For the past five years I had been working in Hampshire across the museums and collections in various capacities and had the best time building up my knowledge and experience with such excellent teams of people at Hampshire Cultural Trust. In June though, an opportunity came up in Bridgwater, admittedly not a town I was entirely knowledgeable of before moving here, to help kickstart the museum after well over a decade of being entirely run by volunteers. An opportunity that, so far at least, I am so glad to have taken!
It’s now been three weeks since I have moved to Somerset to embark on this exciting new challenge of working at the Blake Museum for Bridgwater Town Council. A very busy three weeks of drafting policies, writing risk assessments, general forward planning with colleagues and councillors and meeting a brand new team of dedicated volunteers here in town.
The museum has a collection of roughly 12000 objects, a far cry from the 2.5 million that HCT looks after. It is one venue instead of the twenty that HCT look after. And it is just me as the paid member of museum staff, having previously been used to venue teams, a collections team, a marketing team, fundraising, etc. etc. A smaller operation here in Bridgwater then, but one that comes with the same number of challenges that a larger heritage organisation faces! How do we increase footfall? Where should we put this oversized object? What’s actually in that cupboard and/or filing cabinet? It is all reassuringly familiar.
The chance to start with a blank slate in any job is a rare occurrence. The chance to do that within a museum context, given the current state of the heritage sector, is virtually unheard of. I really do feel so grateful to have been given an opportunity to take this role and run with it. I’m grateful to the volunteers who have done a remarkable job at keeping the doors open over the past decade. But I’m also grateful to Bridgwater Town Council who, when given what was quite an uncertain situation in the past year for the venue, thought to invest in their heritage rather than divest in it.
I am really positive about the next few years here in Bridgwater. There is so much work to be done but there are so many brilliant people to achieve that work with. There are so many opportunities to be seized and so many objects to be celebrated. And so much fun to be had on the journey to realise the potential of the Blake Museum.
