North Hertfordshire Museum, Hitchin

It was not until 2006 that proposals were first discussed to replace the two existing buildings, both of which had severe access limitations, with a single museum for the whole district on a new site. An opportunity arose when plans were drawn up to refurbish Hitchin’s former town hall, which occupies a convenient site in the town centre just off the High Street, and is a popular venue for everything from weddings to film shows. It even still has its sprung wooden dancefloor. 

An area alongside the town hall was acquired to create an infill structure for a new museum building with direct access to the town hall next door, and joint use of essential new facilities such as a cafe, lifts and toilets. The scheme was planned in partnership with a new community company, which was to run the town hall on the council’s behalf. It looked like a promising way forward for the district’s museum service.

The existing Hitchin and Letchworth museums closed in 2012 and preparations began for the creation of the new museum, which would integrate and present the best of the district’s collections. At this stage, the £6m project was scheduled to take three years, and had secured £1m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

But for reasons largely outside the council’s control, the construction and completion were not finalised until this year, doubling the overall timescale. The museum’s full opening was stalled by a long-running dispute over the terms of purchase of part of the site, including the main entrance, and by the lead contractors for the museum fitout going into administration. 

Ros Allwood, the council’s cultural services manager and head of museum services, is phlegmatic about the lengthy delay, now that the new museum is finally up and running: “There were certainly members of my team who thought it might never come to fruition. It’s been such a long haul, but visitors are amazed at how big the museum is and the high quality of everything on display. It opened fully on 6 July and in the first two weeks, we had 2,700 visitors – we wouldn’t have had that in a month at the old museums.” 

By the end of the summer holidays, the new museum was welcoming its 5,000th visitor and getting daily enthusiastic comments on social media.

The new glass wall entrance, which is covered in a huge enlargement of a local scene reproduced from the museum’s art collection, draws in casual visitors from the shopping street outside and sets the welcoming tone of a light, airy and accessible venue. There is a platform lift for buggies and wheelchairs, and all visitors are welcomed by a member of staff at the entrance desk. Even at this point, there are objects on display, which draw visitors into the shop and cafe in the foyer area, before they enter the main galleries beyond. 

The building design is Tardis-like, with what appears from the street to be a modest glass box opening out into three substantial galleries beyond and above, all with free admission. The museum carried out extensive public consultation before determining the nature of the new displays. It was to be a community museum for a largely local audience, but had to reflect the whole North Hertfordshire area, not just the town of Hitchin. 

Letchworth residents, in particular, felt they might lose their heritage now their own museum was closing, and the rural villages needed their own links with the displays and valued the incorporation of a local studies centre. Inevitably, there were favourite or significant objects from both the old museums that people wanted to see included, but this was also an opportunity for a comprehensive collections review of the stores, and some 40,000 items were photographed and catalogued. 

In the end, display choices and interpretation were more subtle than the conventional chronological or thematic approach that can often characterise local history museums. Visitors wanted object-rich displays but clear presentation that was easy to follow and had an obvious local significance. Captions and text panels have been kept short and snappy. “Every label tells a really good story,” says Allwood. “We don’t include anything that doesn’t add to it.” 

Interactive technology 

The designers have made creative and varied use of interactive technology throughout the three main galleries. The visitor journey begins in the Discovering North Hertfordshire Gallery, where a central digital map of the district allows access to museum subjects and stories from different areas and periods, using an iPad on a tethered, flexible harness. This highlights stories of selected objects in showcases around the gallery – from a hand-axe and a mammoth tusk to the location of each bombing incident in the district during the second world war. 

These are augmented by short videos and displays around the upstairs galleries, using historic stills and film material. These range from local suffragette activities, celebrated in a collaborative project with other local museums and heritage groups in a new publication, Suffrage Stories, to the history of the famous Spirella arts and crafts corset factory in Letchworth Garden City, now restored and converted into a business centre. 

