management regime;
greatly increased our media profile.
These changes enabled us to build audiences: the annual number of visitors rose to more than 2 million by 2007, three years ahead of the target I set (purely speculatively) in 2001, and almost three times as many as that year. By 2011, the annual visitor total was 3 million, up 330 percent, and by 2012 the NML had its most successful year ever with 3.3 million visitors, five times as many as a decade before (National Museums Liverpool 2013). These audiences were more diverse than before, and more diverse than most other national museums in the United Kingdom (Changing Lives 2012, 21). Meanwhile new iterations of our Aims and Beliefs appeared annually over the years, arising out of regular discussions among staff and trustees, culminating eventually in the current version:
Who we are and what we do
National Museums Liverpool (NML) is one of the world’s great museum organisations. We hold in trust and safeguard some of the world’s most important museum collections, which are universal in their range.
We are core-funded by central government and we are the only national museum service in England based wholly outside London, so we have a unique fourfold role – we are the main museum service for Liverpool and Merseyside; we are the region’s largest cultural organisation; we operate at national and at international levels.
Having played a pivotal role in the cultural, educational and economic life of Liverpool and the North West for more than 150 years, our success can be measured in terms of how well we combine this local and regional role with our national and international responsibilities.
NML currently comprises eight museums: International Slavery Museum, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Sudley House, UK Border Agency National Museum, Walker Art Gallery, World Museum Liverpool, and the Museum of Liverpool.
Our mission
We change lives and enable millions of people, from all backgrounds, to engage with our world-class museums.
Our values
We believe that museums are fundamentally educational in purpose.
We believe that museums are places for ideas and dialogue that use collections to inspire people.
We are a democratic museum service and we believe in the concept of social justice: we are funded by the whole of the public and in return we strive to provide an excellent service to the whole of the public.
We believe in the power of museums to help promote good and active citizenship, and to act as agents of social change (National Museums Liverpool 2010).
The “who we are and what we do” statement of mission and values is supplemented by a “Strategy Statement” (see Appendix A below). This approach to capturing values and writing a mission, but also citing the social and economic contexts in which we work, seems to me to be the best way for a museum service to stress its non-profit nature. Readers may not be surprised that we try to run NML efficiently; they may be more surprised to find that we are quite so aware of, and tenacious about, our social role.
This is particularly important to NML because we see ourselves as an organization that carries a very weighty social responsibility, and we have to capture this in our mission statements, values, and vision. Before the arrival in 2008 of Phil Redmond, the current Chair of NML, the atmosphere among our trustees was at best indifferent, at worst hostile to this kind of socially oriented mission statement, even though members of staff were committed to this approach.
In July 2011, we opened a new museum, the Museum of Liverpool (Museum of Liverpool 2013). I have often described this as a “democratic museum,” in that it has been conceived and created by people who adhere to what I see as NML’s democratic mission (Fleming 2011). Indeed, the Museum of Liverpool in many ways embodies NML’s values: it is people- and story-led; it is emotional; it sets out to engage local people first and foremost. The museum is the culmination of ten years of re-visioning the purpose and value of NML, and of the ways in which we work. So far the museum has proved to be extremely popular with Liverpudlians. In 2012, ALVA reported it was the most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside London with over 1 million visitors (ALVA 2013).
The current Aims and Beliefs statement is now just about where we want it to be. It will be revised for our Strategic Plan 2012–2015, because our external environment has shifted with the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government in May 2010, and the subsequent reduction in our budgets. Thousands of public sector jobs have already been lost in Merseyside, including scores at NML, as government spending cuts bite deep; the think-tank Centre for Cities has forecast that cuts will damage Liverpool more than any other city in the United Kingdom (Centre for Cities 2011). Nonetheless, we will adhere to our values. As the world around us shifts on its axis once more, our values are what make us what we are.
Conclusion
The way that NML’s mission, values, and vision are expressed is always a work in progress, even though these things do not change in essence, whatever the external environment might throw up. There is always external change, so there is always more to do within the museum. No museum can afford to stand still. Political, social, economic, technological, and environmental changes mean the museum must continually rethink what it is doing and how it does it. But the mission, values, and vision will remain constant.
Recent data indicates NML’s success in pursuing our social justice agenda. The audience continues to grow and become more diverse (“Liverpool’s Museums and Galleries Celebrate a Rise in Visitor Numbers” 2013). In 2010/2011 the number of visits made to NML museums by adults from NS-NSC groups 5–8 (i.e., those from lower-income groups) exceeded that of any other DCMS-funded museum, and was far greater than the numbers recorded for the British Museum, Tate Gallery, and Victoria and Albert Museum combined (Changing Lives 2012, 21).
This kind of achievement results from a determined adherence to our mission and values, added to the ability to anticipate and respond to external change. I have learned that clarity about mission and values must accompanied by: the courage to challenge the status quo; adapting to local circumstances and avoiding generic solutions to problems; motivating staff as well as outside stakeholders; and a determination not to be bland and procedural in this crucially important area of our work.
NML now has less money to spend than for the past few years and has lost staff, and it is difficult to plan for the future when there is something of a political policy vacuum nationally where culture is concerned. Museum professionals need to be very aware of these things or we shall lose our way. Nonetheless, mission, values, and vision provide a reference point and an anchor for a museum, even in the most troubled of times.
APPENDIX A
NML Strategy Statement
The brutal reality of austerity Britain will begin to be felt in earnest in England’s most deprived city this week, as Merseyside’s five local authorities collectively deliver the harshest public spending cuts the region has seen for generations.
The five councils – Liverpool, Knowsley, Wirral, Sefton and St Helens – will from tomorrow formally ratify plans that will see their budgets slashed by a fifth (£200 m) shrinking or axing hundreds of services and shedding thousands of jobs.
The Guardian, February 28, 2011
National Museums Liverpool operates in a city which remains
