Memorandum submitted by Stoke-on-Trent
Museums Service
1. EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
1.1 The Designated collections of Stoke-on-Trent
Museums Service have local, regional and national significance.
The service is part of the West Midlands regional museum hub but
also has an international profile, attracting visitors from outside
the region and from abroad. Although it is a discretionary service,
the City Council has maintained a high level of commitment to
its museum service, supported by external funding streams. Renaissance
in the Regions has enabled the service to recruit new staff and
invest in improvements to meet the changing expectations of visitors.
MLA funding has also facilitated the creation of a national subject
specialist network, designed to share knowledge, expertise, research
and interpretation skills across ceramics museums. Stoke-on-Trent's
collections have their roots in the local ceramic heritage but
also have a diversity that opens up points of entry into the wider
world. The ability to engage in dynamic contemporary collecting
is constrained by the lack of a significant purchase fund and
limited physical capacity. Rare and unique objects require high
standards of care. The development of regional museum hubs and
other partnerships provide opportunities for a collaborative approach
to strategic collections development and the pooling of skills
and resources.
2. STOKE-ON-TRENT
MUSEUM SERVICE
2.1 Stoke-on-Trent Museums Service comprises
The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, the Gladstone Working Pottery
Museum, the Etruria Industrial Museum and Ford Green Hall. It
is part of Stoke-on-Trent City Council's Department of Regeneration
and Heritage.
2.2 Each of the four sites operated by the
service has its own distinctive characteristics. The Potteries
Museum and Art Gallery is a purpose-built multi-disciplinary museum.
The first new local authority museum to open in the post war era,
the museum was extended during the late 1970s to create the present
building. More than 650,000 individual objects are preserved at
the museum and its collections have local, regional and national
significance. The museum also has an international profile. Its
collection of Staffordshire pottery is acknowledged as the finest
in the world. Recent additions include Victorian Minton and Doulton
ware, works by Turner prize winner Grayson Perry, and a major
collection of 20th century studio ceramics. The displays also
include a Mark 16 Spitfire, designed by the locally-born Reginald
Mitchell.
2.3 The Gladstone Working Pottery Museum
brings the traditions of the North Staffordshire pottery industry
vividly to life through demonstrations and first person interpretation
within the unique setting of an historic "potbank".
The museum also houses Flushed with Pride, which tells the story
of the toilet, and a superb tile gallery, both of which were developed
with support from the ERDF and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Gladstone
also houses the Ceramic Century digital history archive, which
records the life-stories, skills and techniques of pottery workers.
2.4 The Etruria Industrial Museum is centred
round a scheduled ancient monument, Jesse Shirley's Etruscan Bone
and Flint Mill, Britain's sole surviving steam-powered potters'
mill. Ford Green Hall, a yeoman farmer's house built in 1624,
is the oldest surviving domestic building in the city. It is furnished
with original and reproduction textiles, ceramics and furniture
according to contemporary inventories to offer an insight into
17th century life and provides an attractive learning resource
for local schools and other visitors.
2.5 Together, the four museums tell the
unique story of the Staffordshire Potteries, its people, products
and landscape. Their collections have depth, diversity and richness
and in 1997 were all Designated as outstanding.
2.6 Around 240,000 people visit the museums
every year, around 75% of whom live locally. More than 20,000
children visited in school groups, with many more visiting in
family groups or with friends during their leisure time. The museums
offer a wide range of opportunities for learning, study, research
and enjoyment. Groups of young people with learning styles which
are not well served by the school environment often respond positively
to work with our collections.
2.7 Information services, including a comprehensive
website, are well used by the public and the service has a strong
track record in improving access, particularly for people with
disabilities. A variety of public and specialist services, ranging
from object identifications to consultancies, are also offered.
2.8 Research from MORI shows that the Potteries
Museum & Art Gallery is having significant success in attracting
audiences from all sections of society. The latest survey, carried
out in 2005, shows that 43% of the museum's visitors are from
the lower income social groups C2DE. Regionally, only 29% of museum
visitors are from these groups, while nationally the figure falls
to only 23%.
2.9 The survey also shows a very high satisfaction
level (76% "very satisfied" and 20% "fairly satisfied")
with 46% of visitors saying that their visit exceeded expectations.
