Labor history in UK museums is constantly in a state of change. A hundred-year-old tradition of displaying and interpreting the history of the common people has seen a shift from the folk life museum to a much more all-encompassing model. The academic trend for and acceptance of working-class history began this process, and museums followed, albeit at a much slower pace. Young curators actively involved in the History Workshop, Oral History, and Women's History movements brought their new philosophies into the museum sphere. This internally driven change in museums has been matched with demand for change from above. Museums have been given a central role in the current Labour government's wide-ranging strategies to promote an understanding of diversity, citizenship, cultural identity, and lifelong learning as part of a broader social inclusion policy. The zenith of this plan would be a museum devoted to British national history, though whether this will take place is yet to be seen. The transformation of the People's History Museum makes an interesting case study. The museum, originally an institution on the fringes of academic labor history and actively outside the museum community, is now at the forefront of labor history display, interpretation, textile conservation, and working-class historical research.

Museums were slow to build on the pioneering academic work undertaken by labor historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first exhibitions of labor history was not held in a museum, but in Collet's bookshop on the Charing Cross road. Organized in 1937 by G.D.H. Cole, The Road to ’37 offered a Marxist interpretation of the labor movement's history, and its stated purpose was to “weigh what has been won, and lost too, and what yet remains to be done in this heroic work. No one from the eldest to the youngest should miss The Road to ’37.” Footnote ¹ Individuals including Cole, George Howell, and John Burns were the initial pioneers in the collecting of labor material,Footnote ² indeed the majority of the objects in The Road to ’37 came from Cole's own collection.Footnote ³ These early collections were based primarily on archival material, and it was these archives that would provide historians with the opportunities to study labor history. Indeed Cole's own collection was bought by Nuffield College, Oxford, in the 1950s. Charles Goss, librarian of the Bishopgate Institute for forty-four years, acquired the archives of the political activist and trade unionist George Howell and the Co-operative historian George Jacob Holyoake. This consolidation of working-class historical archival material continued after the Second World War, and especially with the growth of interest in labor history during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Co-operative movement responded to a growing academic interest in its historyFootnote ⁴ by opening a museum dedicated to the Rochdale Pioneers in 1931. The museum's purpose was, and arguably is still, to provide a shrine where worldwide co-operators can worship at the birth of the co-operative movement, as well as to display and educate people in the ideas and principles of the Rochdale Pioneers and co-operation.

Twentieth-century developments in labor history did have some resonance in the museum world; however, they proved to be far more discursive. While historians wrote working-class history, early twentieth-century curators followed a different route, with early museum displays principally devoted to folk life. These early folk museums, including the one opened at Hall I’ th' Wood in Bolton by the industrialist William Hesketh Lever in 1902, the Gloucester Folk Museum (1935), St. Fagan's (1938) and Kingussie, Scotland (1944) collected historically important social history material though much of it related to a lost agrarian way of life.

An extension of this folk life ideal came with the establishment of several large-scale open-air museums, based partly on the Scandinavian model but also adopting a philosophy similar to the écomusées, which determined that the museum should reflect the identity of a place. One of the most important of these was opened by Frank Atkinson in County Durham. Beamish, established in 1970, today covers some 300 acres and tells the story of the Northeast. It takes pride in not displaying collections in glass cases; instead they form part of what is effectively a living museum. These open-air museums use a combination of historical interpreters and real objects to tell the story of ordinary working people's lives. Beamish is divided into two parts; the first is organized around the date 1825 and the second around 1913. Visitors to Beamish can explore many aspects of working-class life by visiting a farm, a bank, a co-op shop, and even a Masonic lodge.

Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, Cheshire, provides a similar experience in the Northwest of England to that of Beamish and is the most complete mill and village complex remaining in Britain. Run by the National Trust since 1939, it allows visitors both to see the process used for the production of cotton and the working and living conditions of those who did so. The Greg family, who built the mill, were considered generous employers, and visitors to Styal can wander round the model village provided by the mill's employers. A highlight of any trip, and one made by thousands of school children every year, is a stop at the restored apprentice house. Here visitors can experience something of the life of an apprenticed child at the mill, before the practice was abolished in the 1830s.

