Introducing: Iain Watson & Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums

For this month's interview we are introducing Iain Watson, director of the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.  TWAM are a museum, art gallery and archives service, working to preserve, promote and make accessible arts and culture in the North-East. From a vast range of invaluable projects run by the organisation in the local community, to the wider impact of Covid-19, Iain gave DUAS some insight on arts and culture in the North-East and beyond. 

Amana: Please could you start by telling me a bit about you?

Iain: I’m director of Tyne and Wear archives and museums... until the end of March! I’m actually retiring at the end of March 2021. I will still do lots of cultural and creative things but in a different format.

My job involves running 9 museums, art galleries, heritage sites – a complete range across Tyneside, from Roman forts to contemporary art galleries, galleries of design, industrial museums, one railway… it’s a very varied heritage portfolio. My first degree is in Archaeology – I specialised as an archaeological scientist and my first proper job was actually doing research for Durham university. I then trained to be a teacher, again in Durham (at Hild Bede), qualified as an English teacher and was looking for a job when one came up in a museum. I was lucky enough to get that role and have now worked in museums, libraries and archives for the last thirty-five years, including running what was the Durham light infantry museum and Durham art gallery when they were based up at Aykeley heads. I’ve worked for the present organisation for 19 years and have been director for 10.

Image: Tyne and Wear archives website

Wow, a long time. So, you must be well-versed in this area.

I know it inside out; I know the organisation inside out. What I love about my present job is that variety – I might be at the Laing art gallery talking to some contemporary artists, I might be at the Stephenson railway museum talking to our volunteers who spend their time with massive spanners about a metre long adjusting the wheels on a working steam locomotive, I might be at a Roman fort talking to enthusiasts about Roman Britain, I might be at Discovery museum talking to some of our retired engineers who are fascinated by the history of science and want to tell the stories of some of the great innovators and inventions of the North-East. While I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in any of those areas I love having just enough knowledge to be able to have conversations with people across that whole variety of art, heritage, culture, science; the stories that we tell in our museums and galleries.

There’s a lot to be gained from taking all of those things together rather than just in isolation.

So, talk to me a bit more about TWAM and what you do.

Basically, we manage museums and archives services for nine local authorities and for Newcastle University. We work for the four Tyneside local authorities: Newcastle City, North Tyneside, Gateshead and South Tyneside and we run seven museums for them, and we run the Great North Museum Hancock and the Hatton Gallery for Newcastle University. We also run a regional archives service. The basic difference is that archives are the paper historical record – of businesses, public bodies, individuals, and families (we have 20km of paper records in out headquarters building which tell that whole story of Tyne and Wear). The area is particularly strong in industrial records – so ship building, marine engineering, mining.

Image: Packet of Hall-Mark Special Value Tea, 1914, from South Shields Museum, Tyne and Wear Archives website 

We have about 1.5 million objects in the museum collection, ranging from contemporary artworks that have been acquired through some generous gifts from the contemporary art society, through to fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old. So, it’s that complete spectrum – through to collecting most recently rainbows people had painted for the NHS, it’s a moment in time, you’re recording that creative output that people produced during the early months of lockdown.

So the organisation do a lot of work with the local community?

Absolutely. Most of what we do is what you would call a universal service – it is open to anyone who walks through the door. But straightaway some people are not going to be able to walk through the door because maybe they’re housebound, maybe they’ve not got the money to get on a bus and come in – whatever it might be; universal service is technically available to everyone but not everyone can access it. We also provide what we would call targeted service, so for instance we work with people who have been in the criminal justice system and their families. We work with people in substance recovery and people who have experience of alcohol or drug issues and their families, we work with people with mental health issues, with older people, communities, LBTQ+ groups and BAMER groups… We work with a whole variety of different people, trying to reflect the diversity of the communities around us as much as is possible – but you are not going to be perfect in this. You work, you encourage people to engage and to tell their stories, but our aim is for people to be able to see themselves in our museums and galleries – that has to be the goal that we work towards. And we are not there – there’s work to do.

