Jenny has also worked on the museum’s Nothing About Us Without Us programme, curated in partnership with the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People.
What do you think Greater Manchester is doing well, or could be better at, when it comes to people feeling included in our local heritage?
I think Greater Manchester has really strong local archive services and local museums. People feel really connected to those. I used to work at Wigan Heritage Service, and I live in Tameside, and I know there are really great services available for people there, and lots of different kinds of community projects. I think there’s really clear local history and local identity in different areas of Greater Manchester, and there are a lot of overlapping stories that are told in a lot of places. Each local history archive and museum is like a microcosm of the wider stories that exist.
There is a shared history of Greater Manchester, and I think connecting that could be done a little better. For example, we have the Rochdale Pioneers Museum, and the co-operative movement was so widespread across the Greater Manchester area – one of my favourite games is ‘spot the old co-op shop’! It’s such an interconnected story, and in so many neighbourhoods.
One of the challenges is actually that there’s so much history and so many stories, and funding in the cultural sector is an ongoing challenge, which means it’s really hard to tell all the stories in any depth.
The next question may be a bit obvious for something called People’s History Museum, but I’m going to ask it anyway – what are the gaps you’re aiming to fill with your work?
The museum was formerly called the National Museum of Labour History, so its roots are in working class history. Our focus in recent years has been around marginalised voices and stories, and making sure that those voices are heard and represented.
For example, the exhibition Never Going Underground, back in 2017, was groundbreaking in its time because it put communities at the forefront of the stories being told. In this case we had ten community curators. It’s an exhibition with a legacy that we are still carrying forward.
One of our ways of working is through co-curation and working alongside people who’ve got lived experience. Through co-curation, you discover stories that may not have been chosen by someone with a curatorial background, but the lived experience that people have shines a light on those things. This is the kind of quality of discussion you have when you’re doing co-curation work.
I remember on Nothing About Us Without Us, we had a meeting where I thought we were going to be deciding the object list for a section, and we spent the whole meeting discussing one object, because the depth of knowledge, lived experience, different perspectives that you get are so important.
I think allowing people to tell their histories with their experiences and what it means to them is really, really important. And so what we’ve been trying to do in the recent years, is fill the gaps that are in our main galleries.
Our main galleries opened in 2010, and since then so many things have changed in the world and the UK. We are aware of so many gaps in the galleries – which weren’t co-curated. They’re more traditional in the stories they tell, and there aren’t a lot of individual people’s voices. So in the gaps we’ve been trying to bring in that person-centred lived experience.
For example, our main galleries had one section in the 1950s entitled ‘migration’. And that’s where the idea came from for a whole programme about migration in 2021/2, because actually migration runs throughout the galleries, it’s not one section in the 1950s! So what we’re aiming to fill is the gaps in our own stories – because you don’t curate things in a vacuum.
The other gap we’re trying to fill is in terms of access. During Nothing About Us Without Us, which was about the fight for disabled people’s rights, we learned a lot about access. We really want to make our museum and exhibitions as accessible as they can be, and that’s in terms of things like BSL interpretation, audio description, easy read – things that will make museums accessible to disabled people as standard, rather than having to request special access.
If you imagined having a magic wand with the power to change things when it comes to local heritage, how would you want Greater Manchester to look, ideally?
If I had a magic wand, it would be to get more secure funding for the heritage sector, because that is the biggest challenge. A lot of the great work is project funded, and it is an incredibly challenging financial climate at the moment for People’s History Museum, as I know it is for the vast majority of other heritage organisations.
Since the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis, standstill funding from major funders represents a real-terms cut in budget. It’s a really intense, challenging time, and it’s very hard to do the amazing creative work that we want to against a backdrop of trying to keep the lights on.
So including annual inflation to funding would make the biggest difference to us, it would enable us to adapt to inflationary market increases and continue to build on our work.
Moving away from finance, I would want my magic wand to have the power to tackle access. It links back to resources in some ways, having the resources to embed access in everything from the start of an exhibition design process to the design of an event.