The Northwest of England has several museums dedicated to showing a visiting public the process of how raw cotton was manufactured into a finished product. School children visit these working museums; they learn about the history of the local area, the inventions that marked the changes from a cottage-based economy to the factory system and have an opportunity to see history in action.

It is not just the Northwest that teaches its youth local history through museums and heritage attractions. There are many provincial UK museums that highlight their particular area's history. In Stoke on Trent, the Gladstone Pottery Museum displays the processes involved in the ceramics industry and the UK's rich coal-mining heritage is exhibited in several museums, which in the past were working pits.

In the 1980s labor history museums began to develop a new model, removed from that of the folk life tradition. Actively involved in the History Workshop, Oral History, and Women's History movements, young museum curators began to adopt new methods for presenting social history. Folk life interpretation was abandoned in favor of displays that embraced the concepts of class and gender. The 1983 George Edwards exhibition in Norfolk and pioneering collecting policies in Bristol demonstrate the attitude of this new generation of curators toward labor history, albeit from a local rather than a national perspective.Footnote ⁵ This group also brought about a change in the professional organization of those working in the sector. The Group for Regional Studies in Museums became the Social History Curators Group (SHCG). Initially, older members of the body reflected on a loss of specialization; however, the SHCG has created a platform for museum professionals to discuss and debate the policy and display of social history. Through its subsequent rise in membership, annual conferences, local meetings, and regular publications, the SHCG has proved to be an effective method of knowledge transfer.

People's History Museum: A Case Study

The People's History Museum's origins were based around pioneering collectors. Walter Southgate and Henry Fry formed the Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society (TULC) in the 1960s, after combining their significant personal collections. While Frank Atkinson, the inspirational figure and founder of Beamish, was collecting ephemera associated with working-class people's lives, TULC collected items that related to their fights, ideas, hopes, and aspirations. A grant in 1975 from the London borough of Tower Hamlets resulted in galleries being established in Limehouse Town Hall as the National Museum of Labour History (NMLH). This provided a permanent base after a series of temporary exhibitions in various venues around London.

The NMLH was pioneering in its rescuing of important items of labor history; but this foresight was not reflected in the way the museum was run. Professionalism in documentation and conservation standards, indeed best practices of any kind, was not prioritized. In rejecting accepted museum standards, the NMLH failed to contribute fully to the emerging academic interest in labor history. NMLH's decision to place itself outside the museum world resulted in a failure to attract any significant funding, either from central government or from the trade union movement.

A decision in 1986 by the newly elected Liberal council in Tower Hamlets to cease funding for the NMLH left the museum both in severe financial straits and homeless. The rejection of museum standards and the museum's patchy relations with the labor movement in Britain left the collection in a perilous state, not least the temporary storage that it was placed in during these difficult times. A change was forced on NMLH with an offer from Manchester City Council, which sought a tenant for the newly refurbished Manchester Mechanics building at 103 Princess Street. This building, aptly, was the site of the first meeting of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in 1868. As paymasters, Manchester, backed by the TUC, insisted on an independent inquiry into the professional and financial affairs of the NMLH. Reporting in the summer of 1988, the report recommended that the existing staff be dismissed, a new trust be established, and the Manchester funding offer be accepted. The NMLH trustees acquiesced to this course of action, and the museum was given a future.

Driven by demands from the museum's new funders, the Manchester City Council and the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, the NMLH quickly established professional standards of practice. A textile conservation studio, based on the scientific practice of conservation rather than the previous amateur restoration, meant the museum's banner collection could be preserved for longevity. The conservation center continues to develop and has become the national center for the care of large painted textiles; the studio's work is split between the museum's own collection and external contracts. A 1998 Heritage Lottery-funded project, the National Banner Survey (NBS),Footnote ⁶ surveyed all United Kingdom museums to discover precisely how many banners were extant in Britain and record the details of each. The NBS results showed the current number of known British banners to be about 2,500 (the People's History Museum holds over three hundred of these, by far the largest single collection); the work of the museum has resulted in a unique resource for the study of labor history.Footnote ⁷

