Does Weston Park Museum need a complete overhaul?

Good afternoon members — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.

I absolutely love museums. From the small regional ones near us in South Yorkshire to the vast collections in London, I can happily spend entire days walking around them marvelling at the treasures on show. However, it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that museums are currently a hotly-contested space, with major arguments over race and power dominating the discourse. Throw in the impact of more than a decade of austerity and the job of managing a museum becomes unenviably difficult. On Tuesday, I went down to Weston Park Museum to talk through some of these issues with a Tribune member — and met a woolly rhino called Spike.

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News round-up

🚨 A former police chief thinks he may have solved a long-running Sheffield cold case. Dawn Shields was found in a shallow grave near Mam Tor in 1994, but no one has ever been brought to justice for her murder. Now, former detective Mick Creedon thinks convicted murderer Alun Kyte, nicknamed the Midlands Ripper, may be responsible. Creedon brought Kyte to justice in 2000 and says he has boasted in prison about killing several more women.

🌊 A great story by Simon Ogden in The Star about the proposals to uncover the River Sheaf at Castlegate. Work on Sheaf Fields Park is due to start in August, but many are concerned that the current plans don’t go far enough. Ogden, who is chair of the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust, says their engineers have developed alternative proposals that would ensure the opened up part of the River Sheaf would have a naturalised and accessible bank.

🗳️ An important piece in Now Then about voting in this year’s local elections. On May 4, for the first time ever, everyone will need photo ID if they want to vote, prompting fears that those who lack traditional forms of photo ID may be disenfranchised from the democratic process. At risk groups are believed to include poorer and younger people and those from ethnic minorities. The piece also included a link for where you apply for free voter ID by 25 April.

Things to do

🎻 Manchester’s world-famous Halle Orchestra return to Sheffield City Hall on Friday night with a programme of 20th century classics. The performance will include the de Falla opera La Vida Breve, Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto and, on its 110th anniversary, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a work the composer said was “unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of spring”. Tickets are £22.50-£30.50 and doors open at 7pm.

🦋 Site Gallery will this weekend (22-23 April) be showing a series of nature-based films to coincide with Earth Day. The films have been chosen by Nature Matters, a new project from Yorkshire and North East Film Archives which explores how filmmakers have documented our changing environment over the last 120 years. The films include ones on the weather, the right to roam and activism. The free exhibition is open from 11am-5pm on both days.

🥾 On Sunday, April 23, learn about trees in a fun, informal way in Ecclesall Woods, South Yorkshire's largest ancient woodland. Volunteers from Sheffield Woodland Connections will point out notable and veteran trees and all attendees will also be provided with a link to a downloadable tree ID sheet prepared to accompany the walk. The walks are priced £7 per person plus booking fee (kids go free) and start at three times: 10am, 12pm and 2.30pm.

Does Weston Park Museum need a complete overhaul?

What is a museum? Well, a big building with stuff in it. But how are the items chosen? How did the items get there? And what should we be collecting now for the museums of the future? These are all very live issues in the museum sector, and Weston Park is no different.

For much of its history, Weston Park has been a typical museum, imparting its unquestioned wisdom in a didactic fashion. Like it or lump it. But increasingly that isn’t the way museum professionals think about them today. Speak to many in the sector today and you hear them using phrases that would have made the museum managers of the past have kittens. The displays and exhibitions of the past have given way to “having conversations” with audiences and “co-curation” — working with the communities of the city to exhibit material that is relevant to their lives and experiences.

As well as conversations and co-curation, another important word preying on museum types’ minds is decolonisation. “Decolonisation acknowledges that museums are built on Empire,” says Dr Alex Woodall, programme director for creative and cultural industries at the University of Sheffield. “They are deeply problematic institutions”. Alex is a member of The Tribune and has worked in the sector for 20 years. She now teaches museum studies and has agreed to help me find my way through thorny problems of modern day museums. We meet in the foyer and nip into the light and airy cafe for a coffee.

When our sister title the Manchester Mill did a brilliant story recently about the reopening of Manchester Museum after a multi-million pound refurbishment programme that took them five years, a reader contacted us to ask us to take a look at Weston Park. While we haven’t been lucky enough to have had the Manchester treatment, many of the same issues that our neighbours across the Pennines have been thinking about apply equally over here. All are having to do this after struggling through more than a decade worth of austerity cuts.

The modern iteration of the museum opened its doors in 2006 after a £17.3m refurbishment funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The refurb saw the museum completely redesigned and it even changed its name, from the Sheffield City Museum and Mappin Art Gallery to Weston Park Museum. As well as major structural repairs to the building, the work saw the creation of seven new display areas alongside a café, new education areas and entrances.

However even with this massive level of investment not everyone was happy. There was, Alex tells me, a “massive hoo-ha” when the Mappin Art Gallery closed down. Art lovers from the leafy west of Sheffield had grown used to having a fine art gallery on their doorstep and weren’t best pleased at the prospect of it closing. 

On Tuesday morning the museum isn’t exactly busy, but there is a school trip taking place while we’re there and a steady stream of mums and dads looking round the exhibits with their kids. It's an enjoyable place to spend time and Alex and I both find enough to keep us interested, although some parts do feel in need of a refresh. 

However, the chances of a Manchester-style rebirth seem remote. As we found out in our recent piece about the disparity in arts funding between Sheffield and Manchester, Mancunians get an astonishing seven times more spent on them per head of population than we do. While the Sheffield Museums Trust did get £814,720 in the last round of funding from Arts Council England, Alex tells me this isn’t a sum of money that is likely to make a transformative difference to a sector still struggling to recover after Covid.

This isn’t to say Weston Park has been forgotten about for the last 17 years. Ten years after it reopened in 2006, the museum was awarded £1 million from the HLF to completely revamp its archaeology and art galleries with new lighting, flooring, decoration and “futureproofed” display cases. This was followed in 2020 by a £187,000 grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport for two new galleries, one showcasing the city’s Ancient Egyptian collection and another co-curated space focusing on the people and communities of Sheffield. The chances of much more money coming from major funding organisations in the near future seems unlikely.

And organisational change has been a factor too. While Sheffield Museums’ merger with the Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust in 2020 has given the two organisations the opportunity to share objects, displays, exhibitions and ideas, it has also meant that they now have six sites to maintain across the city. Of the six, it seems Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet and Kelham Island Museum are next in line for investment not Weston Park.

The first exhibition we come across is one all about the history of Sheffield — Sheffield Past and Present. In one corner of the room a traditional butcher’s shop from Attercliffe has been transported to the gallery wholesale. A video interview with the proprietors about what the old East End of Sheffield was like plays in the background. Round the corner an old back-to-back terrace is recreated complete with washing line and soot-blackened bricks.

Elsewhere in the room heavy fixed metal display cabinets are everywhere, giving the room the look and feel of the Tardis. The cabinets have all kept their shine well but the whole thing looks very 2000s, understandably reflecting the time from when it was installed. As a result, the room doesn’t just feel like a gallery showcasing Sheffield’s past…but like an exhibition showcasing how museums used to look in the mid 00s. Presumably this isn’t intentional.