Where would you like to see our photos? (A digital conundrum you may be able to help us with…)

Model balloon made by the Museum Collective from White Night 2011

At the Royal Pavilion and Museums, we produce a lot of photographs. Scanned images of historic photographs, pictures of events and activities, photos of objects in our collections. They attract a lot of interest…. but where should we best put them?

We have a presence on several social media sites, and all of these can host photographs. But where would you prefer to browse through and share photos? Here are some of the possibilities:

• Flickr is our main platform for our general photographs. But is it appealing to a general audience?
• Facebook is the largest photo site on the web, with over 200 million photos uploaded every month. But our following on Facebook is much lower than our Twitter following.
• Google+ presents photographs very well, but it still has a relatively small following.
• Our Image Store is used for images from our fine art and photographic collections, and is more popular than our Flickr pages.  Should we use this for more of our images?
• Pinterest is presently the hot new thing, and we have set up an account. But does it have a big enough audience to act as our main place to host photographs?

I would be very interested to know what you find to be the easiest place to browse through and share photos. Let me know with the poll below:

Kevin Bacon
Digital Development Officer

A week to remember at the Royal Pavilion & Museums

Staff at the Royal Pavilion & Museums celebrated a series of truly amazing announcements and events last week making it one of the most memorable in the service’s history. Read on to discover how the Beach Boys, Queen Victoria, the Arts Council and JMW Turner helped to make our unforgettable week!

It started on Sunday 22 January with the Royal Pavilion’s free day. The annual event marks the purchase by the town of the Royal Pavilion from Queen Victoria in 1850. This year’s People’s Palace Open Day campaign struck a cord with local residents and visitors alike. From 9.30am the queue snaked through the Royal Pavilion gardens throughout the day as people waited for the opportunity to see the spectacular palace for free. In all, staff welcomed 3,262 visitors to the building. This is about 1,000 more than would normally visit on a busy weekend in peak season in the summer.

Sunday was also the closing day of the Royal Pavilion Ice Rink. The rink has yet again been a huge success boosting the city’s winter tourist economy and contributing to increased visitor numbers at both the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum. We look forward to welcoming the team back again in November 2012.

On Monday 23 January it was announced that Brighton Museum & Art Gallery had been successful in its bid to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport /Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund for £100,000. The grant will be used to transform one of the existing museum galleries into a space where displays can be changed quickly, bringing more of the museum’s outstanding collections into the public eye. New flexible display cases, complete with the latest digital technology, will help to modernise the museum and enable staff to work more closely with young people, community groups and digital media companies.

You can read the press release here.

On Tuesday 24 January it was announced that the service was one of just 16 in the country to receive prestigious Arts Council Renaissance Major Partner awards. Although the service has received Renaissance funding as part of a South East consortia of Museums for the last 7 years, for 2012/15 the awards were based on open applications from museum services across the country. Over the next three years the grant will fund, among other things, better access to exhibits via digital technology, more exhibitions and collaborations, skills training for staff and artists, apprenticeships, improved marketing, developments in fundraising, and work to provide leadership within the museums sector in the region.

The Royal Pavilion & Museums was praised for its £2.7 million application which represented:

‘a highly imaginative and innovative response to the Arts Council’s goals. Rooted firmly in confidence of the range and recognised significance of its collections as its core asset, the service presents a well evidenced and inspirational application to build on current practice and achieve excellence over the next three years.’

You can read the press release here.

On Wednesday 25 January a member of our night team pointed us to some amazing You Tube footage they had found of the Beach Boys playing on the roof of the Royal Pavilion in the early 1970s. We posted a link via our popular social media channels and was widely shared.

On Thursday 26 January with a significant grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF),  along with an award from the Art Fund, the national fundraising charity for art, and a donation from the Royal Pavilion & Museums Foundation, we successfully bid on a JMW Turner watercolour being auctioned at Christies in New York.

The watercolour was purchased for $352,500 (£225,000), and is believed to have been painted in 1824-5. It has been in private hands and unseen by the public for more than 100 years and will go on show at the Royal Pavilion soon after it arrives in the city.

The Chain Pier, Brighton, by JMW Turner, c1824. Copyright Christie's Images, 2012

The painting depicts Brighton from the sea, with the newly constructed chain pier on the right of the picture and the Royal Pavilion at the centre. It will be the star attraction of a new exhibition at the historic royal palace in 2013.

You can read the press release here.

