The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery (2021)
The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery
Rawtenstall, England (2021–)
Reinterpreting a small museum to explore the past, meet the present, and create the future
The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery is a fairly small museum in a park in a small town in Lancashire. The Museum underwent a major capital redevelopment, to develop new exhibitions and overhaul its existing natural and social history galleries, as well as renovating the building and creating new gallery spaces. I was taken on as the interpretation consultant, helping the museum to create the overall storyline and layout of the eight gallery spaces, selecting objects and specimens for display, writing text, and working with the museum team and the designers (Hartland Design) to realise the project. The Museum reopened in 2022.
Alongside the museum’s ‘hardware’ of exhibitions and galleries, I worked on the museum’s strategy, vision and goals, to position the museum as a key aspect of the cultural infrastructure of the town and nearby area.
Promoting everyone’s right to participate in cultural life
Interpretation explored the three traditional dimensions of sustainable development – social, environmental and economic – and how these had changed over time. Once a royal hunting forest, the area became increasingly agricultural, then industrial, and then post-industrial. The museum’s rich collection of natural and social history objects was mobilised to tell a coherent story, and to create opportunities for community exhibitions and changing art exhibitions, and for people to respond, react and share their own ideas.
The Museum’s strapline was developed as ‘explore the past, meet the present, create the future’, aligning with the transformations of society and nature that were presented in the galleries. This approach also emphasises that the future is not a set thing (as in Heritage Futures), but something that we create together.
The Sustainable Development Goals were used as a central framework, in terms of the strategy and goals, and in some exhibitions. Human rights were considered to be very important to the museum staff, and form an important aspect of exhibitions and the overall purpose of the museum. Spaces which are forward-looking ask questions, such as ‘what kind of world do we want to live in, and what kind of place do we want to live in?’, and visitors can pose questions to the museum.