"We work with a whole variety of different people, trying to reflect the diversity of the communities around us as much as is possible – but you are not going to be perfect in this. You work, you encourage people to engage and to tell their stories, but our aim is for people to be able to see themselves in our museums and galleries"

So you’ve spoken a bit about how you started working with TWAM and the kind of work TWAM does. What was it about this organisation that drew you in?

I think it’s an organisation which has, for over 30 years, been committed to a community approach. It has been committed to doing things not on behalf of people, but with people. This work was led by my predecessor, David Fleming, who then went on to be director of national museums Liverpool. In the 1990s we were one of the first organisations to have a community outreach officer: somebody dedicated to going out of the building and reaching out to communities.

One of the stories that I really like – a real story – is from working with adults with learning disabilities. You start by providing a bus or transport to bring people in and they’re treated like VIPs, they get a special tour round, but the mission is to stop treating people like VIPs so they can come in like you or I could go in, like anybody else would. Some of that is giving people the confidence to know that they can set their alarm clock, they can wake up at a time when they can go and get a bus, they can have some money in their pocket to get the bus, and they can make that journey themselves to come into the museum or gallery. When you talk to people who have been through this journey, they can tell you how validated they feel that they’re not treated in that ‘special’ way – they’re treated like anyone else. Most people want to be treated like anyone else, they don’t want to be treated as special. It obviously depends on the group you’re working with - sometimes you do need to make specific adjustments.

"It’s an organisation which has, for over 30 years, been committed to a community approach. It has been committed to doing things not on behalf of people, but with people."

On your website you say your hope for the future is for "everyone to have access to museum and archive provision in Tyne and Wear, to use this access and to value it for the significant and positive impact that it makes upon their lives.”

 How does that actually work in practice? What are some projects which manifest this vision?

At the moment we’ve got a project called Pea Green Boat (supported by the Tyne and Wear Community Foundation), which is working with refugees and asylum seekers to train up volunteers to give guided tours of our building. We all know that it’s much easier to identify with someone who has shared life experience as opposed to someone who has a different life experience. This has been a very powerful project. The people doing the training gain real skills but are also validated by the fact that they are then able to help their friends, their family, by sharing that knowledge. Even though we might say “Oh please come in, everyone is welcome”, it might be really hard to believe that if you’ve been through a traumatic experience, you’ve fled economic hardship, you’ve fled persecution, whatever it might be.

The other project that really sticks in my mind is a little older – we did it in the 2000s - called Culture Shock. We recorded about 750 digital stories of people from across the community. They each identified an object in one of the collections in the North-East and then used that object to tell a story – it was really powerful and moving. We had a celebration day, where two people individually came up to me and said “this project changed my life” – and they had different reasons as to why it changed their life. In those moments you just think “this is why we’re here.”

It just shows how powerful art can be in bringing communities together and giving people a sense that they are heard... In recent times with Covid-19, your organisation has been impacted. How do you think your organisation has been affected and how do you think that has impacted the distribution of art in the North-East, people’s experience of the arts and the future of galleries?

Well, obviously, it is a really difficult time. We had a long lockdown from the middle of March through to July, and we opened our sites on a staggered basis through July and August. The Hatton Gallery has never reopened because it physically sits within the teaching department of Newcastle University so there were obvious concerns about mixing public and students. The Northeast is now in tier three, which means museums and galleries can't reopen. We don't anticipate being able to open before the new calendar year.

There is some immediate impact: visitors can't come in and physically enjoy what we've got. When we were open for the couple of months, we had the most fantastic response from the public. People were so grateful that we were open. They really appreciated all the work we had done to make it safe.

We’re having to do things in different ways. For instance, we launched a campaign just yesterday – a crowd funder to provide loan boxes for schools in the most deprived areas of Newcastle.  Normally schools would come and do visits to museums, now we’re doing teaching via Zoom. Our learning staff have stood in a gallery with an iPhone and walked around showing what they're doing. We’re learning that you need more digital skills to be delivering the sort of quality of work that people are expecting.

