New boss of Beamish goes back to future

Sep 22 2008 by Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

IT'S our history, it belongs to us, but how do we take Beamish Museum forward? Alastair Gilmour talks to its new director to find out.

TIME-warps are for getting stuck in. But can a moment in history have a future, can it move forward? Past and future are what Beamish Museum is all about and answers to these questions may be rooted in another era but are very relevant to tomorrow.

These questions are the remit of Richard Evans, the newly-appointed director of the multi-award-winning historical attraction. Barely six weeks into the role, he has walked the course, talked to customers, studied with staff, listened with intent and seen the future. And, it’s a living, breathing future representing the year 1913 as the pinnacle of the Industrial Revolution, a vitally important period in the development of the present North East.

Beamish is wholly dependent on the region’s contrasting characteristics of prosperity and deprivation, hard work and hard play, and enterprise and innovation driven by a class structure that could on one hand be considered repressive but which was actually a system that fostered incredible spirit and formed true character. It’s a momentum that needs to not only be kept up but intensified – therefore Richard Evans has a big job.

“The main focus is on people coming through the forge hammer at the top of the hill,” he says. “Then you meet people who explain what they do – Beamish is good at that – it’s not about information panels. Beamish is part of people’s ownership, part of their family, their town or village. It’s the colliery houses they grew up in or the ones their gran grew up in. It’s a tremendous North East archive. When you come to Beamish Museum you see real people, real fires, real bread, real chairs – and that’s very important. The future is based on these fundamentals.”

Richard has been in full charge of the 300 acre attraction since August but worked part-time for a few months whilst disengaging himself from a previous project in Yorkshire. The Grade I-listed Wentworth Castle and gardens had presented a unique restoration challenge and he had just delivered the initial plans that would open it up to the public when the Beamish opportunity came knocking.

“It was a really good programme and it was difficult to leave,” he says. “Wentworth is a Georgian mansion with an interesting range of 26 listed buildings, six follies and monuments in 600 acres of parkland, a grandiose playground for the 18th Century rich. It was a blank canvas; buildings had collapsed and it was overgrown.

“We got lottery funding and another £5m from other sources and refurbished the main house for the Northern College for Residential Adult Education. I was eager to make a good start at Beamish but I wanted to hand over the project which I’d started from nothing. It’s a bit like running your own business and I had to make sure the hand-over was safe.

“It also gave me a chance to get to know the staff at Beamish, the visitors and the local authorities over time. It’s a new personal challenge. I haven’t come from a museums background but have been managing sites for independent trusts, so it’s important for me to understand what we have here before I identify where I take Beamish Museum forward. You learn a lot more from watching people visiting than by sitting behind a computer.

“One of the great things about Beamish is its ownership. North East people understand this, they own it, it’s their museum and we want to give them a great time. That’s a very positive reaction and a very positive experience for me. What really interested me – and something that really matters – is Beamish is about ordinary folk, not the great and good, but it’s important that it’s not a cliche with flat caps.”

Beamish was the first English museum to be financed and administered by a consortium of county councils (Cleveland, Durham, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear). The idea was first proposed in 1958 and the collections were established on the site in 1970 under director Frank Atkinson who was concerned with preserving North East customs, traditions and ways of speech before they disappeared. He adopted a policy of “unselective collecting” which translates as “you offer it and we’ll collect it.” The present site was opened to visitors in 1972 with the first relocated buildings – the railway station and colliery winding engine – being erected the following year.

Richard has also spent part of his career at New Lanark Conservation Trust in Southern Scotland, a ‘new’ village built in the 1790s around a cotton mill which eventually supported 2,500 people. The settlement was one of the earliest experiments in creating a civilised working environment and improved living conditions for a workforce involved in large-scale mechanised industrial processes. It came to prominence when Robert Owen was mill manager from 1800 to 1825. Owen transformed life in New Lanark with ideas a century ahead of their time. Child labour and corporal punishment were abolished and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools, evening classes, free healthcare and affordable food.

Richard says: “New Lanark was awarded World Heritage Site status while I was project manager there. We secured European money and Lottery funding and opened a hotel on site. But I would have had to assassinate the director if I was going to get the top job (he reflects for a moment and laughs: “Actually I had a lot of time for him.”)

“Beamish has been here a long time and will be here for a long time; it’s safe, but it’s at an interesting point. How can we manage growth and still give people a good time when they come? It was a carefully chosen site, in a bowl, a place where you can visit without any outside intrusion. It’s not objects in a glass case or in a field, you’ve got to see them, touch them, that’s why people like it so much. But how do you communicate that? It’s the perception, it takes a while to explain what we have.

“Beamish can develop in lots of different ways. We’re drafting plans at the moment from our own staff and not from external sources, focusing on delivering activities and events, new things for people to come and see, so when they come they enjoy it. Plans will take 18 to 20 months or two years to come about.

“There’s one word that consistently comes back from focus groups – genuine. The new lamp cabin in the colliery gives us a chance to exhibit our terrific collection of miners’ lamps. There are new engines in the drift mine with real people telling how it was really like. There’s the dentist, the Co-op, the sweet shop – and while this is going on I’m taking time to think where Beamish should go in the future. The origins of Beamish are in rescuing stuff that was going to be scrapped and we still have buildings in the North East needing to be saved; if we don’t, they’ll be lost.

“We’re self-sufficient in operational terms which is really unusual. Most museums can’t do that, but we’re not the cheapest place to come to. Financially it’s not an easy time for people; household budgets are stretched, so we’re looking at an extended membership scheme where people can perhaps pay once and come back at different seasons to see the harvest being brought in and fields ploughed.

“Our Resource Centre is tremendous too, it has something like 600,000 images of the North East which people can book in and view. Places have memory, it’s a subtle but important issue. Memory itself is important, it’s sanctity of place but it’s hard to quantify in economic input and pounds spent.”

Given time away from 1913, Richard’s passion for the outdoors would see him spend more time rock climbing, but as in most people’s experience, priorities change.

“I’ve got young kids now so it’s difficult to get out rock-climbing but it’s all about keeping level-headed,” he says. “Like everything else, the best way is to take it easy with no dramatic lunges to the left or right. It’s not particularly a team sport, but you rely on people in a big way – if you fall off, people can catch you.

“I do like space and the North East is great for that, particularly where I live on the edges of Durham and Northumberland. It’s a great quality of life where the family and dogs can run around like lunatics. On a personal level, it’s one of the reasons I came to the North East.”

Richard has a clear and confident vision for Beamish forming in his mind which he outlines with great enthusiasm and a perceptively genuine love for his new challenge. Time-warped he is not.

However, there’s one thought that clouds his vision and makes him backtrack slightly as an inheritor of “unselective collecting”.

“The sheds,” he says. “We still have sheds stuffed with objects.”