During the 20th century, North Hertfordshire became increasingly part of London’s commuter belt, but these displays demonstrate the growing appeal of recent and distant heritage in the 21st-century home counties.

One of the museum’s iPads was already out of action on my first visit and I found the other one quite difficult to use balanced precariously on my arm, but I’m sure any six-year-old could have handled it with no trouble. It’s an effective way of introducing the geography, history and communities of the area through modern multimedia. 

It also avoids the need for visitors to read too much while standing up, a problem most museums and galleries still seem to struggle with. Relying exclusively on traditional text panels no longer works, particularly with younger audiences, and the museum has made an impressive step forward here. 

It also allows for flexibility and change in the galleries. The displays, with a well-chosen range of objects in attractive and beautifully lit showcases as well as hands-on features, are creative and imaginative. Themes and topics are clearly signed, but visitors feel free to dip into areas that interest them. There is always a risk in relying on technology that may break down, but staff were on hand throughout my visit, providing assistance in all areas. Troubleshooting that new technology may take up a lot of their time, but they were already getting used to it.

The temporary exhibition gallery’s first show was Blood and Bone (finished on 22 September), a soft-sculpture installation that allowed small children to explore parts of the human of body from the inside. When I visited, the occupants were treating it more like a bouncy castle than any kind of learning experience, but why not? It was certainly popular and very noisy, but one of the next displays – a collection of prints by Rembrandt borrowed from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – will have quite a different atmosphere, and audience. 

On the second floor, there are two further galleries with displays grouped in themes, sometimes with deliberate period juxtaposition such as Roman tableware contrasted with a Victorian tea set. 

The reconstructed interior of a 19th-century pharmacy, complete with labelled apothecary jars and drawers, was a well-loved favourite of the old Hitchin museum and has been recreated here by popular demand. Another redisplayed item nearby is a giant oil painting of Hitchin market square in about 1850, with a new digital label identifying nearly every individual in the crowded street and whatever is known of their role. 

Personalising the displays and objects in this way wherever possible is a particularly effective feature of the new museum, from the Queen Mother’s christening gown (she spent her childhood in St Paul’s Walden, near Hitchin) to a pair of Sir Stanley Matthews’ football boots from the 1950s (Sir Stanley came from Stoke but the boots were part of the museum collection built up by Hitchin Football Club and donated in the 1980s). This is just what a modern local history museum should be like and I wish North Hertfordshire Museum every success in the future. It was worth the long wait.

The challenge was to close two much-loved museums, choose items from both (plus hundreds more from the shared off-site store) and display them in one new museum. How could we choose? What should we choose? A colleague who had been through the process before assured me that we would already know our key pieces – and she was right. 

Through meetings with the whole museum team, volunteers, our users’ forum, and with external audience research, we drew up a list of themes. I still have the dog-eared flip charts, and it is amazing how closely the displays in the new museum mirror those early conversations. 

We asked visitors what they most wanted to see in the new museum, and their yellow sticky notes were invaluable in ensuring old favourites featured in the new displays. 

Choosing items from our store was harder, as none of us had been through every box, so we had no idea what was in many of them. Two excellent paid interns photographed more than 40,000 objects, and every Wednesday afternoon, our small team went through the images. 

There was much cursing of museum staff predecessors for accessioning boxes of unprovenanced and damaged “tat” (technical term). But there was also delight at discovering the amazing items that made our task so exciting. 

With the objects chosen and labels written (just 30 words to tell an interesting story – thanks to Lucy Harland’s wonderful text-writing training), we sent the label text to local interest groups for fact-checking. They helpfully pointed out any cataloguing errors, while gaining a real feeling of ownership. 

The original plan was that we each wrote about objects that were not in our specialist areas, to outlaw technical jargon, but in the end, it became a real team effort, and no one now knows who wrote what. Label-writing was – generally – easy. What we had not expected was the time that we would spend on checking consistency and proofreading.