(Image: A 1970s Washington play park. Photo from Tyne & Wear Archives, Tyne and Wear Archives Website)

I mentioned that we collected the rainbows people put in their windows, and we also asked people to send us samples of their hair from their first haircut after lockdown. That went viral – it was picked up by national broadcast media because it's such a lovely story.  We've collected people's diaries, we asked people to send in their records of lockdown. An amazing number of people recorded their experience of lockdown, whether it was an old-fashioned paper diary, whether it was a blog, it's the same thing. My own father, who's eighty-eight, writes every day about what he thinks and feels about lockdown. I think for people it's a therapy. We’ve collected some of that information to record what it's been like living through this this pandemic.

How has the pandemic impacted your financially? The Arts Council offered some funds to help organisations to get back on their feet after the first lockdown. Have you received any of that funding?

Yes, it has kind of deferred to two main rounds of funding. We weren't successful with the first emergency funding round but we did receive funding from the cultural recovery fund in that second round – about £387,000 – which sounds like an awful lot of money, but then we turn over about nine million pounds a year. If you're an individual artist, living on individual commissions, it's very different to running an organisation like we do; the pressures are different and sometimes immediate funding challenges are different. I also think a lot of internal artists – freelancers – have had a really, really tough time.

We’ve managed to avoid any redundancies, but obviously we haven't employed as many casual staff as we would have done in other circumstances. We've just kept our expenditure to an absolute minimum and, where we were able to, furloughed people. The culture recovery fund enables us to get through the 31st of March next year but now we are working on what our budget looks like the next year, and that will be challenging, because public funding will be under pressure again.

 Particularly in reaction to the government’s response to the impact of covid-19 on arts and culture, there’s been a sense of a network of artists, gallery leaders and project leaders. Have you experienced this kind of coming together of the creative community in your line of work?

I think there's some really important networks. What’s been really interesting, right from the very early days of the lockdown, has been the ways people have worked together. I'm very involved with several big networks. One is the English civic museums network, which is museums like ourselves around the country, and that has been fantastic. We were meeting every week at the start of the lockdown and now meet once a month.

On Tyneside, we have Newcastle and Gateshead cultural venues.  It goes across the performing arts, the visual arts, culture and heritage. At the moment we meet every fortnight on Zoom, and there's always a lot to share. One of the things we’ve been working hard on is a response to Black Lives Matter. We've also obviously been sharing information, doing joint marketing, and supporting each other. I think those networks are really important. We have also just set up a North-East cultural venues network. People have really valued the chance just to meet and share with colleagues because, even if you're quite different organisations, you may be experiencing very similar things, and it's just quite validating to realise that you're not on your own. It's been one of the big things to come out of Coronavirus, that sharing. Even this call – there are some frustrations with Zoom but it also gives us some real opportunities to get together and share.

Exactly, this blog (DUAS Loop) has actually come about in part because of Covid-19.

We’ve spoken a bit about the impact Coronavirus on the arts. What did you think of the government’s response regarding support for the arts? Do you feel that it has been sufficient?

I think it is very nuanced. It will be very different for different communities. I think for some of the larger organisations, the help has been life-saving and life-changing; it was really important to us to get that £387,000. I think the big fear for people running organisations, like myself, is what next financial year looks like. We're not aware of any additional resources next year and we can be fairly sure that visitor numbers and income levels will not have returned to what we need them to be.

I think what's really important is a join-up across government. So, you have the Arts Council, and then the National museums are supported by Department of Culture, Media and Sport, but an awful lot of arts and culture is supported by local authorities. Their budget comes from the Ministry of housing Communities and Local Government. University museums are supported through the Department of Education, and through the business department. The government bringing all these parts together is a real challenge. There needs to be a kind of unified approach, and people need to talk to each other across government.

In fact, the national museum directors Council, of which I'm Vice Chair, have recently established what's called an all-party parliamentary group on museums, so people from all political parties coming together to use their influence to lobby on a particular cause.

