Taking history into the 21st century

FRIENDS who live in Sheffield often say how lucky we are to live in York. Without taking anything away from the great South Yorkshire city, you'll find no disagreement from me there.

There is one area of Sheffield, however, that leaves York looking like a backwater: the Millennium Galleries next to the Winter Garden.

These galleries are light years away from the traditional gloomy, poky municipal art gallery. Purpose-built exhibition spaces filled with light and air, they beckon you inside and make the spirits soar.

There are four high-ceilinged glass, white concrete and marble galleries altogether, built on two levels around an internal avenue.

They include a purpose-built space to house travelling exhibitions; a craft and design gallery which, on a recent visit, was exhibiting a selection of stunning works in cloth and fabric by contemporary artists; and (of course, given Sheffield's steel history) a gallery devoted to metalwork.

They make York's public galleries and museums (not counting Jorvik and the NRM) look distinctly dowdy and old-fashioned. And not even Janet Barnes disagrees with that.

"I think that's about right," the chief executive of York Museums Trust agrees, nodding briskly.

But hold onto your horses. York's public museums and galleries aren't going to remain stuffy for very much longer, if Janet has her way.

Part of the reason the Trust was formed two years ago was precisely because the Castle Museum, the Yorkshire Museum and the city art gallery were failing to keep up with the times.

As well as being freed of bureaucratic red tape, an independent trust, it was decided, would be able to apply for funds not open to municipal, council-run galleries and museums.

Janet knows all about that because she was one of the senior curators who steered Sheffield's galleries through from the dark days of the mid-Nineties, when they were council-run and cash-starved, to the triumph of today.

The key to that was cash. Sheffield's newly formed Galleries and Museums Trust was able to tap into oodles of Millennium and European funding as part of the Heart of the City project.

York's museums aren't going to be as lucky. We've missed the boat on Millennium funding for a start - though the city did get the Millennium Bridge - and York simply isn't poor enough to attract the kind of European funding Sheffield was able to tap into, Janet says.

But there is still plenty of money out there that the Museums Trust will be able to apply for - heritage lottery funding, for example, or regional development funds.

The trick will be to demonstrate that the trust can be relied upon to put that money to good use.

After being formed in August 2002 the Museums Trust was quick to set out its credentials: reintroducing free admission to the art gallery. It was a statement of intent says Janet, who was appointed as chief executive two years ago when the Trust was formally launched.

"We were saying the gallery was a place for everyone," she says. "Saying to people that this is your gallery, your collection." It worked. Visitor numbers soared 200 per cent in the first year.

Credentials established, the Trust then needed a 'calling card' project - something to convince funding bodies it was serious about innovation and capable of carrying it through.

It decided on a revamp of the art gallery.

"As a new organisation, we wanted to do something that was not massive, not too big a project, but something to show people that we can cope," Janet says.

With the help of £272,700 of heritage lottery funding, that revamp is now under way: and all the signs are that when the gallery re-opens - hopefully in March next year - it will be almost unrecognisable.

The dingy main exhibition space on the ground floor - previously divided up into claustrophobic rooms - will have been swept away in favour of a new, open space, painted in cleaner, lighter colours and with a completely new lighting system and stripped wood floor.

It will be used to house new, challenging exhibitions of art, craft and design - some based on the gallery's own collection, others brought in - so that there will constantly be something new for visitors.

The gallery's permanent collections will be moved upstairs.

Also on the ground floor, where the shop used to be, there will be a workshop area and studio where school groups can come to paint and draw and learn about the visual arts. The foyer, meanwhile, will be taken up by a caf, which will aim to draw people in off the street.

The new exhibitions policy will aim to balance contemporary and traditional art, and to place the gallery's own collection in context. The first exhibition, Reflections, will pair off works from the gallery's own collection with masterpieces of the same age and style from other galleries - including works by El Greco, Monet and Rembrandt from the National Gallery in London. That will be followed by an exhibition of contemporary art on the theme of Forest. A ceramics exhibition is also planned.

It will, Janet promises, add up to radical change. "The gallery is going to look entirely different. The whole point is to open up space, to make it more accessible, to try and get new audiences in."

The next stage of the Trust's reinvention of York's museums will be the refurbishment - with the help of a £187,000 grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - of the Castle Museum's most famous display, Kirkgate. The Kirkgate police station, cells and bank are to be opened up so visitors can explore inside, the cobbled street is to be resurfaced - and Kirkgate itself will be brought to life with the help of museum staff in costume. "The idea is to people it: to add movement and colour and atmosphere and create an opportunity to talk with people while you are there," Janet says. Work should be starting early next year and is expected to be finished by August.

Then will come the big one. Next June, Janet and her team will start putting together details for a St Mary's Precinct Project. The idea will be to take one of the most beautiful and historically important areas of York - Museum Gardens and the buildings associated with it - and reinterpret it in a way that does it justice.

At the moment, says Janet, thousands of people pass through the gardens without ever really appreciating what is there.

It is, she says, a truly remarkable area of York. Here, in these few acres of land within the old abbey walls that stretches from Bootham and the art gallery past King's Manor to the Museum Gardens and the river, is to be found layer upon layer of history. There is archaeology from the Roman period, the Anglian period and medieval times, and architecture from the 19th century and early 20th century. St Olave's Church is on the site of one of the earliest churches in York.

And the area's scientific associations are also rich. The geological collections at the Yorkshire Museum, the observatory in the grounds of the Museum Gardens and the 'champion trees' - 18 individual trees in the gardens that are amongst the very best examples of their species and which include a pear-barked beech planted in the 1840s or 1850s - are all the legacy of the great Victorian age of discovery and scientific inquiry that left its mark here.

There is also, of course, St Mary's Abbey itself. "It's extraordinary to think that there was a huge abbey here that was almost face to face with the Minster," Janet says. "It must have been a wonderful sight."

The Museum Trust's ambition - which picks up on many of the ideas suggested a few years ago by Yorkshire Philosophical Society, the former owners of the Museum Gardens - is to open up this wealth of archaeological and scientific history.

The Trust is talking with York University about how it can open up a walk that would take you all the way from the art gallery through King's Manor and out into the gardens, then down to the river. The observatory could be opened up to the public for night-time stargazing; the Hospitium modernised as a venue for laying on events; the Tempest Anderson Hall converted into a modern conference facility.

The Yorkshire Museum is in desperate need of improvement, Janet says, with new facilities including an education room and activity area a priority, and displays being reviewed to better reflect the history and archaeology of the museum's surroundings. And she'd love to see the Museum Gardens themselves better presented, so that people using them become more aware of what is there.

The details have yet to be finalised: but the ambition is very definitely there. To achieve it could cost something like £7.5m, Janet reckons. Getting that money will not be easy. But when work begins on putting bids together next June the success of the art gallery and Kirkgate refurbishments could go a long way to persuading the funding bodies the museum trust will have to apply to that it can be trusted with those kind of sums.

It won't be a quick or easy process, Janet warns. As she knows from her time in Sheffield, putting together funding on that kind of scale takes time. But if all goes well, the next few years could mark a much-needed renaissance for York's public museums and art galleries.

Updated: 09:17 Wednesday, October 27, 2004