Welcome to the This Is The North Podcast, your source of transformative conversations. An intentional challenge to the systems holding back the North of England. Hosted by Alison Dunn MBE, an award-winning charity chief executive and former solicitor. This podcast is supported by the Society Matters Foundation and is dedicated to curating and sharing knowledge, powering the change we need for a more equal and inclusive society.

In this episode, Alison is joined by Keith Merrin, Director of North East Museums, the organisation responsible for twelve museums across Tyneside and Northumberland, from the Hancock and the Discovery Museum to a former coal mine at Woodhorn and the Roman forts at either end of Hadrian's Wall.

Keith grew up in Jarrow in the 1980s, when worklessness was as high as it had been at the time of the Jarrow March, and the town's story was one of loss. It took him years to learn that in the seventh century Jarrow had been one of the most important centres of learning in Western Europe. That gap, between the story a place is told and the story it actually owns, runs through the whole conversation.

Keith describes how the job has changed. One of his duty managers, thirty years in post, puts it simply: "We're much more like community centres now." That means sessions with refugee and asylum seeker communities who arrive in the North East knowing nothing about where they've landed, memory boxes taken into care homes with staff trained to carry the work on, and the women at the Shipley Art Gallery passing on the craft of clippy mats. It also means confronting the harder history in the collections themselves, objects gathered during the British Empire whose significance to communities living in the North East today demands more thought than the Victorians ever gave it. Keith is direct about repatriation: his organisation would consider returning an object if a source community asked, and in twenty years it has happened once.

The conversation gets specific about money. Most of Keith's museums are free, and free is not enough. He cites National Trust research showing members visiting less often even with entry covered, because the bus fare, the coffee and the gift shop have turned a free day out into something many families cannot afford. Alison shares her own experience of leaning on museums and libraries during the hardest years of raising her family, when free programmes were, in her words, the lifeblood of her parenting. Keith explains the poverty-proofing work with Children North East and the pay-it-forward café tokens his team quietly moves between sites so that nobody has to prove hardship to accept one.

Then there is the imbalance. The national museums, most of them in London, receive the most public funding and have the greatest capacity to raise their own, while councils across England have cut culture spending to the point where many spend nothing on museums at all.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why museums matter now

01:26 Jarrow, and the story it wasn't told

03:01 The Pitmen Painters

05:12 The Enigma machine and a North Shields hero

09:36 Empire, collections and repatriation

13:35 Five challenges facing the North East

20:03 A sector under pressure

23:48 The North South funding gap

31:48 What excites Keith about the future

This conversation is a reminder that museums are not warehouses for the past. They are where a region keeps the evidence of what it has been and what it could be, and the barriers that keep people out of them, financial, cultural and psychological, are barriers to identity itself. Keith Merrin grew up in a town that was never told its own greatest story. His job now is making sure that stops happening.

Host: Alison Dunn

Guest: Keith Merrin

This podcast is produced by Purpose Made.

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