Tony Butler has been executive director of Derby Museums since 2014. Derby Museums includes Derby Silk Mill, the site of the world’s first factory and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This has undergone a £16.5 million redevelopment to transform it into the Museum of Making, which opened last year.
Previously, Butler was director of the Museum of East Anglian Life for nine years. Here, he repositioned the organization as a social enterprise, led a major capital development programme, and founded the Happy Museum Project which aims to create an international community of practice to explore how museums could contribute to a society in which well-being and environmental sustainability were its principle values.
A Fellow for Museums on the Clore Leadership Programme and a Fellow of the National Arts Strategies’ Chief Executive Program in the US, he is also a Fellow of the Museums Association, Director of Mission Models Money, and a Trustee of Kids in Museums.
He spoke with blooloop about the innovative new museum, its ethos, and its collaborative creation.
Tony Butler
“I’d always been interested in history as a child,” he begins. “My early years were more formed through libraries than museums because I grew up in a fairly working-class family. We didn’t go to museums as kids, but my mum used to take me down to our local library. I’d sit in the children’s section, and devour all these books about history.”
He did a degree in history at Aberystwyth University:
“Then, because I didn’t quite know what to do after I graduated, I worked as a volunteer in a local museum during the day and worked in Burger King in the evenings to pay the rent.
“I got on an MA course at UEA back in the mid-nineties, and it kind of went from there.”
His MA is in Museology. He adds:
“My introduction to the transformative work museums could do was an internship with Glasgow Museums in 1996. I was working with teams that had developed a concept called the Open Museum, which was a museum without a home. It consisted of travelling shows and exhibitions, curated by people that were often marginalised in society.
“They’d worked on exhibitions about homelessness. They’d done projects with prisoners at Barlinnie Prison, and with survivors of domestic abuse. That work made me understand how transformative a museum could be, aside from being these great temples of culture.
“That was the formative experience that marked me out in my work going forward.”
Before the Museum of Making
After completing his MA he had a number of jobs at a curatorial level.
“My background is social history; I was a social history curator in London, and Wakefield on the Isle of Wight. In 2002 I moved to Suffolk to become the number two at Ipswitch Museums.
He was 27 at this point:
“It was my first proper management job. I learned a lot working in a Local Authority organisation, and it gave me the tools to get my first director’s post.”
He became director of the Museum of East Anglian Life in Suffolk, which has since become the Food Museum. He comments:
“I started there in 2004 and was able to put a lot of the socially engaged work that I’d been exposed to into practice. This was a rural life museum but it had seen better days. It was in the middle of a community and connected to its community, but often the community wasn’t reflected in the work. Over the eight years that I was there, we developed it into a social enterprise.
“We developed work with long-term unemployed people, learning disabled adults, and people receiving mental health services, and we created social and work development programmes so people could gain skills and confidence, and either progress into the workplace, or just improve their lives.
The Happy Museums project
The project built on the heritage assets in the museum to serve and benefit the community:
“We had prisoners on day release from Hollesley Bay Prison helping out with stewarding our farm animals and working on construction, for example. That was a great canvas to test out a lot of the social practice that I’d been exposed to.”
Simultaneously, Butler was leading a £4 million capital project to restore Abbot’s Hall, a Queen Anne mansion on the site, along with associated outbuildings and cottages.
He also founded the Happy Museums project. This aims to create an international community of practice to explore how museums can contribute to a society in which well-being and environmental sustainability are its principle values.
“I was awarded funding through the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund, which helped set the programme up,” he explains:
“We employed a director, Hilary Jennings. The project was designed to challenge museums across the country to think about how social and environmental sustainability could work together to improve the lives of audiences.”
Changing the way museums see themselves
Butler was inspired by a book by Andrew Sims and Joe Smith, DO GOOD LIVES HAVE TO COST THE EARTH?
“It looked at social and environmental concerns, two sides of the same coin, and at how the most resilient communities are the ones that look after the places where they live, and look after each other. It takes the idea that societal wellbeing is the driving force to make places more equal, more loved, and, basically, better places for communities to come together and live in.”
The Happy Museums project is still going strong.
“The project has given out 30 odd grants to fund museums across the country to experiment. Plus there have been a number of other museums that have been affiliated with the scheme.”
The project has been hugely motivational:
“There is a very strong network of practice within the UK, but also overseas as well,” he says. “The Swiss Museums Association has set up a similar thing. And I have done quite a lot of lectures in North America, Europe, and Australia, talking about the work. I’d like to think it has been quite influential in the way that museums see themselves, especially those medium-sized and smaller museums because they’re in a place where they can make a change.”
