissue. Turpin would have used lead shot.
The demos are part of the Summer Fun Events programme at the Castle Museum.
York is busy right now. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the city and August is a very popular time to make the pilgrimage. And pilgrimage is a good word for it, ever since early medieval days people have travelled to the city from far and wide.These ‘tourists’ as they are now called have always been an important part of the city’s economy.
What is surprising though, is just how many of our visitors come from the UK rather than overseas. Even before the recession introduced us to the ’staycation’ (Brits holidaying at home), 80% of York’s visitors were British.The new Prison exhibition at the Castle Museum is proving popular too, but not quite as popular as when the museum first opened….
Fiction in museums? Surely not. But they can be a source of inspiration – and we have a few recent examples to prove it.
Last year Tracey Chevalier curated an exhibition at York Art Gallery and used it to stimulate all sorts of literary activity in a wide range of folk, including some of YMT’s own staff.
In November Kate Atkinson wrote in The Guardian, talking about the Castle Museum:
“The museum was a place of miracles and wonders for me, where the rooms and streets of the past were brought to life in a way that was (and still is) thrilling. My imagination was undoubtedly nurtured by those visits; in fact I am sure that they helped to build the foundations of my becoming a writer.” (full story)
And the wider community of bloggers and online writers are following suit – here, for example, is a story for kids that uses the museum as a backdrop. So if you want to get over your writer’s block perhaps you should get along to your local museum.
York Castle Prison is a really exciting new project that has been taking up a lot of our time. We’ve just made our plans public (see this Yorkshire Post Article).
The idea is based on the fact that the Castle Museum building is an incredibly interesting historic monument in its own right. This has been a bit obscured in the past by the desire to display as much of the huge and wonderful museum collection as possible.
But, from July 17, the whole of the ground floor of the 18th century Debtors’ Prison (pictured) will be given over to telling the story of the site. And it is a truly revealing, and sometimes terribly moving, tale.
The project team has been lucky enough to have first sight of the material that the project researcher, Katherine, has discovered. All sorts of unexpected facts about the building have come to light, but for me it’s the stories of the individual prisoners and prison staff that really have most impact.
To give just one example, there is the case of William Petyt, a poor weaver who was imprisoned in the Castle at the same time as his mother, Ann. He went into the prison only for owing money, something most of us can empathise with, but he never came out. Defending his mothers’ honour, William got into a nasty scrap with the jailer and was held in an underground dungeon for 11 days as a punishment, dying a few days later. The jailer was accused but acquitted of murder; ironically his own circumstances later changed and he, himself, died as a debtor in the Castle Prison.
The latest addition to the History of York website is very seasonal – a page about Guy Fawkes and his York connections.
I knew that Fawkes was born in the city but I hadn’t realised before that he was one of three Gunpowder Plotters to have grown up here. Two of his pals from school, the brothers John and Kit Wright, were also deeply involved and ended up losing their lives because of the plot. It seems that York harboured a resistance community that was willing to kill and die for their religious cause.
If you’re in York any evening until 02 November, make sure you see this truly impressive sound and light show in Museum Gardens. I went to the opening event last week and, not having been involved in this city project, I had no idea what to expect.
It was brilliant – in every sense of the word. Huge moving projections glowed from the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey Church and the front of the Yorkshire Museum, each image appropriate to each building but timed to work together and with an evocative soundtrack.
There’s no charge, it runs from when it goes dark until about 11pm and it’s a great way to start or end an evening. Not to be missed…
