Setting up a new museum – Corwen Museum

The Edeyrnion Heritage and Cultural Society was created in 2012 to tell local stories to visitors arriving in Corwen on the Llangollen heritage railway. The Society opened Corwen Museum in 2015 and here, Trustee and Volunteer Lindsay Watkins tells us what they’ve learnt and the lessons they would share with anyone else setting up a new museum.

Background

Corwen is a small market town in rural North Wales.  In the late 1800s and early 1900s it was an important railway junction, with the Llangollen to Corwen line opening in 1865.  Beeching cuts a hundred years later closed the line and Corwen has never recovered from this blow.

In 1975 a group of railway enthusiasts decided to re-open the line as a preservation railway, starting in Llangollen.  By 2012 they were ready to start completing the last three miles of the line to reach Corwen, hopefully by 2015.  A group of people in Corwen decided that a volunteer run, community Museum would be a good attraction for visitors arriving by train and, following several meetings, a society was set up to try to bring this about.

The Edeyrnion Heritage and Cultural Society was created in 2012 as a Limited Company by Guarantee, with the help of the Wales Co-operative Society, and trustees appointed.  An exhibition ‘Corwen a Railway Town’ was put on for a couple of weeks to gauge the interest of local people and it was voted a great success.  Further exhibitions were not possible until 2015 because of a lack of venue but, in the summer of 2015, when the train from Llangollen finally reached Corwen, a new exhibition was launched with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund.  Again, the exhibition was well received and it was decided to make it permanent.  Corwen Museum was born.

Top tips

The volunteers at the Museum are all amateurs and we have had a steep learning curve.  The Museum improves each year and we have learned by our mistakes as we have gone along.  Here are a few things we’ve learnt since starting out on this adventure and the advice we’d give any other new museum:

1. The Wales Co-operative Society helped us to write our Constitution and to comply with the legal requirements of being a business. It was only later that we found that our Objects were not worded in an acceptable way for applying for charitable status and we had the difficult task of changing them, only to find, twelve months later, that they would not be accepted by the Welsh Government’s Museums and Libraries Department if we wanted to apply for accreditation, and we had to change them again. We’d recommend thinking about the Accreditation criteria when you first set up your Trust.
2. Our initial trustees were the group of people who originally met together with the idea of forming a museum. They were not chosen for the skills and expertise that they could bring to the Board and did not necessarily want to do anything other than to attend board meetings.  The makeup of the Board has changed somewhat since then, but we still lack trustees with skills in particular areas and a small number of trustees carry the main burden of work. Consider your long term skill requirements as you may need to undertake additional trustee recruitment once you’ve got the museum set up.
3. The Museum is housed in a renovated chapel which is an ideal building for this use. However, it is owned by the local authority which is not prepared to give us a long lease.  They want to pass the ownership onto the Town Council whose members are reluctant to take on what they see is a possible liability.  We want to apply for accreditation but need security of tenure to do this.  We have spent the last five years trying to get this. Finding premises for your new museum might not be as challenging, but again, do consider the Accreditation guidance when you’re evaluating initial options.
4. Because the exhibition in 2015 coincided with the return of the train, the main content told the history of the various stations along the Llangollen to Corwen line, with only a small section covering other parts of the heritage of the area. In 2016 we realised that the Museum was being referred to as the Railway Museum and local people who had no interest in railway history were not visiting and getting involved.  We therefore applied for a grant to revamp the Museum, moving the railway exhibition upstairs and using the downstairs space to tell the story of the development of Corwen using a timeline.  This better reflected the aim of the Museum which is to help people understand the heritage and culture of the local area and proved to be a turning point for us.  In 2017 we recruited several new local volunteers, received many donations of local artefacts, documents and photos and had far more local people visiting and giving us favourable feedback.
5. In the beginning we were very poor at recording the donors of artefacts to the Museum and very quickly realised the problems that this can cause. We now have forms in triplicate that are completed for all loans and donations, with a signed copy given to the owner.

We still have a lot to learn but the reward for our hard work is seeing the wonderful comments left in our Visitor Book and knowing that the heritage stories of this area will not be lost but will be here for future generations.  Our volunteers are a great team and working together on new projects gives us all a great deal of satisfaction.

Lindsay Watkins, Trustee and Volunteer, Corwen Museum

For more support and guidance on setting up a new museum, click here for our new Success Guide – Setting up a new museum>>