Heritage Lottery Fund award set to transform Whitworth Art Gallery

Just a quick post to pass on some fantastic news, we’ve been awarded the awarded £8million by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) towards our long-awaited extension.
I’m sure many of you will have seen the  designs by leading architects MUMA and I’m also sure that if you have you’ll be as excited as we are.

You can find  more details on our Capital Development page

This is excellent news indeed and as I’m sure you can imagine a great deal of hard work from many people has paid off.
I’d like to thank everyone involved for all their hard work that’s made this all possible.

As this development is about to become a reality I’d just like to share a quote with you that helps to show just how long it has been a dream;

‘I have come to the conclusion that a good museum or gallery should be a place where people feel comfortable.If it stands in a garden or park, the visitors should be able to enjoy the beauty of the outdoors as a counterpoint to what is within.’
Margaret Pilkington, Whitworth Art Gallery Director following a visit to Oslo, 1932

The world has changed a good deal since 1932 and a great many events and have led us to where we are now and have shaped our direction for the future.Margaret Pilkington’s words are as true now as then she wrote them. Much work has been done at the Whitworth since then but always with the same aim.
It can be difficult to encapsulate an aim but something that literally shows the shape the Whitworth will be taking are some carefully planted crocus bulbs!

During one of our family events last year these were planted in the shape of the ‘footprint’ of the new perimeter and are now shooting through right on cue – hopefully an encouraging portent for our future!

Crocus shoots marking out the future footprint of the Whitworth

Our capacity and facilities will change a great deal in the coming years and while we may look different and be able to offer more one thing will remain the same.

We are the Whitworth. The same gallery we have always been and will continue to be.

Only thanks to our redevelopment, even more so.

A word from our team!

The Capital Development project will mean a number of exciting changes for the Whitworth. A new expansion at the rear of the building will not only alter the way visitors experience and interact with the gallery, but will also directly affect the gallery staff, as their working environment undergoes some radical changes. We caught up with three members of the team to hear what they had to say…

Chad McGitchie – Head of Visitor Services Manager

How will the new build affect your day-to-day working’s within the gallery?

As our spaces change and expand with the new build, so will the Visitor Services Team. We are always looking for new and innovative ways to engage with our public and having a brand new entrance from the park will be an excellent opportunity to create dialogue with our visitors.  With the new expansion, we will be looking to adapt our services for each new space and help create a place where people come to learn, explore and create.

Are there any issues/problems you’ve encountered at the gallery, that you think will be alleviated by the new development?

At the moment space is a real big factor.  We have so many great programmes running in the gallery raging from activities for families with small children to adult workshops and every age in between.  At the moment, some of these programmes can over lap in space or be in close proximity to one another, which can cause issues with noise levels and interfere with an individuals visit.  Some people want a quiet gallery where they can peacefully look through our collections and other want a place where the’r children and get excited and explore the spaces.

Is there a part of the new development you’re most excited about?

Connecting with the park with a second entrance is what I’m most looking forward to. Also having the opportunity to have bespoke areas for school groups, family programmes and other activities which is greatly needed.  Our park entrance will help us organise large groups more effectively and ensure all our visitors have the best possible experience. Also having a café in the trees is very exciting as well!

What about the new build do you think will be of most benefit to the visitors?

Accessibility.  That word is the key focus on our area of work within the gallery.  The new build will ensure that our existing spaces are opened up and used more effectively and the new areas are equipped to allow all visitors, including people with mobility issues, visual impairments or any other special needs can access all areas and be included in every part of our building.

Any other comments you’d like to make?

The Visitor Services Team are really looking forward the new dynamic the project will bring with engaging with new and existing visitors.  It’s all very exciting!

~

Steven Roper - Early Years and Primary Co-ordinator

How will the new build affect your day-to-day workings within the gallery?

It’s going to be really great having an area set aside for the kids to go when they get to the gallery, somewhere we can sit them down and get them interested in the workshops we’ve arranged without them getting distracted.

