Images of the new display at York Art Gallery, courtesy of Gelder Harvey Architects
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…
This is probably one of the most celebrated types of bowls produced by Lucie Rie – the dribbly iron glazed rim is a famous design feature of her work. It’s a large bowl (over 28cm in diameter) and has warped slightly due to its size. Rie threw her pots with very thin walls and then made them even thinner by cutting back the pot with a razor.
The bowl, along with 42 other pieces, was given to us by the collector Henry Rothschild (1913 – 2009). Rothschild was a hugely influential figure in the British crafts scene and founded the Primavera gallery in London in 1945.
Rothschild had a particular affection for bowls and described this bowl as his favourite, his “Desert Island Disc pot”.
Lucie Rie (1902 – 1995)
Bowl 1949 is on Display in the new Gallery of Pots at York Art Gallery.
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….
In his final blog before the opening of the
Of course we want an entertaining exhibition: something to grab the attention, something fun.
But for us it had to be more than that. It couldn’t be tacky and it couldn’t be exaggerated.
It had to have truth.
But what is the truth? The nature of history means that it is open to interpretation and therefore the ‘truth’ may never be uncovered. However, we have sought-out and used every trace of evidence we could find (even meeting descendents of prisoners on the other side of the world) to guide and inform our vision of the Prison in the eighteenth century. We feel we’ve achieved the most accurate representation as possible, but it will be for you the public to judge if we have succeeded and we will greatly value any comment you have to make (see below).
Another key element for us is to show that the buildings that we all know and love as
That’s one reason why the first half of the exhibition highlights the real, thick-walled, dark and dank cells where thousands of poor souls were incarcerated.
The idea is to offer visitors an ‘immersive experience’ which means we attempt to give an impression of what it was like to actually be in the gaol in the 1700s .
We have films of each of our real-life characters in individual cells, the very places they were once limprisoned. Amidst the sounds of chains rattling, doors slamming and children playing (reflecting the fact that some children were born and lived inside the grim walls), the first character our visitors will meet will be the turnkey, Thomas Ward, a thoroughly corrupt, nasty piece of work, who will make it quite clear it wasn’t just the prisoners who were rogues and scoundrels.
We hope that we get some atmosphere across with our strong stories but fall short of traumatising the children. We aim to show that some of the prisoners were perhaps jailed unjustly - whilst others deserved to be there.
Our thinking in the second half of the exhibition is to show where the prison fitted into the wider context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – times of great judicial change and prison reform. So we’ll feature a ‘what happened next?’ room where you can find out what happened to our characters mapped against a timeline of other significant events.
In addition, to encourage people to undertake their own research we have our database of names where you can find out if your ancestors were once incarcerated , executed or transported from here. There’ll also be a digital projection showing a virtual timeline of how the Castle site of the museum, Crown court and Clifford’s Tower has evolved from the days of William the Conqueror to today’s familar landscape .
Finally, there will also be a tiny cell adorned with photos of former inmates. Here visitors can contemplate what life must have been like in the Prison for those people whilst listening to the haunting poetry of a former inmate.
So how have we managed this fine balance of Entertainment, atmosphere and poetry coupled with cold, hard, unexaggerated fact? You’ll have to visit to find out, but trust me, like much to do with this prison, the detail is in the Execution.
In the fourth of his blogs Jim Butler gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build-up to our new major
We knew from the outset of this project that by unearthing the Prison’s history we would encounter troubling and emotive issues.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing accounts we discovered was the tragic tale of Martha Chapel, a teenager who killed her newborn baby and was hanged for murder six weeks later.
Complaining of being ill and in pain she gave birth, alone, on June 15, 1803 and the baby, a girl, was found dead shortly afterwards. A doctor said Martha must have killed the baby with her own hands. Martha defended herself, saying she was rendered delirious with pain and, having never given birth and with no idea what was happening, mangled the child whilst trying to hasten the delivery
In the third of his blogs Jim Butler gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to our new major York Castle Prison exhibition.
The Luddites, named after their fictional leader Captain Ned Ludd, were skilled textile workers forced into poverty by the machines of the industrial revolution and the wars against France and the USA. At a time when unions were banned, they formed illegally with the hope of relieving their plight.
In his second blog about the build-up to our forthcoming York Castle Prison exhibition, Jim Butler, Learning Manager, tells the tale of the last woman in
Elizabeth Boardingham, a victim of her time and a ‘must’ character for our Prison exhibition. Although tragic by today’s standards,
Murder! Murder!
Soon after she ran off with one Thomas Aikney who, late one night following her husband’s release, stabbed John twice before running off. John staggered into the street, pulled out the knife, and cried ‘murder! murder!’ before collapsing, quite dead. Aikney was caught and later convicted of murder but blamed
Jim Butler, Learning Manager, gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to the opening of the
It’s a strange fact that York Prison was always a tourist attraction, right from when it opened in 1705.Back then people would peer through the fence to glimpse the inmates and good money was paid for the thrill of meeting a notorious criminal in the flesh.
However, visitors to the York Castle Prison can forget the