New director at Weald & Downland Living Museum relishing the challenge

In her career Tilly worked for 20 years at the Science Museum, where she was head of collections and principal curator before moving to the University of Leicester, where she was Professor and Head of the School of Museum Studies.

“I was at Leicester for two years and even though I was talking about museums and lecturing about museums, I just missed them terribly. I missed the buzz and I missed the incredible teamwork. No museum professional can work on their own. You always work as part of a team and that's what I really loved.”

A huge part of the fascination is the way that museums point to the future: “I think museums are actually very interesting ways of thinking about ourselves. You think of museums being about the past and yes, they are about the past but they also form the way that we think about ourselves in the present and in the future. It's about the things that we might need to know going forward, and the stories that museums tell us about ourselves help us think about our present and our future.”

In that sense museums are very much alive. As Tilly points out, the word Living is very much part of the museum's title at Singleton.

Tilly admits she didn't have a specific moment where she realised that museums were where her career would lie: “I think I just fell into museums and they just got under my skin and then I realised that I could never work anywhere else. The brilliant thing about museums is that there is always something new happening, new ideas, new initiatives, new acquisitions. There is always something going on. And once you've lived and breathed museums for a certain amount of time, you realise that you can't imagine yourself doing anything else.”

Enjoyment also comes through the sense of challenge that they offer, the fact that they have changed so much over the years: “Museums used to be places for the chronology of the past and the chronology of objects but what we want now is to stand at a point in time when you can move forwards and move backwards. Now museums are very much about being participatory and about how you can work with the community. I would say that the word story now is really important, a story based in fact and based in evidence. It is about offering a compelling narrative rather than putting something in a glass case and saying ‘Be deferential to this object!’

“The Weald & Downland Living Museum has got so many amazing historic buildings but there is also the whole element around the trades and the crafts that are at risk of being forgotten. Also with everything coming from the south-east of England it's about bringing an understanding of how people have lived, really since Anglo-Saxon times. It makes it fantastically interesting and exciting but it's not just that. We've also got an amazing team of volunteers. We've got more than 350 volunteers that come along and help us bring our buildings alive. And they come from all different backgrounds, all with different sets of experiences and skills from all different areas.”

Tilly is very much still in the learning phase at Singleton, she says: “I think it would be quite wrong to come here to an organisation that has been going since the 1970s and say ‘This is what I want to do.’ I need to know the strengths of the organisation and I need to understand its community and I want to spend some time with everybody here thinking about what we do. But I do wonder do we make as much of ourselves as we should. We are very well known locally and it is a real treasure for Sussex, but does the country as a whole know that it is such a treasure. It is not the country’s fault. Maybe we are not shouting loud enough. We need to make sure that the country is more aware of us.”