Our problem? We’re just too great!

Andrew Morrison, our Curator of Archaeology, begins a series of blogs about the £2m transformation of the Yorkshire Museum.

andrew2

What’s our greatest problem at The Yorkshire Museum? The answer is obvious, isn’t it: we’re just too great.

That may sound like a boast – in fact, let’s face it, it is a boast – but it is the simple truth. There’s just too much important stuff and just too many fantastic stories for a provincial museum of medium size to tell.

Our greatest strength is, of course, the same thing.

Allow me to take a minute to explain just what we’ve (that ‘we’ includes you, naturally) got in the Yorkshire Museum.

We’re a science and natural history museum with one of the most historically important collection of fossils in Europe, the custodians of evidence which helped lead to Darwin’s breakthrough on natural selection.

We’re a Roman history museum with key artefacts crucial to the understanding of the Romans in Britain. The great emperor Constantine was proclaimed right here in York. We have the proof. We have the last evidence of the legendary, supposedly vanishing Ninth legion, rare statues of the Gods and a whole lot more.

We’re a museum of medieval history beyond compare in the country outside of London. The remains of the abbey, destroyed by King Henry VIII’s men, actually make up part of our building and we have the most complete and important Saxon helmet in the Kingdom.

Add to that the fact that the building is Grade I and of vast historic importance (we’re one of the oldest purpose-built museums in the world). Oh and don’t forget we’re a seat of learning with visiting academics from around the world beating a path to our doors.

So a legacy and a collection that is the pride of Yorkshire. How can you fail to present all of that? Very easily.

It can’t be confused, it can’t be boring and we have to entertain and inform both 80-year-old granddad and that five-year-old on his or her first ever trip to a museum. We want this museum to confirm its rightful place as one of York’s premier attractions, right up there with the Minster. We want the wow factor and we want to brand the museum as the one venue with the whole story of York and Yorkshire.

All of which sounds a bit grand when you find yourself knocking out plasterboard, breathing dust and wondering about the cup-of-tea factor while negotiating with the skip company and lending your mind to where that moth-eaten but much loved old stuffed bear is going to go.

We’d love you to join us and follow our progress via these blogs.

NB: Our thanks to Peter Williamson who bought ‘Swampy’ (see previous blog) for £69 for his dinosaur daft and animal crazy nephew, Jack, aged 11.

by Lee
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Save Swampy!

Curator Andrew Morrison

Andrew Morrison, Curator of the Yorkshire Museum currently undergoing a £2m refurbishment, ponders the future a much-loved museum character who he decided not to smash up with a sledgehammer.
 

I’ve known my mate Swampy for a long time now and I love him.

 

Of course loving him wasn’t going to stop me from smashing him up with a sledgehammer and chucking him in the skip.

In fact it was only the gentle persuasion of the York Museums Trust Media and Public Relations Department (ie Lee) that led to my sticking him on eBay (current bidding £56).

‘Swampy’ is a plaster and fibreglass model of a 5ft amphibian which roamed the tropical – yes tropical – swamps of Yorkshire 312million years ago.

He was a key feature in Yorkshire Museum for well over a decade and so was viewed by well over a million people. Nearly every child and a fair proportion of grown-ups felt the need to pat his head.
 
 The reason for Swampy’s existence was to help explain what ‘Yorkshire’ would have been like in the Upper Carboniferous period, a time when many of the coal seams in Britain were formed.

Emerging from a swamp, devouring a fish, this eye-catching amphibian performed his job in our old museum well – though I lost count years ago how many people wrongly thought he was a crocodile.
 
He just won’t fit into our planned new family friendly and fun Extinct gallery which will boast a real dinosaur trackway, tell the story of supposedly extinct creatures that returned ‘from the dead’ and modern interactive activities.

Swampy is just one of our characters and I’ll be telling you of others in the course of these blogs. Not that we’re going to be too sentimental. They have to do a job and fit into our new museum – or it’s the sledgehammer and the skip.

Can you save Swampy from this fate? He makes a good educational tool and he’s quirky and fun. Just don’t call him a crocodile.

swampy

by Lee
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Oak Armchair

This lovely armchair is made from oak and was made in one of a group of workshops operating in the Leeds area at this time. The decoration is Elizabethan in style and so perhaps a bit old fashioned for the time of its production. The chair was probably made for one of the new breed of Yorkshire gentlemen whose fortunes were based in the affluent towns of the West Riding, at the centre of the English clothing industry.

This group of furniture makers produced various forms at this period including chairs, chests and cupboards. Their work is characterised by its extremely good workmanship and decoration.

The distinctive design features of these workshops which can be seen in this chair include the double-scrolled pediment crest with earpieces, and the carved back panel with the diamond motif complete with pennant-like terminals.

North of England 1650-1700

by Collections Snapshots
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Prize Winning Exhibition

Lady Cockburn and Her Three Eldest Sons

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).

by Michael Woodward
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Gallery of Pots


Images of the new display at York Art Gallery, courtesy of Gelder Harvey Architects

by Michael Woodward
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Windows of Opportunity

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…

by Michael Woodward
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Bowl by Lucie Rie

Bowl by Lucie Rie

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.

by Collections Snapshots
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Pistol Shooting

Pistol Firing DemonstrationPistol Firing Demonstration

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.

by Michael Woodward
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York is Popular

Queue at Castle Musuem

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….

by Michael Woodward
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In his final blog before the opening of the York Castle Prison exhibition, Jim Butler explains what will be in the exhibition and why. 

 

The Truth and Nothing but the Truth.This one statement perhaps best sums up our ambition for this exhibition. 

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 York Castle Museum were once a gruesome prison .   The Baroque style of the Prison buildings is more greatly associated with stately homes, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that many visitors tell us they had no idea of the building’s history.  

 

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.

 Please let us know if you think we’ve achieved our aims or not and comment below.

by Lee
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