The number of people saying that they were "very satisfied"
had increased significantly from the 2004 figure of 43%. Across
the West Midlands, the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery is perceived
to be the most enjoyable museum to visit. 98% of visitors said
that they enjoyed their visit, 62% said that they were "inspired"
by their visit, and almost all visitors felt that the collections
are laid out in a way that is easy to understand (97%). Of all
the museums surveyed in the West Midlands, the Potteries Museum
was the most likely to be visited to take the children or attend
an event. At the same time, the proportion of repeat visitors
(82%) is much higher than the national average (59%). One in five
was a regular visitor, making at least 10 visits a year. 14% of
visitors were "true new users" against a DCMS target
of 8%.
2.10 Stoke-on-Trent Museum Service is part
of the West Midlands regional museum hub, which is supported through
the Renaissance in the Regions initiative, which aims to improve
standards of excellence throughout the sector.
3. FUNDING
3.1 Stoke-on-Trent Museum Service is currently
part of Stoke-on-Trent City Council's Regeneration and Heritage
Department. The City Council has in the past looked at the possibility
of transferring the service to a trust and further exploration
of this option is being undertaken. Like all museum services of
a similar size, it has an audience base that far exceeds its local
funding base.
3.2 To one degree or other, all the major
regional museums experience a mismatch between available resources
and user demand. All have large and significant collections, which
are costly to maintain and preserve for future generations. Uniquely
among local government services, museums need to draw on current
expenditure to pay for future benefits ("intergenerational
equity") and yet they remain a discretionary function. Stoke-on-Trent
has around 250,000 residents, but more than half a million people
live within 30 minutes driving time of its museums. Although the
museums have a strong local audience base, they also attract visitors
and other users from outside the region and from abroad.
3.3 The museum service relies on the council's
revenue budget for core funding. As a discretionary service, it
faces strong competition from other service areas. Like other
local authorities, Stoke-on-Trent City Council has found it necessary
to impose constraints on spending in order to avoid large increases
in Council Tax. During the past 10 years, net expenditure on cultural
services in Stoke-on-Trent has steadily reduced as a proportion
of the total net expenditure for all General Fund Committees.
This trend was already well established when the city became a
unitary authority in 1997. Since then, strategic priorities have
meant that resources have been focused on large statutory service
areas such as Social Services and Education, rather than on discretionary
services such as museums and galleries. Despite this, the City
Council has still maintained a high level of commitment to the
museum service and has made a significant capital investment in
improvements to the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Gladstone
and Etruria.
3.4 During the 1990s staffing levels fell,
primarily as a result of vacant posts being frozen. A new staffing
structure was agreed in 2001, which sought both to reflect the
changing needs and expectations of museum audiences and address
organisational strain. The new structure brought all the curatorial
staff together into a single team, headed by a Collections Development
Officer, with overall responsibility for the use and management
of all the collections and related information. At the same time,
more resources were allocated towards the key priority areas of
learning and access, ensuring that material from our collections
is available to all sections of the community.
3.5 Year on year efficiency savings have
inevitably meant cutbacks in revenue expenditure on museum services,
but this has been masked by a refocusing of resources and success
in accessing short term external project funding to undertake
developmental work. A major digitisation programme, offering electronic
access to many areas of the museum collections, was made possible
by the New Opportunities Fund, for example. Improvements to collections
care, displays, interpretation and documentation systems have
been supported through the Designation Challenge Fund. The Potteries
Museum and Art Gallery was one of 15 regional museums that benefited
from the Contemporary Art Society's Special Collection Scheme.
This initiative was funded by the Arts Council Lottery between
1997 and 2004 and enabled these museums to acquire 610 works of
fine art and craft by 313 different artists and makers with a
total purchase price of almost £3 million. Each participating
museum was able to spend £30,000 each year on acquisitions,
with a further £2,500 for curatorial research and travel.