The Museum of Making
This brings the narrative to the substantial refurbishment project that is the Museum of Making. The museum opened in May 2021 and was a finalist in Art Fund’s Museum of the Year awards 2022. The Creative Core, a leading visitor experience designer for museums, heritage and culture, worked alongside the team at Derby Museums to design and co-produce the new museum with local communities.
Butler outlines the project’s history:
“Derby Industrial Museum was founded in 1974. Its goal was to highlight the huge range of industries that existed in Derby, and that have made it the place it is.”
The museum was situated in Derby Silk Mill which, founded in 1721 as the first integrated site where raw materials arrived in one form and left in another, is considered by many to be the site of the world’s first factory:
“It is now part of the Derwent Valley Mills UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is a status based around it being central to the founding of the factory system. For better or for worse, industrial society can be seen to have been born at Derby Silk Mill. Therefore, the site is important historically.”
Reinventing Derby Industrial Museum
Although the current building dates from 1910, there are remnants of the original 1721 building in the under-croft and Bakewell’s Gates. These are part of the museum experience.
“Over time the museum, which opened in 1974, became moribund,” Butler says:
“It was very old-fashioned by the time it closed in 2011; a ‘great man’ history of British exceptionalism on how we invented industry, all that sort of stuff. It contained lots of propellers and engines, but it did give a comprehensive history of the railways, aeronautics, and the small trades that were associated with those things..”
“It was a fine museum, but it wasn’t relevant to local people. Derby City Council mothballed the museum in 2011. A year later, the Museum Department from the city council was spun out into a charitable trust.”
Derby Museums is now, therefore, an independent charitable trust that manages the museums on behalf of the city council.
He adds:
“I’m the chief executive of an independent organisation. The process of becoming independent meant that we were better placed to think differently about what this museum could be. The catalyst for the redevelopment of the museum was the employment of Hannah Fox. She was the Museum of Making project director, and the visionary behind what the museum could be.”
What does the city need?
Butler joined the organisation two years after Hannah Fox’s appointment. Fox recently left to become the director of the Bose Museum in County Durham.
“The first question we asked about what a new museum could be, wasn’t how could a museum flourish; it was, what does the city need? What does Derby need from a museum that focuses on industry?
We took as a starting point a report compiled by Alastair Redfern, who was, at the time, Bishop of Derby. The Redfern Report highlighted the high levels of inequality in the city.
“Derby has some of the best-paid people in the country, working in companies like Rolls Royce, Alstom and Toyota. But it’s also got some of the lowest levels of social mobility in the country as well. At that time, many of our schools were among the worst-performing schools in the country. There was an aspiration gap in the city.
“What young people needed were aspirations, and the ability to progress into the roles that, in the past, would have been taken up by family members who would have passed on from one trade to another.
“Making this museum relevant to young people and inspiring that next generation of makers became absolutely central to what the museum was becoming; breaking down those barriers, encouraging young people to become makers, and also responding to the needs of employers.”
Museum of Making celebrates Derby’s heritage
There was an employment gap as well as an aspiration gap:
“The big employers were saying, ‘We can get the best-qualified technicians from anywhere in the world and pay them massive salaries, but we really struggle with mid-range technical jobs. We’re not seeing people coming up through the locality into those jobs that we would have done previously.’
“That was another factor in thinking about the museum that we felt the city needed.”
To achieve all those objectives, a very participatory approach was taken to building the museum.
“Right at the beginning, Hannah led a large number of workshops. In these, we were asking some basic questions of people: ‘What do you want this thing to be?’”
The team synergised the content from those early initial suggestions:
“It all boiled down to the fact that people were proud of Derby’s industrial heritage,” Butler says. “They were proud of Derby as a place of making.”
Maker groups
Early in 2013, the museum received seed funding from the council to develop parts of the museum.
“Instead of building new displays, we emptied out the ground floor, creating an open space, and then built a workshop.
“The workshop contained CMC machines, laser cutters, 3d printers, lathes; fairly high-spec kit which groups of makers from the city could come in and use. We work with organisations like Derby makers, and then with individuals who might be making stuff in their own workshops or sheds. It very much fed into this maker culture that has been rising up over the last decade or so.”
Those groups of makers, he explains, became the kernel of thinking about how the new institution could develop:
“Many of the makers became volunteers. A great example is a guy called Morgan who used our kit to make bespoke skateboards, which he used to sell for £300 a throw. In return for access to the kit, he would teach Year Six kids coding in after-school sessions.
“There was a kind of give-get arrangement in those early days. There were, then, good examples of building community in the museum, even before we got to the point of developing plans for what it could be. Community building laid the foundation for the iteration of the museum.
“From that, we then started putting plans together.”
