With a history reaching back some 170 years, Derby Museums was managed by the local authority until 2012 when it became an independent trust. The local authority still provides 55% of its funding. It has a turnover of £1.6-£1.8m, with a quarter of its revenue provided by Arts Council England. Footfall is approximately 120,000 people per year, although the organisation extends its reach through off-site visits and communication on social media. There are 65 members of staff, and Tony Butler has been Executive Director of the Derby Museums Trust since 2014.

Mission: A place for people to discover their place in the world

Prior to joining Derby Museums, Tony Butler ran the Museum of East Anglian Life, where he developed a social enterprise model, working in partnership with the local authority and non-profit sector, for instance mental health charities, to put the museum at the heart of a range of programmes looking at improving skills, employability and independent living. There, Butler recalls: “I explicitly started talking about the museum as a social enterprise that happened to be a museum: the creation of social capital, or bridging social capital, was the purpose.”

He also established the Happy Museum Project, which provides a leadership framework for museums to develop a holistic approach to well-being and sustainability. The project reimagines the museum’s purpose as steward of people, place and planet, supporting institutional and community well-being and resilience in the face of global challenges.

Consistent in his thinking is a discomfort with the “deficit-funded approach” often found in culture, concerned with targeting under-representation. As he says: “you can’t make everyone go to a football match”; and the same is true of museums. He does, however, believe in the essential role a museum plays in “anchoring a community”. As such: “I think we should focus on creating the conditions for habitual, everyday participation.”

“I think we should focus on creating the conditions for habitual, everyday participation.”

To do this, he is rethinking how Derby Museums explore “issues around local, national and global citizenship” through mutuality and co-production: that is, not forms of participation that require communities to engage with the museum on its terms, but ones that engage with communities on their terms – and in doing so find creative solutions to community problems. Essentially, all his work leads towards “being a host and a place for encounters”, because that is what a museum should be.

Head, heart, hands

Butler summarises the approach at Derby Museums as “encouraging people to think, feel and do”. There are two key, interrelated yet opposite activities through which this approach is being developed:

The museum “out there”

Through the project Your Place in the World, material from the world-cultures collection is being transported across Derby, to diverse community hubs including barber shops, nail bars and boxing clubs, where people are invited to talk about how they feel about the objects. “The museum holds all this stuff in trust for the public, and we have a duty to expose as many people as possible to these things. It’s not about going to places of low participation to teach, but to involve and elicit people’s responses to this material culture,” says Butler. Results of this work will be transferred into a new gallery space, built with many of the people encountered during the object walks.

Visiting communities on their own ground requires “building mutual relationships with communities”, which in turn requires “understanding that we don’t have the answers to everything, but that research and care of our cultural heritage is better when it’s done with the community, because we draw on all the social capital in the community to increase the cultural capital”. The result is a “fluidity” between institution and people, which also addresses the imperial past of the museum in a multi-cultural present context.

“The museum in here”

Using a “human-centred design” approach, the £16.5m Silk Mill redevelopment project will result, in 2020, in Derby’s Museum of Making, which aims to “inspire the next generation of makers” alongside contemplation of “how we use making to face the challenges of climate change, automation, population growth – all the challenges of the 21^st century”. To do this meaningfully, Butler argues, “we need to involve all aspects of the community in building this museum”.

Volunteer programmes have involved the local public in everything from designing a taxonomy for the new museum by moving objects around the space, to the conservation of objects, to defining how they might be displayed. In addition, a “social return investment method” is being used to evaluate the success of the project: “That requires lots of open workshops at the beginning of the process to ask people what matters to them, then judging the success of the programme on what people have told us at the outset, rather than us taking the approach of, this is what we want to build, did the people like it?”

In both of these strands, Butler emphasises the importance of the museum seeing its role not as management but stewardship, and of “building mutual relationships with our community”. In that sense, the work is a direct translation of the museum’s original purpose , to be a place for all sorts to congregate, to the present day. “The challenge that we’ve set ourselves is to take that first principle of being somewhere that everybody can access culture to somewhere that’s open and democratic and participatory.”

What next?

Butler is already navigating the effects of the Conservative government’s programme of austerity, which has resulted in a 40% cut to local authority funding, which in turn threatens the very existence of civic institutions such as museums. Time and staff capacity that might otherwise be dedicated to the development of museum activity must instead be devoted to fundraising, because “no amount of social capital will pay the electricity bills”.

None the less, he has ambitious plans for further development at Derby Museums. This includes discussion with the local authority about the possible use of library buildings to open additional space, and redevelopment of the Museum and Art Gallery to create “more of a civic space”: “an open meeting space for people to congregate and share ideas, because there aren’t many spaces like that under cover in cities any more”.

“An open meeting space for people to congregate and share ideas, because there aren’t many spaces like that under cover in cities any more”

The creation of the Museum of Making at Derby Silk Mill is breaking new ground in the way that it is being co-designed and co-produced with the public, and this sets the tone for the rest of the museums in the city. “We are thinking harder about what a civic space means in a society which is more personalised, fluid and where people expect to be able to create their own ‘cultural life’. There is a tension between individual desires and needs and solidarity, personal and communal. The museum still has a role as an anchor in the civic realm, as a nexus for social networks. This is the role the Museum of East Anglian Life played in Stowmarket and there is no reason why that cannot be scaled up to a city.”