Thread by @ian_lawley

A potted history of museums in the Potteries - Part 3
The 1956 museum building was always seen as the first phase of a larger development and in 1975 @PotteriesMuseum (then known as the City Museum & Art Gallery) closed for the completion of a major extension.

The new premises (which completely engulfed the earlier building) were officially opened by The Prince of Wales in June 1981 and won the Museum of the Year Award in the following year.

The new, multi-disciplinary museum boasted a series of galleries displaying natural history, archaeology, social history, fine & decorative arts, costume & glass, as well as ceramics & spaces for temporary exhibitions. Extensive stores were built to house the reserve collections.

The museum service at this time was a standalone department of the local authority, headed by its director, the formidable Arnold Mountford, who had joined the service in 1949 as Assistant Curator before becoming curator and then director in 1962.

An internationally recognised ceramics expert, and author of several books, Arnold Mountford was a Fellow of the Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Museums Association & in 1984 was awarded a C.B.E. for his services to the museum sector.

The Museums Department was overseen by a Museums Committee. Elected Members competed to be part of that committee, were directly involved in appointments & approving acquisitions, & it was customary for two or three councillors to attend the Museums Association annual conference.

Each curatorial section comprised a Keeper and one or two Assistant Keepers, with considerable autonomy, while other sections included design and display, and visitor services. There were also in-house technicians & conservators.

The Archaeology Unit maintained the Sites and Monuments Record for North Staffordshire & undertook consultancy activities such as site assessments and fieldwork relating to land development. It also monitored all planning applications within the city.

By doing this & facilitating archaeological mitigation, the unit ensured that remains were not destroyed without record. Over the years Archaeology staff have also contributed to popular television programmes including Time Team and House Detectives.

In addition to the permanent staff the museum also hosted a succession of externally funded projects such as the Historic Buildings Survey and the Stoke-on-Trent Environmental Survey. Each section also had the support of a number of regular volunteers.

When Arnold Mountford retired & the art historian Peter Vigurs became director education & marketing posts were added. The staffing structure expanded further when the Etruria Industrial Museum was opened and when @GladstoneMuseum was absorbed into the service.

@PotteriesMuseum also pioneered many developments in improved access for disabled visitors and was cited as an example of good practice in the Arts Council’s publication In through the front door (1992).

Tours were developed for visitors with visual & hearing impairments & radio microphones & induction loops were installed. Virtual Tours enabled wheelchair users to explore inaccessible areas in the museums & consultation with disabled visitors informed building works at Gladstone

During the 1990s staffing levels fell, primarily as a result of vacant posts being frozen. A new structure was agreed in 2001, which sought both to reflect the changing needs & expectations of museum audiences & address organisational strain.

The new structure brought all the curatorial staff together into a single team while more resources were allocated towards learning and access.

The 1990s also saw the EU financed Gladstone St James Urban Pilot Project which brought regeneration based around design & heritage to Longton. This scheme improved facilities at Gladstone & saw the development of the adjacent Roslyn Craft studios & Hothouse Ceramic Design Centre

Like all major regional museums @PotteriesMuseum has an audience base that far exceeds its local funding base. All have large & significant collections which are costly to maintain and preserve for future generations & there is a mismatch between resources and demand.

Uniquely among local government services, museums need to draw on current expenditure to pay for future benefits (‘intergenerational equity’) and yet they remain a discretionary function. This creates ongoing problems.

Year on year ‘efficiency savings’ meant less revenue expenditure on museum services but this was masked by success in accessing short term external project funding for developmental work.

There has long been discussion in the sector around the idea that, collectively, the holdings of individual museums represent a ‘distributed national collection’. Stoke's museums, along with other large regional museums, argued that this should be recognised at governmental level

More than 650,000 individual objects are preserved @PotteriesMuseum and & collections have local, regional and national significance. The museum also has an international profile attracting visitors from outside the region and from abroad.

The collection of Staffordshire pottery @PotteriesMuseum is acknowledged as the finest in the world. The museum is seen by many people as the first port of call for expertise in British ceramics, ahead of the V&A.

A correspondent from Virginia, USA, writes that ‘the international value of the research conducted at the museum is immeasurable’. Another describes the museum as ‘the prime world site for ceramic history’.

In 1997 the Museums & Galleries Commission introduced its Designation Scheme in order to identify the country’s outstanding collections, raise their profile & ensure that they would be safeguarded in future. Stoke-on-Trent’s museum collections were Designated in their entirety.

This was something quite unusual. In many cases, Designation was only given to a specific collection of objects relating to a particular subject area, such as textiles, or decorative ironwork, within a larger museum collection.

In response to intensive lobbying from Designated Museums a challenge fund was launched, facilitating improvements to collections care, displays, interpretation & documentation. Stoke’s museums took full advantage of this & other funding sources such as the New Opportunities Fund

As the millennium dawned, it appeared that Stoke-on-Trent’s unique museum collections were, at last, recognised as a major national asset.