The museum's new professionalism was matched by expansion. The museum's reputation grew with the development of long-term galleries and an extensive changing exhibition schedule. Its changing exhibition program, superior standard of documentation, and high quality of museum practice led to a rapid increase in the size of the collection, as donors felt confident in the museum's ability to care for objects in the long term. A condition of the museum's new funding required that the Labour Party archive (the most complete of any in the world) be moved from London to Manchester to form part of the NMLH collection. The Labour Party poster, photograph, and object collection followed the Party's archive to Manchester in 1990, forming the core of the Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), and has been added to significantly since. This vast resource's removal to Manchester and its proximity to Salford's already-established Working Class Movement Library “make the North-West the awareness point for the study of Britain's Common People.”Footnote ⁸ The decision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to disband raised questions regarding what would become of its internationally important archive and object collection. The CPGB objects and archives are a remarkable assortment of materials acquired by a collector in the Southgate and Fry mold—James Klugmann, a leading member of the CPGB who became one of its historians. Klugmann used his post-Second World War demobilization gratuity to buy labor history items when such things were cheap and not collected. His collected material developed into a diverse history of the working class; included within the collection is a group of 18^th-and 19^th-century satirical cartoons second only in importance to those held by the British Museum. The collecting habits of Klugmann and the CPGB have provided material that spans the entire political spectrum.

The NMLH acquired other important collections. Tin plate workers material, assembled by their historian Ted Brake, includes the important 1821 Liverpool tin plate workers banner; in its entirety, the collection provides a fascinating and historically significant insight into early unionism. The tin plate workers collection was augmented in 2006 with the addition of an original skeleton painting that would have been used in early trade societies' initiation ceremonies. In 1997 what was then the Department of Employment donated its collection of objects; dating back to the 1860s, the collection offers insight into the active involvement of government in working people's lives.

NMLH saw further expansion in 1994. Manchester's last surviving Edwardian hydraulic pumping station was converted from its previous use as a technical college to house the museum's enlarged long-term galleries and a larger changing exhibition space. This development was marked with a change of name to The Pump House-People's History Museum in May 1994 (shortened in 2001 to The People's History Museum). In recognition of its success, the museum hosted the International Association of Labour History Institutes' (IAHLI) conference in the same year. Unfortunately, the museum's growth in size and official recognition has not always been reflected in revenue generation. One of the last acts of the Conservative government, with the formation of the National Lottery, did provide some respite for museums. The NMLH received direct lottery funding through the aforementioned National Banner Survey in 1997. The museum has further benefited from lottery funding with a project to fund a series of family-friendly interactive exhibits in 2001 known as Play Your Part; the museum's current redevelopment has also received significant lottery backing.

The election of a “New” Labour government in 1997 did bring further funding opportunities for the NMLH and museums in general. The instigation of the Designation scheme for museum collections in 1997 resulted in the NMLH material being awarded status as a collection of preeminent national importance in 1998. Designated status has allowed the museum to bid for and receive six substantial awards from the Designated Challenge fund. Further revenue streams were established through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Department of Media Culture and Sport award of an annual direct grant from 2003, as the museum became a nationally sponsored institution. The museum currently collaborates academically with the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), through an AHRC Post-Doctoral research fellow who is researching posters of the 1980s as part of a wider study into the Labour Party's communication strategy. The research fellow has also contributed to the PHM-led conference Getting the Picture: Using Visual Collections as Historical Evidence in October 2006 and the museum's changing exhibitions program.

The museum's current expansion involves a £12.2 million redevelopment, with a planned reopening in Fall 2009, thus allowing the museum to secure its future, attract new audiences and display collections that had previously been in storage. The first minutes of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 1906, containing its groundbreaking ideas, will be displayed with the political advertising used to popularize these proposals. The completeness of the Labour Party archive, combined with the significant collection of Labour party ephemera, will allow the museum to display a complete history of a major political party from its conception to the present day.

The new display of Labour Party material follows a major touring exhibition curated by the museum in 2000: The Builders and the Dreamers: One Hundred Years of the Labour Party. This is one of a number of major exhibitions shown by the museum dedicated to Britain's political parties. In 1998, The Tories and the People: Mass Conservatism 1867–1997, gave insight into the Conservative Party's relationship with working people. The Liberal Party's metropolitan reforms were documented in Reforming Manchester: The Liberals and the City in 2001. In 2003, Reds! The Story of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the last of the exhibitions dedicated to political parties, utilized the CPGB material. The final exhibition held at the Museum before its redevelopment, Battle for the Ballot: The Struggle for the Vote in Britain, showed the story of Britain's democratic history and was opened by musician and activist Billy Bragg.

