‘Culture isn’t just something it’s nice to have, it’s fundamental to all our lives’

Streets is a woman, clearly, who can respond to pressure.

“I thought long and hard before I applied for the job,” she says. “It’s a challenging time for the arts generally and the organisation has been through a particularly challenging time, but the thing I thought long and hard about was deciding whether or not I was up for the job. As far as I’m concerned, the question was never about the future of the organisation. Museums Sheffield has an exciting future, the question was more about me personally being able and willing to do what needs to be done.

Clearly, after some consideration, the answer must have been yes – we’re sitting in the office of Museums Sheffield Chief Executive – Streets’ new home.

“It was a question about whether the organisation would benefit from someone coming from the outside and who might look at the place differently, or someone who already knows the organisation. I have been here a long time, I know the place, I know the city and I know the potential of this place. I wondered if all that made me the right person to lead the organisation right now – and I must have decided yes, because I’m here.”

It can’t have been an easy decision. In January this year, the announcement was made by the Arts Council that Museums Sheffield, previously awarded £800,000 annually by the Museums and Library Archives (MLA), would no longer receive any funding. The Arts Council also rejected an application from the organisation, which runs Millennium Gallery, the Graves Gallery and Weston Park Museum, for £1.4m per year for the next three years.

The chief executive at the time, Nick Dodd, was bullish and came out fighting, warning that the impact on the service the organisation provided to people from the south of the county, would be catastrophic.

Within a month, Dodd had announced he would be stepping down as chief executive, taking voluntary redundancy by June this year and the race was on to find a successor.

Kim Streets was the woman who landed the job. While still facing a major challenge in leading an organisation that has lost £800,000 a year from its public funding, the new woman in the chair is taking a pragmatic view of the difficult times ahead. “If I was thinking of laying down and taking a kicking, I wouldn’t have taken the job. We’ll come out the other end, we’ll hopefully have the right people still in place and also have the backing of the city and the Arts Council. I don’t want us to just survive, I want us to do well and thrive,” she says. “It’s not about complaining about where we are, now it’s time to ask what we’re going to do about the situation we’re in.”

When we meet, Streets has been at a business breakfast with people from around the city. She has been extolling to them the virtues of collaborating with Museums Sheffield, in this case specifically on an exhibition planned for next year which will celebrate the centenary of the stainless steel.

“Culture is an entitlement, people should have access to it and that access should be free. In future partnerships with businesses like the ones we are forging, will be even more important,” she says. “We’re realistic about the level of support we can expect, but it’s important to have a vibrant cultural life in a city. It all adds to a confidence and pride in the city that we all benefit from.”

Streets is well placed to comment. After studying history at what was then Sheffield Polytechnic, graduating in 1989, she worked with the Museums Sheffield as a volunteer, before moving to Lincolnshire to take a job in a museum there. She cut short her contract in Lincolnshire when a job came up with Museums Sheffield as assistant keeper of social history.

“There was always something about the spirit of the city. In the 1980s and 90s there was politically a lot going on that the city keyed into, the Thatcher government brought the demise of industry in the area, but there was a real sense that the city wasn’t going to just lie down and get kicked. There has always been a sense of an indomitable spirit.”

Streets is going to need to key into that spirit if she is going to make a success of running the three venues that now fall under her stewardship. Having worked her way up the organisation to the head of it, she has an intimate understanding of how the place works and is perhaps in the strongest position to lead Museums Sheffield what can only be a seriously difficult period.

The museum, by September, will have lost 40 of 120 staff, the learning department alone is being reduced from 23 people to just three. The reason for the mass changes came after the Arts Council took over responsibility for funding museums from the MLA. Having rejected Museum Sheffield’s initial application, in February the organisation received confirmation that it was to receive £341,000 to allow for the transition from its previous level of funding.

There was an outcry locally, Sheffield residents having grown used to a gallery which had the ambition and facility to host some major national exhibitions. The writing was clearly on the wall – losing an annual grant of £800,000 means that you simply can’t expect the same quality. “The outburst of passion we experienced when the decision was made public was people saying ‘we want our museums, we want investment’. If you pull away the layers of the outcry, you see that there are a lot of individuals talking passionately about the fact that culture is central to their lives. In a city like Sheffield, we are culturally very rich and that gives people a sense of what the city is.”

This is all well and good, but the Arts Council decision is made and, for all her optimism, Streets cannot get away from the fact that the museums she runs have taken a serious battering in terms of their funding.

“The challenge is to get through the period of change, losing 40 people is going to be hard – they are all passionate and knowledgable people. I have to step back and look at how we do things differently. Clearly there is rebuilding to be done, we have significantly less money, so what we do is going to have to be done with less money.

“Culture isn’t just something it’s nice to have. It’s fundamental to the way we speak about our lives and about the places we are from. We need to find ways to shout about what culture does for us, but also to make sure that it continues to do those things.”

The purple patch the museums have experienced over the past few years – last year the Millennium Gallery hosted an exhibition of John Martin paintings before they went on to be a blockbuster in London – is going to come to an end. The way Streets will continue to give people an experience of art that will be meaningful to them, she says, is by using the museum’s own collection, rather than receiving expensive touring shows.

“We get feedback from visitors all the time asking why we aren’t putting more of our own collections on display and now we have a chance to do that. The collections we have are fantastic and, importantly, are unique to Sheffield. We have some star pieces in our own collection and it is art that belongs to the city. We are now going to be finding more ways of sharing that with our audiences.”

“We have got a future. When I started here at the museums, as a volunteer, we were in a difficult period as a city. Through the 1970s and 1980s we went on a difficult journey. It’s made the city somewhere that has a real sense of determination. Museums make a difference, the city understands that, and that’s what we are here to serve.”

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