Are there any issues/problems you’ve encountered at the gallery, that you think will be alleviated by the new development?

It’ll definitely ease the battle for space within the gallery, which will be nice for both staff and visitors. Having our own space also means we’ll be able to offer a wider range of workshops and activities which we’ve been unable to in the past – specifically, we’ll get to do some painting and other, messier activities, which will be great for the kids!

Is there a part of the new development you’re most excited about?

I’m really looking forward the back of the gallery being opened up more, out onto the park. Having such proximity and easy access to park will mean we can really look at exploring other areas of the curriculum that we haven’t previously – more outdoor learning!

What about the new build do you think will be of most benefit to visitors?

I haven’t been at the gallery too long, but from what I’ve seen I think the new build will definitely help to ease the traffic flow through the gallery for visitors. I also think opening up the back of the gallery in the way they are will encourage visitors to consider their environment in a new way, which will be really interesting.

Any other comments you’d like to make…

I’m really excited about the new build over all, can’t wait until it starts taking shape. Looking forward to being able to better promote the learning provisions we have available.

~

Helen Stalker - Assistant Curator  (Fine Art)

How will the new build affect your day-to-day working’s within the gallery?

Having had a base in the Prints and Drawings Study Room for the past six years I’m looking forward to working in an office with a wall I can pin things to! I’ll miss working in such close proximity to the collection, but I’m hoping a shiny new office space will help me work more efficiently!

Are there any issues/problems you’ve encountered at the gallery, that you think will be alleviated by the new development?

One of the main issues I encounter most often is access to the stored collections. We do our very best to make sure that visitors and researchers who wish to view the collections are catered for, but the only route to the stored prints and drawings is via a couple of large flights of stairs which can be daunting, if not impossible, for visitors with mobility or health issues.

There are also two members of staff who use the study room as a work base (myself included). It’s a little difficult to make a call or have a conversation when there are researchers or study groups in the same room – and I’m sure visitors are also conscious of the fact that we’re there. When the prints and drawings are housed in the new study areas it will be a great asset as we’ll be able to open up this amazing collection in a much more user-friendly way.

Is there a part of the new development you’re most excited about?

I can’t wait to see the new galleries and am particularly excited about dreaming up exhibitions to go in them!

What about the new build do you think will be of most benefit to visitors?

A visitor-friendly building full of interesting and beautiful things with a glorious aspect onto Whitworth Park will, no doubt, become a haven for many in a crazy-busy city such as Manchester.

Planning with our fingers crossed

It’s been rather too long since my last post but I hope I can be forgiven as since September we have submitted our second round assessment to the Heritage Lottery Fund for £8 million towards our new extension – a huge task.  We’ve also done a full planning application, as well as the usual daily business of opening exhibitions (The Land Between Us) and welcoming people to the gallery – 172,000 last year!  Our best ever visitor figures.

We’ve also continued to work with MUMA and the design team to refine to the design – fine-tuning it drawing on feedback from visitors and a range of different users as well as taking into account input from our specialist advisors from the Heritage Lottery Fund and our own University Estates department.  The upshot of all this is that the design looks brilliant – both beautiful and fit for our purposes.  In the coming weeks they’ll be some great images of the various parts of the new and old building going up on the blog.

We had Manchester City Council planners and planning advisors visit earlier this week – as part of their assessment of our planning application.  All a bit nerve-wracking but Stuart from MUMA did a fantastic presentation and I talked to them about the importance of the project for our local communities as well as for our university and city.  They seemed interested and impressed.

But mostly at the moment we are planning for how we will make the design and the plans for the Whitworth’s future real – thinking 5, 10 and even 20 years into a new future as a green gallery in a beautiful park.  But we’re planning with our fingers crossed – and the next few weeks are critical.  On January 24th, the Trustees and officers from the Heritage Lottery Fund come to do their final assessment of the project, before making their decision at the national Trustees board on February 15th.  Manchester City Council planners also make their decision about granting planning permission in the next few weeks.  We need yes from both bodies and then the project can – for definite and for real – go ahead.  Keep your fingers crossed with us and let’s hope my next post will be a celebratory one.