The museum's ability to curate these exhibitions relying largely on its own collections demonstrates the success of the expanded collecting policy beyond the narrow remit of the Tower Hamlets period. Ideas formulated in these political exhibitions will inform the designs of PHM's new long-term galleries. Other British museums have been reluctant to display political history and when they do, often focus on specific events in a local area. These include the Newport Museum's display on the Chartist uprising, which took place in 1839, and the TUC-funded 1834 Martyrs Museum in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle. The People's History Museum has the ability to tell the overarching story of working-class history within a national context, enabling visitors to fully appreciate similarities and differences within the working-class movements of Britain. The museum's new setting will be able to display a complete history of how working people sought access to and interacted with the British political process.

The museum has expanded beyond a traditional history of organized labor. The exhibitions Moving Lives—Migration, Work and Identity in Manchester's Caribbean Communities and Moving Stories—South Asian Communities in Manchester and Beyond, collaborated with Mancunian communities from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent. As a result, the museum was able to build significant collections of personal items and stories from these communities, which will form a central part of its new displays. The new long-term gallery will improve on the old with a more inclusive perspective of labor history. The museum's view of labor history, at least while it has been in Manchester, has always been broader than that of organized male workers, but without being a generic museum of social history.Footnote ⁹ This democratic model is consistent with the government's continuing philosophy that museums include notions of social inclusion, diversity, citizenship, and cultural identity.Footnote ¹⁰

The museum's redeveloped displays will allow its internationally significant banner collection to be displayed as part of the history of the organizations for which they were produced. Conservation and space restrictions of the museum's previous galleries meant the banners were displayed like art, on the wall. Divorced from the histories and ephemera of their host organizations, the banners' meaning was changed from one of iconic cultural history objects to important pieces of folk art. The new museum will allow banners to be displayed surrounded by other ephemera relating to the organizations that commissioned them. In addition to this, the exhibition designers of the new museum have been tasked with positioning the galleries in such a way as to give the impression of the banners being carried in procession; visitors should be able to feel something of what it is like to be involved in a large demonstration.

The redevelopment of the museum will also allow for LHASC and the new museum galleries, which are currently located in separate sites in Manchester, to be situated in the newly expanded Pump House. When the galleries and archives are managed in the same location, general visitors can look around the gallery and then research more detailed history with a trip to the archive. Museums are increasingly discussing how to vary levels of information for visitors. The new People's History Museum will allow visitors, in a single trip, to view a historical subject in a museum gallery and immediately learn more about it at an advanced level. The integration of museum and archive collections is at the forefront of current museum thinking.Footnote ¹¹

The Future of Labor History in Museums

What constitutes labor or working-class history is changing within the scope of the museum sector. As historians begin to redefine what falls under the remit of labor, so museums are providing their audiences with different interpretations than had previously been offered. Traditional transport museums, interpreted along an industrial taxonomic method are also facing reassessment. Mark O'Neil's (head of Glasgow Museums) statement that “You can't talk about trains without talking about people,” reflects current thinking about the increasing awareness that social history should encroach into areas that had been the preserve of industrial or transport history. O'Neil's ideas are becoming reality with the redevelopment of Glasgow's museum of transport. A brand new building designed by Iranian architect Zaha Hadid will display transport, not in a linear interpretation of its development from the wheel to the present, but with a focus on the history of Glasgow's transport heritage in relation to the local community. The new museum will encompass a series of stories in which the emphasis will be on how transport influenced the people of Glasgow's lives and how their lives impacted Glasgow.