Additional funding has been secured from lottery distributors
such as HLF and ACE, from grant-giving agencies and foundations,
from the EU Culture 2000 programme, through Regeneration streams,
from the Museum Friends, through sponsorship, and through Field
Archaeology contractual work
3.6 The museum service has learnt to balance
increasing expectations against decreasing resources through efficient
management and re-prioritisation. It has managed to "do more
with less" and has avoided making cuts in the areas which
have greatest impact on service users, such as exhibitions, educational
programmes or opening hours. However, bbefore Renaissance in the
Regions came on stream, it was difficult to plan developmental
work in a strategic way. Although we have been able to lever in
partnership funding from a variety of sectors, by demonstrating
ways in which we help to deliver wider agendas, this has sometimes
been opportunistic and is almost always short-term and project-based.
3.7 The MLA's Renaissance in the Regions
initiative has enabled the service to address infrastructure issues
and to invest in service improvements that would be impossible
to deliver from core revenue funding. Renaissance has enabled
the recruitment of 15 additional staff during 2003-06, developing
our capacity to meet the changing needs and expectations of visitors
and develop new initiatives. MLA funding has also facilitated
the creation of a national subject specialist network, designed
to share knowledge, expertise, research and interpretation skills
across ceramics museums.
3.8 There needs to be more clarity and consistency
about the funding streams and distribution. There is logic for
a single agency to represent all museums to provide coherence,
encourage collaborative working and facilitate the delivery of
common objectives.
3.9 People have very high expectations
of the service, which are difficult to sustain on the present
funding base. Many people consider Stoke-on-Trent's museum service,
and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in particular, to be
a national and international resource. Some regard the Potteries
Museum as the first port of call for expertise in British ceramics,
ahead of the Victoria and Albert Museum by some distance. A correspondent
from Virginia, USA, writes that "the international value
of the research conducted at the museum is immeasurable".
Another describes the museum as "the prime world site for
ceramic history".
4. COLLECTIONS
DEVELOPMENT, ACQUISITION
AND DISPOSAL
4.1 Collections are what make museums unique.
They exist to preserve and present collections for the public.
Their collections often act as a "memory bank" for a
local community, contributing to a sense of identity by interpreting
its history and heritage. However, communities change, and museum
collections and the way in which they are presented and understood
must reflect the changing identities of our communities. Collections
relate as much to the present and the future as they do to the
past.
4.2 While many museums have their roots
in a particular locality, their collections often have a diversity
that enables people to connect the local with the global, opening
up points of entry into the wider world. In Stoke-on-Trent, for
instance, there are obvious connections between the local ceramic
heritage and European, Islamic and Far Eastern ceramics.
4.3 There is a clear need to continue to
develop collections. A dynamic collecting policy should be responsive
to contemporary needs and our collections more representative
of the lives of people within our communities. Our contemporary
collecting and oral and digital history programmes provide an
opportunity to embed outreach activity within mainstream museum
practice.
4.4 Our collections, like those of many
other large regional museums, have their origin in the 19th century.
The focus of the early museums was to help improve the standard
of design in the pottery industry, primarily through the collection
of `exemplary' ceramic material. Other collections of fine and
decorative arts, natural history, archaeology and social history
evolved through gifts, bequests and purchases. Some items have
terms and conditions attached. A collection of cow cream jugs,
for example, must be kept on permanent display according to the
terms of the bequest. We would not now accept material with such
conditions attached, and would query whether such historical conditions
should still apply.
4.5 Few museums currently have the resources
individually to develop and sustain an ambitious programme of
focussed collecting. Like many other museums, our ability to collect
contemporary art (or any other material, for that matter), is
constrained by the lack of a significant purchase fund and limited
physical capacity. Much contemporary art also presents "housekeeping"
problems. New media works often incorporate complicated equipment,
with built-in obsolescence, that is difficult to display and expensive
to maintain. We do not have in-house technicians or conservators.
There is a need to develop more effective models of collaborative
working in order to address these challenges.
4.6 The Contemporary Art Society's Special
Collection Scheme offers one model for strategic collections development.
Participating museums were asked to identify an idea or theme
which would provide a framework for acquiring new works. The Potteries
Museum and Art Gallery chose to explore ways in which traditional
notions of "art" and "craft" might be challenged
by "Blurring the Boundaries". Contemporary artists with
a "fine art" background were invited to use the language
of craft in a playful or ironic way. The works purchased are predominantly
in ceramics, and artists represented include Grayson Perry, Mona
Hatoum, Richard Slee, Jacqueline Poncelet and Edmund de Waal.