Green shoots on the roof

Everything is green here at the Whitworth this August, as typical Manchester rain, followed by sun, followed by rain is slightly frustrating those of us who would like to believe in summer but really helping our progress with reducing the carbon footprint of our building and expanding the biodiversity of our environment.

Both of these considerations are central to our overall capital plan. We intend to reduce the carbon consumption of the whole building by 10% overall, even as we will be increasing the footprint of the Gallery by 30%. I’ll write more about how we are setting about achieving this in future posts.

For the moment, our attention is focused on a green roof, which is being planted as I type, on the flat roof of the front portion of the building (the 1889 bit). As you’ll see from my photo (apologies for the quality, but it had to be taken from behind the safety barriers) our contractors are doing a fabulous job laying a green carpet (mostly sedum) on the roof – with the regular showers proving very useful!

It’s tremendously exciting as it feels a really visible milestone in our attempt to make the upkeep and long term maintenance of the Gallery more environmentally and economically sustainable. The new development will also have biodiverse roofs. This one is important, as it is visible from inside the building, from the Edwardian staircases that the capital development will open up to the public. It’s also visible from the top deck of the many, many buses that run past along the Oxford Road. So, I’m very happy that we’re wearing a statement about our green intentions on our sleeve (or at least our roof).

It’s been possible to plant this green roof, almost a year in advance of starting the new build work, because Manchester City Council, the University Estates Department and the charity Red Rose Forest, have found funding to pilot a number of green roofs on public buildings – to explore how effective they are and to promote their adoption across the public realm. We’re really pleased to be involved in this good work and there will be a small exhibition in the Gallery in Autumn, showcasing the different projects.

So, as you heard in the last posting, we know a lot already about the biodiversity of our setting (including bats and woodmice as well as birds, bees and other crawly things). We hope this green roof will only increase the positive impact our Gallery and particularly our Park has on our urban setting.

Contractors planting the first green roof at the Whitworth

Toilets, Bats & Digging Deep!

Its been a while now since our latest blog posting, but that doesn’t mean we have been sitting twiddling our thumbs!

Much of the action has focused on meetings, looking at drawings, discussing the finer details of cleaning glass or checking if there will be sufficient toilet provision in our new and refurbished building – so not necessarily a riveting read!  However, we do have a series of short films showing some of the action taking place in and around the gallery.

These include fleeting glimpses of Pipistrelle bats, but also the sound of bats picked up using a ‘bat detector’ during our recent Bioblitz in Whitworth Park; site investigations in the land behind the gallery by Geotechnics and a short interview with one of our architects looking at an area of the basement opened-up to check existing foundations.

Bioblitz in Whitworth Park

June 8th will be the start of our Bioblitz in Whitworth Park to help both the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Museum find out more about the biodiversity of the local green space adjacent to the gallery.  Both institutions are currently developing plans to expand and improve their facilities for visitors and asking the Heritage Lottery Fund for support – The Gallery is at the development stage of a £12m project which will see new extensions into the park area at the back of the gallery, and the museum is developing a new mammals gallery.  Gaining an insight into what plants, animals, birds and insects live around us will help inform our plans.

Tonight entomologists from Manchester Museum will set up a moth trap and bat specialists will be identifying the different bats in the park – results of these experiments and more information will be available all day on June 9th, when everyone is invited to join us in a major species hunt!  Come and visit us anytime between 10am and 4pm.

Hello Whitworth Fans

This is the first of our fortnightly postings about our proposed capital expansion of the Whitworth.  My name is Maria Balshaw and I’m Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery.  For the purposes of this blog, I am also project sponsor for our plan to expand the Whitworth Gallery into our surrounding park and improve all of our facilities for visitors, for the people who come to learn here, for the collections we look after and and for artists who show their work in the Gallery.

