By Sara Merritt, Audience Development Officer at Leeds Museums & Galleries.

Us: We want to retro-fit a permanent gallery! As sustainably as possible! With £40k! In two months! And we want to keep the space open to visitors!

Them: Umm, are you sure that’s a good…

Us: Great! We’ll get cracking.

2022 saw us undertake the retro-fit of our permanent Life on Earth gallery at Leeds City Museum, with the aim of making it as sustainable as possible. The gallery required an overhaul to meet current visitor expectations, with innovative design ideas and production methods to reflect our greater understanding of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and Britain’s colonial history.

Our objectives were threefold and carefully considered:

• To manage and deliver a sustainable retro-fit with the addition of creating a carbon calculator to measure our C02 output
• To ensure the interpretation was relevant, and that we had a strong idea of our target audience to attract visitors who were already engaged in making climate-positive changes.
• To identify robust materials and production methods which would stand up to visitors pulling, prodding, and everything in between.

We were used to working with greener materials for temporary exhibitions and knew the implications around material availability, longevity of eco materials, and higher associated costs. We therefore needed to keep the project resource light and put our efforts into the interpretation, rather than dramatic object moves. We took the bones of what we had, large cases and great objects, and retold the story with the emphasis on using our objects to inspire our visitors to live more sustainably.

In short, we:

• Kept our project team small (three internal members of staff)
• Worked to a £40k budget
• Commissioned an exhibition design agency which specialised in sustainable production methods and were innovative in their approach, working mainly remotely.
• Re-used and repurposed existing panelling and structures, reducing waste and keeping our carbon footprint to a minimum. 
• Kept movement of objects and closure of the space to a minimum; allowing visitors to see the progress of the project and providing important user testing opportunities for new materials in terms of robustness.
• Ensured that the design was in-keeping with the existing museum brand, thereby avoiding the additional carbon that would have been required to go through a design process from scratch.
• Ensured that the design templates were accessible to produce additional elements, without the need for external support.
• Worked with local independent businesses and organisations to provide materials and dispose of waste.

This all looks quite organised and sensible, but it was very much a case of learning as we went along and pooling resources to make the project as efficient as possible. We are in a fortunate position of having a fair amount of autonomy, which isn’t the case for all organisations, but that was only gained by taking risks and sticking to our sustainability principles.

With a small team we avoided decisions by committee and adopted the mantra ‘do it now and ask for forgiveness later’. We closed the gallery for three weeks, which wasn’t enough time, but it did create an opportunity for our visitors to see work in progress and test what we’d done. It also provided a marketing opportunity with a tongue-in-cheek campaign named ‘evolution takes time’ to gauge sentiment. Our visitors enjoyed feeling like they were part of the project, and they tested the robustness of our new green material choices to the limits. 

We avoided waste and the creation of brand-new display elements by re-using existing and sprucing up with recycled paint from Seagulls. The agency we worked with, Thomas Matthews, part of the Useful Simple Trust were incredibly supportive of our mission and worked with us to find local companies which had sustainable making in their fabric. We sourced recycled plastic furniture by Motley Makers* and found waste wood suppliers Leeds Wood Recycling for ‘new’ panels. We also avoided skips for waste and instead offered defunct materials to other museums in our group or local charities. 

Whilst design and material research was ongoing we worked with the University of Leeds and drew on our previous involvement in the ‘No Going Back’ programme to construct accessible narratives which aimed to empower our visitors. Our interpretation needed to appeal to our existing audiences and be powerful enough to generate word of mouth amongst a new generation of museum visitors – those who had to create a future based on a fractured climate.  

Behind the physical output, we commissioned Useful Projects to create a carbon calculator tool to measure our output. This tool would allow us to establish a best practice baseline of carbon emissions from this type of retro-fit and provide a benchmark for the development and production of future exhibitions. 

Our carbon output:

• 2,300 kgC02e
• This equates to about 40% less than an ordinary refit
• It was 23% of the carbon footprint of The Design Museum’s “Waste Age” exhibition

The full report can be read here.

Beyond the pitfalls of failing to find new inner case label material which didn’t off gas, to quickly discovering that eco vinyl was not suitable for heavily used interactives, we think the project was a great success. Feedback from our staff and visitors has been overwhelmingly positive, and the fact that we expanded on our existing brand identity for the design, rather than doing something new, means that if we do need a change or want to update an area, we can do it ourselves.

The project got us thinking about sustainability on a broader level – not just environmentally but economically and socially too – because sustainability encompasses everything and is everyone’s responsibility. If we want to keep doing what we’re doing in museums, then we need to be developing more realistic sustainable practices. But more importantly, we need to recognise what we’re already doing and sharing those learnings with other teams and other organisations. 

*Due to the cost of production Motley Makers had to close their plastic recycling business, sadly reflecting the then wider markets lack of enthusiasm around sustainable material production.