Funding awarded for new Museum of Making
The team applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund and was awarded a stage one pass in 2015, securing development funding of £817,300 to help progress their plans to apply for the full grant at a later date.
Butler says:
“We have been working with a group of architects called Bauman Lyons.”
The project was led by Irena Lyons, with particular involvement from her colleague, Guy Smith:
“Bauman Lyons is a firm that has been used to doing co-design work in other parts of their practice. So, they were really up for us taking a co-design approach, which would be more iterative than if we’d had a more transactional relationship with them.
“We had sessions in the building with groups of members of the public. They would take part in workshops, using cardboard boxes and string and sellotape to layout and design spaces for people to navigate around, and that then could become galleries, so that involving people in those initial design decisions became quite formative in the next stage of design development.”
A new space
It was at around this point that the team decided to build a new Civic Hall. A brand-new addition to the Silk Mill, the glass Civic Hall is a bright and modern entrance to the museum.
“It’s between the Silk Mill building itself and the blast walls from Derby’s central power generating machinery that’s next door,” he explains:
“If you see pictures of the front of the museum, you’ve got the Silk Mill, then this glass building, and then these great big blast walls from the city centre substation. The new glass building is constructed on top of waste land.”
The plan to create a new civic space for the city, he says, goes right back to thinking about what the city needs, rather than whether it would be beneficial for the institution.
“That took us to about 2017 when we had developed the museum into something resembling what you can see now. Other principles evolved during that process; things like opening up the whole of the building, and then making a hundred percent of the collections available to the public. Only the ground floor and the first floor had been accessible in the old museum.”
A “naked museum”
The new Museum of Making has nothing behind the scenes at all:
“It is a naked museum,” he comments:
“I like to think of it as peeling back the layers, like an onion, so that you can see absolutely everything in the museum. The whole of the building, and the complete collections, are available. We have created a new civic space.”
“Then, lastly, we are involving members of the public in every step of the making of the museum.
Hannah talked about using a human-centred design approach. That means that everything we do is prototyped and tested with users, rather than being imposed top-down.”
Public involvement
He gives instances of this:
“The public had a lot of involvement with the decant and recant of the collections from the old museum to an offsite store while the building work was going on. That enabled us to see all the objects that were coming out.
“Members of the public helped us pack, note, and sometimes built new cases in our workshop to enable them to be transported. They also carried out research on those objects as they were taken from one place to another. That was a really important part of the process of understanding more about the collections. Groups of volunteers led on that work.”
The second example, he explains, is something more profound and linked that fed into the way the material was then displayed:
“We held a number of sessions called The Art of Artefacts, led by The Creative Core, our exhibition designers. This was to understand how people interacted with objects. We got about a hundred objects out into a space and then built a system of racking in the gallery. We asked people to group these objects, in any way they’d like to see them.
“This happened over a period of about six weeks.”
Working collaboratively
Butler, as a social historian, expected them to arrange the objects chronologically, with written labels telling history through the artefacts. Instead:
“They didn’t do that. They grouped them in terms of materials. It was the materials that those objects were made from that became central to how people interacted with them. Materiality is absolutely central to the museum and to making. So, what transpired from that was a materials taxonomy that we created.”
“In some of our galleries, we group objects in terms of wood, ceramics, metal, textiles, synthetics, and glass. That’s absolutely writ large on the second floor of the museum in the Assemblage.”
It was undertakings like this that enabled the public to feel that the museum was theirs:
“The public are making the Museum of Making,” he says. “They also profoundly influence the way we present the material and the way those collections are presented, all the time feeding on that idea of building community through making, which was set in the early years of the work at the museum. That has all combined during the construction phase.”
Making the Museum of Making
Work started at the end of 2017, and beginning of 2018:
“There were some fun things that happened in 2018, like the Rolls Royce jet engine coming in,” he says:
“It was suspended on steels of the civic hall building without the building being completed. The building was constructed around it. As the design ideas became apparent for the museum, we ended up with three floors.”
“There is an introductory floor, which introduces the public to the idea of materials taxonomy. The first floor puts the building in the context of the Derwent valley and the historic environment. It then introduces a range of themes to the public in something that’s a little bit more narrative-driven.
“This floor looks at the way that industry is dependent on the exploitation of the natural world and people and it looks at how Derby became a hub for international manufacturing and international trade. It looks at how the city attracted people from all over the world to come and work here, but then at how making became something that means the world to Derby, something in the DNA of the city, that is then exported across the country.”
The Assemblage
An example he cites is St. Pancras Station:
“All the steels for the arches where the trains come in were made in Derby at the Handyside Foundry. Until fairly recently, most of the rolling stock would have been built in Derby in the old BREL place.”
