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Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Collection development policy)

  Leicester (now New Walk) Museum (& Art Gallery) was one of the first local authority museums to be opened under the 1846 Act of Parliament “For Encouraging the Establishment of Museums in Large Towns”. The founding collection was the gift of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society, who since 1835 had gathered a range of items for reference and study. This was mainly made up of natural science specimens, but also included archaeology and items of antiquarian interest such as casts of official seals. In order to provide permanent public access to the collection, during the late 1840s the Society offered its collection of around 10,000 objects to Leicester Council in return for the Council agreeing to purchase and fit-out a former school building and run it jointly with the Society as a free museum. This opened in 1849.

  The opening of the museum stimulated a wave of new donations and 22,000 items had been acquired by 1877. Over the subsequent decades, the collection continued to develop into new areas. This was encouraged and facilitated by both the physical expansion of the museum (including the development of new branch sites) and the development of new academic areas of interest.

  The establishment of an art gallery, to complement the museum, was first suggested at a meeting of the School of Art Committee and Fine Art Section of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society in January 1880. An Art Gallery Committee was set up and well over E2,000 collected by 1881. A permanent gallery to show these works (using an extension of the museum built as a lecture hall) was opened in 1885.

  While geology, botany, zoology, Egyptology, archaeology and (to a lesser extent) art were collected by the museum from 1849 onwards, science and industry and decorative arts were only recognised as separate disciplines in the 1950s and ’60s. By this time social history (including costume) had also emerged as a subject in its own right, although in Leicester it remained closely associated with archaeology until 1980.

  The museum’s historical ethnography collections were largely disposed of after the Second World War as a decision was made to focus more on local and national collections. Some items, including an Egyptian mummy, went to Liverpool Museum which had suffered large losses to its ethnographic collections due to bombing raids during the War. However, this proved to be a short-sighted decision as mass immigration from the 1960s and ’70s made Leicester one of the most diverse cities in the country. The need to collect material that in some way reflected this diversity of heritage and geographic origin led to the establishment of what we now call World Cultures (i.e. art, craft, design and material culture from all around the World, particularly the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania) as a separate subject area from the late 1970s/earIy 1980s. This has raised important questions about traditional ways of defining collections which remain problematic and subject to continuing debate both within and without the service.

  Archaeology and biology are the largest collections, comprising hundreds of thousands of items each, mainly collected through fieldwork and excavations. Until the 1990s the service included a Field Archaeology Unit (now part of the University of Leicester) and the County’s Biological Records Service. Industrial history is another substantial collection, reflecting a process of rapid economic change in the industrial landscape during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

  The collections have been developed through gifts, loans and purchases. Most items have been given, but some collections, especially art, have been built up with significant numbers of purchases. The City of Leicester Museums Trust supports Leicester Museums and Galleries through the purchase of items for the collections.

  The Service went through a dramatic change in 1973/74 when, as a part of local government reorganisation, the city museums were incorporated into what became known as Leicestershire Museums, Arts and Records Service. From this time, defined collections policies began to be established.

  In 1997 local government was reorganised again and Leicester became a Unitary Authority independent of the county. Three services were created from Leicestershire Museums, Arts and Records Service and the collections were reviewed to identify which authority should be responsible for which collection. The Determination of the Destination of Museum Collections report was approved by: Leicester City Council Arts and Leisure Committee (9 Nov 98), Leicestershire County Council Arts Libraries and Museums Committee (8 Jan 99) and Rutland County Council (18 Jan 99).

  In essence, the collections division followed three principles:

  Collections with strong provenance to either the city or county were allocated accordingly;

  Some collections were allocated by theme i.e. standard gauge railways were made the responsibility of the county, with narrow gauge becoming part of the city collections. These allocations tended to follow the available curatorial expertise within each service at the time.

  Existing displays were not dismantled and, in most cases, objects on display in one location but allocated to a different service were made loans.

  In practice, the County transferred from the City items with greatest relevance to them, and for which the standard of cataloguing was sufficiently good for this to be judged. The City continued to hold the remaining (majority) of the collections. Since the original agreement and initial large-scale transfers, transfers of individual items or collections have continued, e.g. a number of items from the Snibston Discovery Museum were transferred to the city after the site’s closure by Leicestershire County Council in 2015.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2019

  Licence: CC BY-NC