The early pioneering work of social history curators has heavily influenced the way in which all museums are being interpreted. This change is ongoing. The first of these changes is the abandonment of a chronological approach, a display method that had been prevalent in social history museums. Chronology has been replaced by an Aristotelian, or themed-based storytelling, reminiscent of the Renaissance Kunstkammer, with the redevelopment of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum the most significant project to adopt this approach. In Glasgow the spoils of the hunt are displayed with the means of killing the prey, so the visitor has a much greater understanding of what animals were shot with. The Kelvingrove also tells previously untold histories of Glasgow. A history of mental illness and sectarianism demonstrate that the history of real people is being accepted by even the biggest of museums. As social historians begin to use material culture in addition to traditional archive-based sources, greater understanding and links are being made between objects and academic study. Museum displays of labor history are increasingly focusing on people's relationships with objects, rather than the objects themselves.

Resultantly many museums have begun to reassess their collections with a view to relevance to the past, the present, and the future. Placing an object in a wider context has become commonplace, challenging the visitor to think harder and beyond the scope of the immediate. This change is exemplified in the recent commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. The Revealing Histories project involved museums from the Northwest of England. Each participating museum selected an object specifically relevant to slavery. Slave shackles, whips, and prints were some of the more expected items to be chosen; however, the choices of Touchstones in Rochdale, the Bolton Museum and Manchester Art Gallery demonstrated the willingness of museums to think outside of the obvious and challenge visitors to examine objects in new ways. Samuel Crompton's spinning mule, arguably Bolton Museum's most interesting object, showed the Revealing Histories audience that the industrial revolution, an event familiar to most British museum visitors, was dependent on and ran sequentially with the international trade in slaves. Manchester Art Gallery's highly decorative bonbonniere (sweets holder) gives rise to the complicated and contrasting relationships between the status, desirability, and cost of sugar for European elites and the maltreatment of those who produced it. The most interesting of the objects was Touchstones' flour barrel, produced in 1862. While the date of the barrel may seem unrelated to the abolition of the slave trade, this single object simply portrays the story of how the majority of people in the Northwest of England adopted an anti-slavery stance. The American government sent the barrel to the people of Rochdale as food relief and to show thanks for the town's support for the North's anti-slavery cause.Footnote ¹² The food was used to sustain mill workers who had been rendered unemployed by the Civil War's causation of the cotton famine. This barrel shows the international solidarity and radical politics of the working people of Rochdale. Revealing Histories had the dual function of telling the important and somewhat ignored history of slavery in Britain and revealing the complexity and universality of history.

The reasons for the change in the way social history museums tell their stories and view their collections are internal rather than external. Realistically, most museum visitors implicitly trust what museums have to say. Yet museums are increasingly beginning to question and reassess their own value, their purpose, and who they seek to serve. This has resulted in accusations of museums becoming filiocracies, and subjugation to market forces has turned museums into little more than playgrounds. This is perhaps more true of local social history museums where the constant search to produce an experience that is empathetic has arguably divorced museums from their original purpose to educate.

The Victorian taxonomic classification of museum collections has resulted in social history being ignored in Britain's national museums, and the legacies of empire mean these national museums have little interest in folk life or labor history. The British Museum collects principally the cultures of other countries and concerns itself with Britain's pre-modern archaeological past.

The political nature of labor history museums leaves them, more than any other institutions, at the mercy of current political trends. As Britain seeks to decide its place in the postmodern world, so politicians seek to define Britishness, and a museum of British history has been suggested as one of the methods to achieve this. At the time of this writing, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has backed a planFootnote ¹³ initially proposed by the former Conservative Education Secretary, Lord Baker, to establish the museum. An attempt to define British history has left the proposed new museum open to controversy. Criticized as an “institutionalised British story—of Glorious Revolutions, Churchillian ardour and empire … might not quite tell the whole story of race, faith, radicalism, or even gender. Instead, it would give a parochial championing of British exceptionalism.”Footnote ¹⁴ The historian Tristram Hunt went on to state that

While the future of the People's History Museum is solid, it seems inevitable that labor history in museums will continue to be in a state of flux. Museum staff and curators change to follow current academic thinking in how collections should be interpreted. As political pressures alter and the very purpose of museums is questioned, adaptation is vital to satisfy centrally determined funding criteria. It is perhaps ironic that the museum visitor is divorced from these internal museum debates. However, the one thing that stays constant with British museums, and that will ultimately save them, is the belief the public hold in their didactic power.