An important factor of the scheme was the incentive it gave to
Local Authorities/Governing Bodies to make a modest investment
in collecting which then levered in significant additional funding.
This scheme was a remarkably successful short term initiative,
but long term, sustainable collecting requires a properly resourced
national framework. It is not clear where the responsibility for
this should lie.
4.7 The North Staffordshire Potteries are
in a period of rapid economic change, as factories close and traditional
skills are no longer required. One effect of this is the loss
of company-owned historic collections that have enormous local
resonance. When Royal Doulton decided to dispose of the Minton
Museum in 2002, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery attempted
to negotiate a private treaty sale in order to keep this important
historic collection together. Royal Doulton withdrew from the
negotiations and decided to sell the collection at auction. The
museum was able to purchase a significant number of items at the
subsequent auction in July 2002, with a grant from the Heritage
Lottery Fund, but many items were sold to overseas buyers. Because
the collection was broken down into individual lots, these did
not fall within the remit of the export review system. Having
established the principle that their collections were disposable
assets that could be sold to offset a small proportion of their
accumulated debt, Royal Doulton proceeded to sell the contents
of their own Museum at auction in October 2004. Again the Potteries
Museum & Art Gallery was able to acquire some significant
pieces, but the collection was dispersed and many key items lost
from the public arena. Although we secured HLF support, their
bidding guidelines allow only a 10% margin above the expert valuation,
with no discretion provided. This meant that the museum failed
to acquire a number of pieces by a very small margin indeed.
4.8 Like many other museums we have developed
productive relationships with private collectors, exchanging information,
borrowing material for exhibitions and persuading then to donate,
bequeath or sell material to the museum. Our good relationships
with ceramic collectors and societies have led to a significant
number of acquisitions, including the purchase of an important
collection of studio ceramics.
4.9 In recent years, there has been a growth
in the number of treasure items being offered to the museum, mainly
as a result of the success of the treasure legislation and process.
In the past, treasure items unearthed locally tended to be taken
up by the National museums, but they are now increasingly being
acquired by regional museums. Sometimes, an object discovered
in one locality can have particular resonance in a variety of
other places. One such object was a Romano-British enamelled bronze
pan decorated with images of Hadrian's Wall that was uncovered
by metal detectorists in the Staffordshire Moorlands. This is
now the joint property of the British Museum, the Potteries Museum
and Art Gallery and Tullie House Museum, Carlisle, acquired under
a unique agreement that enables the pan to be displayed at each
site for a 12 month period. Joint acquisitions such as this may
provide one blueprint for future collecting.
4.10 There is currently much discussion
around the idea that, collectively, the holdings of individual
museums represent a "distributed national collection".
We believe that there is scope to give credibility to this idea
through collaborative activity such as shared stores and the development
of common reference collections. The idea of a "holding"
collection, that made material available to museums as and when
they were able to display it, may be worth exploring. There may,
however, be resistance from donors, who wish to see objects located
in a particular local collection.
4.11 While there is a presumption against
the disposal of objects in our Acquisitions and Disposal Policy,
there is some duplication within our collections and we have limited
space for storing reference material. Where possible, we seek
to transfer such material to another museum that can make productive
use of it. We do believe that there is a need for more flexibility
in this area, although we would not favour transferring objects
to owners in the private sector even if this increases public
access in the short term. This would be likely to deter potential
donors and there may also be legal problems, as the objects may
be seen by private sector owners as assets that can be disposed
of on the market.
4.12 There is little point in collecting
material if it is not properly cared for. Designated collections
by their nature contain a high proportion of important, rare and
unique objects that require the highest standards of care. Many
museums are inadequately resourced to meet these standards for
either new uses or the storage of existing collections. However,
the development of regional museum hubs and other partnerships
provide opportunities for a collaborative approach to common problems
and the pooling of resources.
4.13 There is also scope for much greater
collaboration between the national and regional museums. We believe
that the obligations of the nationals to the wider museum sector
should be made explicit. For example, they should offer much greater
access to support services, such as conservation facilities, which
few regional museums can afford to operate themselves. This should
be a central part of any future national strategy for museums.
September 2006
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