The BREL (British Rail Engineering Limited) Derby Locomotive Works, a former rolling stock production facility, is now owned by Bombardier. He adds:
“If you walk around the newly developed Coal Drops Yard five minutes to the north of Kings Cross, where they used to drop the coal for use in London and the railways, you can still read Handyside Foundry, Derby on all the girders.”
On the museum’s second floor is the Assemblage gallery:
“There are about 30,000 objects in that gallery space, organised in terms of material and that material’s taxonomy. It is an opportunity for people just to rummage, and to make connections from one object to another. There is a sense of discovery. Central to this is this idea of building community through making.”
Co-working at the Museum of Making
In addition to the gallery space, the workshop has been upgraded, and a co-working space was created.
“You can become a member of the museum by joining a scheme that we call The Prospect, named after the Prospect of Derby, a picture of the Silk Mill from 1724.”
The Prospect is a contemporary, 20-desk co-working space for Museum of Making Members. It is located at the top of the new Museum of Making, with access to breakout spaces.
“Membership is £50 a year,” he says. Then you pay on a pay-to-use basis. You get access to desk space up on the third floor, with high-speed internet. It has good working facilities, a refreshment space, and is a nice office space. It also gives you access to the workshop, which has CNC machines, laser cutters, and routers. Plus it has also got a crucible, so you can do welding and casting. There is a kiln for ceramics.”
All the equipment in the workshop, he points out, is based on the materials taxonomy in the displays:
“All of those, glass, textiles, wood, metal, synthetics, can be manufactured or used or made in our workshop space.”
Building a community
The idea is to build community through making. Butler comments:
“The making is linked to the materials taxonomy, so the museum becomes a place for the head, heart, and hands. It’s not just about looking. We talk about encouraging people to think, feel, and do when they access the building.”
It is important, he stresses, to put the Museum of Making into context:
“We run three museum sites; the Museum of Making is one of them. The others are Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and Pickford’s House, which is a social history museum. Through those three museums, we talk about the world, city, and home.
“We learn about the world at the Museum and Art Gallery through our collections of art, natural science, anthropology, world cultures, and archaeology; the city at the Museum of Making, and the home at Pickford’s House. There is a strong interconnection between the work that happens at the Museum of Making and the work in the Museum and Art Gallery.”
Derby Museums
The art gallery holds the finest collection of work by Joseph Wright of Derby. He was one of the most significant Midland artists of the Enlightenment.
Butler comments:
“He is famous for his industrial pictures and pictures of science and technology. So, that absolutely feeds into that heritage of curiosity and manufacturing that is writ large in the ‘doing’ bit.
“Overall, our strap line for the organisation is that ‘Derby Museums is for the thinker and maker in all of us.’”
Alongside the collections of Wright’s paintings, Butler and his team have been doing work around the world cultures collection, linking with diaspora communities in the city:
“We have been exploring some of those issues around post-colonial narratives through those collections. Again, they all link back to the notion that industry and capitalism start in Derby, for better or worse,” he says:
“Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the natural environment and people. Our Imperial past is as relevant to those stories as discoveries around new manufacturing techniques, and synthetics. Everything is integrated. Everything comes together.”
Human-centred design
Citing Hannah Fox as the driving force, he says:
“I want to give credit to Hannah, who began this journey for the Museum of Making. She led that vision from the beginning of the process, driving that human-centred design approach through the project. Without that, it wouldn’t have happened in the way that it has done. She has had a great influence on the finished product.”
In conclusion:
“Overall, we talk about what the city needs, and about being for the thinker and maker in all of us, but also about being an important part of the civic realm of Derby, and our interconnectivity with our local authority; with industry.
“Rolls Royce has supported the development of the Institute of STEAM. It has given us £75,000 over the first two years to develop that programme. STEAM learning is absolutely central to what we do.”
The Midlands Maker Challenge
“We have also been supported by a company called IMI who have given us a quarter of a million pounds to develop what we’re calling the Midlands Maker challenge,” adds Butler.
The Midlands Maker Challenge is a programme for young people of 13 and upwards, drawing on the rich manufacturing heritage of the Midlands. The challenge series encourages young people to get involved in making, and to create solutions to some of the key issues facing the world. The aim is to empower the next generation of Makers.”
“Essentially, it encourages groups of school children to come together to address some of the big challenges of the day. They do this through team working and working with mentors in industry,” Butler explains:
“The learning platform, the Institute of STEAM, is just as important as the building of community through making at the museum. Again, everything is integrated. The broader role we play in the civic realm of the city is so important.”
Top image: A young visitor explores a loom on display in The Gateway at the Museum of Making. ©Chris Seddon Photography-Derby Museums