For the past two weeks (ending Saturday 4 February) the Royal Pavilion has been closed to the public to allow essential maintenance work to take place. Usually open 7 days a week all year round, the closed period allows for more significant work to be made in public areas to ensure that future visitors enjoy the best experience possible. Behind the scenes, staff have been working hard cleaning upholstery, furniture, and the beautiful murals on the Music Room walls. Conservation staff are working in the public display rooms including the Octagon Hall and Music Room Gallery, and the restoration of the hand painted glass laylights in the South Gallery on the upper floor is being completed, after their meticulous repainting by the Glass Conservator.

These essential improvements are being made possible by external funding secured by the Royal Pavilion to help carry out these works.

We look forward to reopening our (newly painted!) doors and welcoming visitors again from Saturday 4 February. For the staff here at the Royal Pavilion & Museums there will be an added touch of excitement in the air about what the next twelve months has to offer thanks to the funding announcements of last week!

Janita Bagshawe (and staff),
Head of Royal Pavilion and Museums

At Work With…

…Kevin Bentman, Visitor Services Officer

I have been working for the council for over 10 years now at three local buildings, Preston Manor, the Booth Museum of Natural History and Hove Museum & Art Galleries.

The Visitor Services Officers are a dedicated and very hard working team; we have great local history knowledge of all three buildings.

There is such a diversity of local museums including Preston Manor in Preston drove. It’s a beautiful Victorian home once lived in by Sir Charles and Lady Ellen Thomas-Stanford, shared with their family and dogs. Here we have an upstairs downstairs feel to the family home all left as it once originally was.

Preston Manor

We hold role-play for children all dressed up in Victorian costumes in which they rein act tasks and chores from cleaning, making fire lighters and beating rugs to cooking preparation. All taught by our very own role-play team, acting as Maurice Elphick the Butler and Miss Rose the head housemaid, both equally as friendly and scary at times! The Children learn so much and get a real feel for what it was like back in the day, they have so much fun they don’t ever want to leave us.

We then also hold ghost tours and late night vigils with mediums, behind the scenes tours throughout the year and croquet on the lawns in the summer. All of this is surrounded by stunning gardens swept with scented flowers and colourful plants.

Next to us is our neighbouring church which is opened daily by volunteers. The Church dates back to the 13th century and was modified in 1870.

Preston Manor was lived in by many families over the years – The Elringtons, Shirleys and the last tenants being the Stanford family until 1932. The house was handed to the people of Brighton through the Brighton Corporation and reopened as a museum in 1933. Much later in the 1980s the basement with kitchen and boot hall was launched. This was due to it being fashionable to see how people worked below stairs.

I also work in the Booth Museum of Natural History along Dyke Road, filled to the rafters with birds, insects, bones and fossils.

Owned by Edward Thomas Booth in 1874 to house his rare collection, it was believed he wanted to collect one of every British bird which he very nearly succeeded. On display are plenty of rare and now extinct varieties.

The Booth Museum of Natural History

Glass cases surround this historical museum, including some newly modernised discovery and insect galleries, a hands on area alongside a room for people to work away at, we always welcome groups, students and school groups. Photography is allowed and artists can sketch away.

Curators are often on hand to answer questions and items can be left and later identified, we also hold children and family ticketed events through the year, the most popular is the reptiles were you can touch both spiders and sssssnakes!

And lastly the 3rd building I work in is Hove Museum and Art Gallery set along New Church Road. It is a grand building steeped in character, hosting an array of local arts and crafts, toys and film.

In the Wizards attic upstairs children and adults can gaze at the toys from the 1920s to the present day, a cinema screen projecting three films from local film makers including a lantern show and looking at Brighton from 1920s to 1980s, Brighton was a very different place back then!

Hove Museum & Art Gallery

An exhibition gallery downstairs hosts changes every so often always attracting visitors from all over. At present we have Robot Invasion, choc full of retro sci-fi robots and its collectable memorabilia. And for those of you that need a refreshment we have the Tea Room which I can say is Truly Scrumptious.

The hard working team of staff here are like one big family working to give visitors that Brighton & Hove Museums Experience.

Our daily work as a Visitors Service Officer is like that of a security role. We also man the gift shops, are at hand for any information, carry out day to day cleaning, promote tickets and events among many other things.

I love my job as it’s always different and you deal with a wide variety of peoples needs…oh and of course we have fun doing it. We hope you come and visit us soon!