Q&A | “We hope to inspire the next generation of naturalists”

Situated in the South Downs Natural Park, Gilbert White’s House and Gardens – credited as the birthplace of ecology – is part country house and part museum, with reconstructed 18^th-century formal gardens, 30 acres managed for nature conservation and a field studies centre in a converted 16^th-century barn.

It also cares for the Oates Collections, which tell the story of Captain Lawrence Oates (1880–1912), the explorer who was part of Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic exploration team and is best known for his last words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”; and his uncle Frank Oates (1840–1875), also an explorer and collector of Central American birds.

The museum recently launched an endowment fund to support its work in the future.

Steve Green, a joint director of Gilbert White House & Gardens, spoke to Museums Journal about the house and its environmental mission – and how it is staying afloat in hard times.

Who was Gilbert White and why are his house and gardens important?

Gilbert White (1720-1793) was a parson naturalist who lived and worked for most of his life in Selborne, where the Weald meets the South Downs.

White practised a method called “watching narrowly”; so rather than killing and dissecting creatures, he preferred to watch and listen to them intently, writing down observations and building a body of information over time.

This careful study and appreciation of the interconnectedness of things evolved in time into the science we now call ecology.

White also studied and recorded the changing patterns of annually occurring seasonal events, which became the science of phenology and in recent decades has alerted us to climate change and the environmental crisis.

After White’s death, the house passed through several subsequent ownerships, including those of Thomas Bell, the famous zoologist who as chairman of the Linnaean Society chaired the meeting at which Darwin and Wallace presented their Origin of Species paper and famously recorded in his diary that “nothing of great note” had occurred in that year.

In 1954 the last private owners put the house up for sale. Following a letter to the Times asking for donations to buy the house for the nation, Robert Washington Oates (a cousin of Captain Lawrence Oates) put up the £18,000 needed to buy the property and turn it into a library and museum on condition that it also held the Oates family collections.

How is the museum run today?

We have 29 mainly part-time employees and 100 volunteers, who together manage and operate the site on a daily basis. Strategic decisions are made by a board of 11 trustees.

As a small museum we have limited capacity to make a big impact on tackling the environmental crisis, but after many years of work to decide how we can do this best we have settled on our current mission: inspiring journeys of discovery in the natural world to make earth a better place.

People who have personal experiences in nature are more likely than average to take action to address the environmental and climate crises, so we use the stories of our explorers of the natural world, our displays, estate and education programmes to give people personal contact with nature and to encourage them to learn more and care for it and hopefully to inspire the next generation of naturalists.

We run a formal education programme linked to our three explorers to give schoolchildren an understanding of the biodiversity on their doorstops and throughout the world and its importance, and have recently developed nature loan boxes and outreach sessions for schools that can’t afford to visit us.

We recently received a grant from the Royal Society to bring refugees to our site to engage with nature on a theme of migration.

We have an active environmental management plan for our 30-acre estate, and have linked interpretation in the museum with interpretation of the land managed for nature conservation.

How have the challenges of the past few years affected your financial model?

Since 2015 the board has focused on growing commercial income and in some ways this has been spectacularly successful. We have a trading company with a diversified business model (including retail, weddings, events, a holiday flat, nano-brewery and taproom) and income has grown from £350,000 to £900,000.

Covid stalled the growth of our commercial activities and set back the work we had done to grow our visitor base. We lost a £60,000 annual local authority grant, price inflation has seen costs rise significantly and the increase in the minimum wage is driving up our monthly payroll.

Visitor numbers are now ahead of our pre-Covid position, but people are spending less and we are having to discount our admission process to attract them.

Our limited capacity and the squeeze on our commercial activities mean have not been able to generate sufficient surplus during spring and summer to meet our winter losses. We can’t sustain this and came perilously close to the edge last winter.

We got through that one with a combination of cost cutting, restructuring and tactical marketing, and we believe that we have a robust, break-even budget for 2024/25.

However, getting through the winters will be a long-term challenge and we are vulnerable to a further shock.

How will the endowment fund help secure the future of the house and gardens?

We are carrying out a range of non-commercial income generating activities to build an endowment fund that will secure our trust and this nationally important site for the future.

The fund will be used to generate investment income to help meet the winter losses and to match fund development work designed to result in greater income opportunities.

It’s early days and we are introducing elements of our strategy over a period because we have limited resources. We know from comparable museums and funds that it can take around two years to make 50% of the target and eight to make the rest, so our strategy will unfold over a number of years.

We are ambitious, but at the same time we are aware of the scale of the task. In the first two days after a letter and article about the fund in the Times, we received £2,500 in donations.

In April our public fundraising has focused around The Big Give and a few days in, that is going to plan. At the same time, our trustees are leading on approaches to potential private donors.

I think we can report a guarded ‘so far, so good’.

Museums are increasingly open to having joint directors – how does this work at your organisation and what are the benefits?

There are advantages in having two co-directors including a wider range of skills and experience – no-one is good at everything.

And in our case, this is doubly so as our other job-share project is a consultancy that works on business and development planning, fundraising, governance and evaluation in the heritage sector, so we get to see lots of examples of good and not so good practice which helps us in managing the museum.

There’s also the fact that we are something of a Bogof (buy one get one free); as we are married, we spend quite a lot of time when we are not at work talking about the museum, plus there are two of us to ask when we are short of duty managers at the weekends!

We also have the advantage of being able to discuss decisions with each other and just being a support mechanism for each other when things are tough; a sole director doesn’t have this, so maybe we are a bit more resilient.

On the flip side, while we try to be available as much as we can, there will be times when one of us is dealing with an issue and staff can’t get hold of them for a couple of days because they are not working or are working elsewhere.

Plus, we don’t always agree on everything, though those instances are thankfully relatively rare.