‘Capital expansion’, ‘gallery redevelopment’, ‘new extension’ are dry and unspecific descriptions of a process that we are finding incredibly exciting, challenging and transformative.  In 3 years time we hope we will have a renewed Whitworth.  A beautiful Gallery, embracing its park and the people who use it – a Gallery that is fit for 21st Century Manchester.  We’ve set up this blog so that we can share some of our excitement with those of you who are interested in our project.  We will use this space to share inside stories, emerging images, stories from our design team and from staff here.  We hope we’ll be able to keep it up all the way through the design process and right up to the day we open the new spaces.

So where are we now?  Well, we aren’t getting the contractors in just yet but it has been a long journey already to get to this point.  In 2007 we started discussions with our own university and with the Heritage Lottery Fund about whether they might be interested in supporting the expansion and improvement of the Whitworth Gallery, which has remarkable and important collections but has had little support since the 1960s to expand to meet the needs of new and bigger audiences.  The University identified improving the Gallery as a strategic priority and the HLF indicated they were interested and in September 2008 we submitted a £6 million bid to their national heritage funding scheme, for 50% of the funding of a £12 million expansion project.  A long process of interrogation of our ideas followed and in February 2009 we were delighted to hear that we had been successful, one of only 3 national bids supported by the HLF in 2009 (the other two are the National Railway Museum in York and Lincoln Cathedral).

We then had to get architects on board!  With the support of the Royal Institute of British Architects we ran an international competition, that attracted 139 submissions from architects from all over the world.  After a process that involved scrutiny by staff, by visitors, by a competition panel and even by some groups of local primary school children, who ran their own parallel architectural competition, the successful practice was MUMA (McInnes, Usher, McKnight Architects).  They are a wonderful practice, who love museums and galleries – recent projects have included the Newlyn Art Gallery and the recently completed Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A – and we have been working with them for 6 months.  For those who are interested in the architectural lingo, we are about to sign off RIBA Stage C.  For those who don’t use the technical language, we are at the point where we know exactly want we want to do and how we are going to achieve it.  We also know that we can afford to do the things that we want!

So that is where we are.  We will be uploading some images shortly, so that you can see what the new development is going to look like.  The next post will be from Nicola Walker, who is client coordinator on the project.  This means she makes sure the design team get to know everything they need to know about the current building and what we want in the future and she makes sure we know everything the design team are proposing.  It means she knows all, all, all the detail.  So I’m going to leave it to her to write some more about what the changes to the current building and the new extension are going to contain, and show a bit of what they look like.

But I wanted to end with an anecdote.  We are finding that every week we learn something new about the Gallery we thought we knew, or the design team find a new and fascinating way of getting us to look at the project.  I want to share some of this on this blog.  So this is my predator story.

One of the loveliest features of the new extension will be a cafe extending into the trees.  The back of the Whitworth has some beautiful London planes and ash trees and the cafe will run very close to an avenue of greenery that draws your eye right across the park.  Clever engineering (courtesy of Simon Smith and his team at Ramboll) is making sure we don’t do any damage to the trees, nor have to take any out and we want it to feel like the cafe is floating in the trees, ethereal and beautiful and allowing you to feel the beauty of outside while you are inside having tea or your (organic) lunch.  Stuart McKnight, from MUMA, has been experimenting with his team to devise a way to use structural glazing for the cafe.  As a non specialist I understand this as the mullions are making the building stand up, rather than there being a separate structure that you insert the windows in (Stuart can add a comment if this is a poor explanation).  The architects then want to use highly polished stainless steel for these mullions, so that they reflect the trees and make the structure dissolve as you look at it.

And the story?  Well Stuart explained it to me by saying, ‘It’ll be a bit like the alien in Predator, flitting through the trees and its form only being seen as reflections catch it’.  Fortunately, I am well versed in 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger films, so I knew what he was talking about!  For those of you who don’t check it out on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(film)

Until the next post, keep thinking about cups of tea in the trees, aliens and enjoy the summer sunshine.