Nothing About Us Without Us was the most accessible exhibition that we’ve ever done. It had a QR code at the start of every section, which took you to a linktree, and from that, you could choose whether you wanted the BSL version, the audio narrated version, or audio description. And then there was large print, Braille, etc., for each section.
But it didn’t fundamentally change the exhibition design. Whereas, if you could fundamentally change how you design exhibitions, you’d want every object to have its own dedicated access.
I’d love to wave a magic wand that meant access was embedded in everything. It would mean that you’d have to have a lot fewer objects if you had a screen or audio point next to everything, but I’d love for disabled people to have the same level of access.
How can everyone be included and represented in a shared heritage for Greater Manchester?
I think it’s about what stories are being told, because there is a strong narrative of Peterloo, and the Pankhursts, and things like that. But there are other pioneers, other stories in Greater Manchester that you could tell.
For example, the region has also a long history of disabled people’s activism, which led to introduction of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, by Wythenshawe MP Alf Morris, who went on to become the first minister for disabled people anywhere in the world. And there are lots of other stories and areas.
Do you think that there is a dominant narrative of what our history is in Greater Manchester, and do you think that adequately reflects what you see as the ‘real’ history?
This is one of the challenges we have as the museum, because we’re People’s History Museum and are recognised as the national museum of democracy. People do often think that we’re a museum about Manchester’s history, which we’re not, but we do tell a lot of Manchester stories, because Manchester is a radical city.
A lot of the stories we share are the things that get shouted about, as I said, Emmeline Pankhurst, Peterloo. And they are really powerful because I think there is a strong narrative of Manchester as a radical industrial city – the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and a radical city that’s contributed to a lot of social change.
When you think about the different organisations in the city and across Greater Manchester, you’ve got Rochdale Pioneers Museum, Working Class Movement Library, Chetham’s Library, Pankhurst Museum, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, and they all do tell bits of the same radical story. You’ve got the Mechanics Centre, which was the birthplace of the Trades Union Congress, and that’s actually in the same building that People’s History Museum was located when it first moved up from London to Manchester.
So I think there’s quite a strong narrative, but there’s more depth that could be gone into with those things.
An initiative that I’m excited about is The Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement project, which Keisha Thompson, who was the Artistic Director and CEO of Contact, has been appointed to be the Manchester project manager.
I think that will be a really empowering project. It will expand the radical figures that we talk about, and also look at Manchester’s role in the colonial story. Because it’s told to some extent, but I think this needs to be much more explicit, which I believe Manchester would be up for.
One of the things that we have done, which will feed into our future main gallery redevelopment, is an audit of our galleries through the lens of decolonisation. Using the definition of decolonisation as the dismantling of colonial power, we have looked at what in our galleries would need to change. So for example, in the slavery section, we found things that were wrong, things that have moved on in the debate, and we identified different sections of the galleries where stories of empire were missing. This is something that I think would be really good for us to share with Keisha.
Is there anything that you would like to ask of others to help you in what you’re doing?
I suppose mine at the moment, from other people, is just understanding, because it is a really challenging time in terms of resources.
I think people often think People’s History Museum is bigger than it is, and that we’ve got more resources than we’ve got, and that is a real challenge, because people come with so many amazing proposals, be that members of the general public or other organisations that want to work in partnership. And we’re actually a really small team. So I think it’s more understanding that if we’re sort of saying, no, you can’t work on something, it isn’t because we don’t think it’s really interesting, and personally, we’d absolutely love to do that. So I think it is that understanding that everybody’s really stretched, and everybody’s really passionate and trying to do their best.
And also supporting support for each other, because at times the cultural sector can be a challenging environment to work in. Especially when you’re working on things like the legacies of slavery, it can be a really challenging subject matter, and a challenging environment to navigate in the media as well.
So I think other organisations supporting each other and sharing their learnings in those areas is really important. And also to know the bigger picture. Sometimes you can see things in the media that happen, a culture storm in another organisation, and not being quick to make a judgement I think is quite important.
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All images: People’s History Museum
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