How my History course gave me important work skills

2021 marks Leeds City Museum’s 200th birthday. The City Museum, located in the former Mechanic’s Institute in Millennium Square, was founded in 1821. The Museum’s origins lie in the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society’s collections which were showcased in the Philosophical Hall (Brodrick Hall) on Park Row.

In 1921, the Society gave Philosophical Hall and its collections to Leeds City Council. During the Second World War, the Museum suffered a direct hit by a 50kg high explosive bomb, and many objects were severely damaged or destroyed, including the Egyptian mummies.

I’ve been working with several other volunteers and a few local organisations to produce an exhibition to showcase some of the objects in Leeds Museums and Galleries collections to celebrate the birthday. The 200th Birthday Project started in February 2020 and runs until March 2022. The programme for the project includes an exhibition, an ongoing series of events, and public talks. 

As part of the project, I’ve written and delivered a talk on the history of housing in Leeds from 1820 to the present day. Here’s more about my role on the project and how my BA (Hons) History degree at Leeds Beckett has helped me while volunteering.

Throughout Spring 2020, I worked with a group of volunteers and project curators to choose nine themes as the basis of the exhibition, which proved difficult with over a million objects in the Museum’s collections. The themes we chose linked well together, making the exhibition flow; for example, some objects from the section about women were linked to the next theme, which was activism. 

I researched the housing developments in Leeds from 1821 to the present day because this fitted in with my research interests as a historian. I thought this would be an excellent way to reflect a large proportion of the Museum’s social history collections. The research skills that I developed during my undergraduate degree proved invaluable for this part of my role, especially as I was working in the middle of a national lockdown. I knew how to access digitised collections like the Leodis website and the British Newspaper Archives because I’d used them before in my coursework.

Earlier this year, we had several virtual meetings to select the objects from the Museum’s collections featured in the exhibition. We were overwhelmed by the number of objects to choose from the Museum’s collections catalogue.

Completing the Public and the Past module in the final year of my degree has given me the experience of creating a good piece of public history. One really good project I worked on in this module was the Leeds Blitz project. Two of the most important things I’ve learned from the module is that the object labels and text panels need to be concise. The key to this is to think about the message you’re trying to get across and what information the audience finds interesting. Also, make the text accessible by using short sentences and avoiding using technical terms.

In September 2021, I gave a talk on the changes in housing in Leeds from 1821 to the present day at the City Museum as part of the Project’s events programme. The research skills and the knowledge of local history that I’d developed throughout my degree proved incredibly useful to me.

The Digital History module I completed at Level 5 also encouraged me to be more creative with my presentation, so I included some of the technology that I’d used in my lab sessions on the module to engage the audience. I created a history pin of a location for one of my PowerPoint slides by overlaying an old photograph onto a Google Street View of the site.

It’s been a fantastic opportunity to work on the 200th Birthday Project, and my degree at Leeds Beckett has had a lot of influence on how I decided to approach the exhibition-making process. I’ve also gained a lot of skills both from my degree and volunteering that I often apply to my projects. I’d definitely encourage anyone who’s curious about volunteering with Leeds Museums and Galleries to visit their website and find out more about their volunteering opportunities. 

The 200th Birthday exhibition is now open at Leeds City Museum until 9th January.