"We need to ensure that culture is recognised for the value that it provides, that culture is supported."

Whoever is in power in the coming years is going to have a massive financial challenge, with the level of borrowing that has been done. At some point, borrowing, by nature, has to be paid back, so either there will be tax rises or reductions in public spending, or an element of both of those. We need to ensure that culture is recognised for the value that it provides, that culture is supported. It was good to see that in terms of the levelling up funds, galleries and museums were specifically mentioned by Chancellor Sunak.

Do you think attitudes towards the arts have changed as a result of the lockdown?

I think things have changed on an individual level – people have done things they wouldn't have, so for example some knitting and crochet or picking up a pad and sketching. What they've missed out on are some of those brilliant gallery experiences. We will have seen exhibitions open and close but never physically open to the public – it’s a weird thought. It's an interesting thought when thinking about the role of an artist; what does it mean for an exhibition to have a run and close in lockdown? An exhibition that’s never been seen as an exhibition – what is its value? How do you interpret it? I'm not saying I have a view either way on that, but I think it would be interesting to explore that loss. When is the last time people have been uplifted? When have they had their attitudes challenged or changed? Who would have had the enjoyment, who would have had the fun? Who would have had the sense of awe and wonder, by seeing that exhibition? That is a powerful loss, and we shouldn't underestimate it.

"It's an interesting thought when thinking about the role of an artist; what does it mean for an exhibition to have a run and close in lockdown? An exhibition that’s never been seen as an exhibition – what is its value? How do you interpret it?"

A lot of materials have been put out online (like the National Theatre). The challenge has been addressing how some of the digital content can generate revenue for organisations. People are happy to watch it, but not always happy to pay for it. I think we need to communicate to a wider public about the value of culture – they may be intrinsically aware of it but we need to articulate it. Perhaps in some ways, the pandemic has revealed some things that we need to work on.  If we aren't willing to pay for a service, then perhaps it reveals a lack of deeper understanding about the value of the arts and culture that we consume.

What do you think the future of TWAM will be going forward?

I think that a lot of the work that we've been doing over the pandemic has been around inequalities. The awful events in the U.S. over the summer, in terms of racist activity, led to the Black Lives Matter response, and the challenge that's come out of that is really, really significant. We need to do something about this, we need to respond. TWAM signed, along with other cultural organisations, the North-East anti-racism statement. We've set up working groups looking at broad equalities issues, across collections, across workforce, across how we operate, and across the stories that we tell. We have been working on decolonizing, which is not just about returning objects to people from whom they were taken illegally, but about the whole approach to history. We have done a lot of work around women's stories, highlighting the fact that if you look around most history museums, probably 90% of the names next to the stories that are told are those of men. At the Discovery Museum, we have just put a trail up, highlighting the roles of some of the women who were there at the time, doing things that were equally significant, equally important, but whose stories haven't been told. I think the journey forward is very much around decolonizing in its broadest sense, and really bringing equality to the fore.

"decolonizing [...] is not just about returning objects to people from whom they were taken illegally, but about the whole approach to history. "

In terms of my own journey, and I want to find ways of utilising thirty-five years skills and experience while they're still relevant. So I think it will be a mix – some freelance work, some non-exec work, some pieces of research, some voluntary work, and I’ll also be taking the dog for a walk more often.

I think it's a good time for the organisation. We've secured that culture recovery fund money, and we are ready for the next stage. It's a brilliant organisation, with some brilliant people and great programmes.

So, finally, who is your favourite artist?

That's a really hard question.  I have a print on my wall from when we were fundraising for the Hatton gallery in Newcastle, around eight years ago, and Victor Pasmore’s son, John, allowed us to run off this print. It was a poster that Pasmore actually did when he was when he was an academic at Newcastle University. Pasmore was there at the same time as Richard Hamilton, and that period was for me really the birth of modern art school teaching, and also, obviously, the birth of pop art with Richard Hamilton… that period interests me quite a lot.

Please consider supporting the work of Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums by donating on their website here. 

Interview led and edited by Amana Moore.