With levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures rising, tackling climate change is more important than ever.

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow this week, uniting the world to tackle climate change, we’re taking a look at what we’re doing to make our museums greener.

In September 2019 we joined others in declaring a global climate and ecological emergency. Over the next 10 years and beyond, we’ll be reducing our carbon footprint and impact on the environment.

Our training

We’ve developed a training course on carbon literacy, accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project. Over 100 staff are now certified carbon literate, and we’re looking forward to rolling out the training to the rest of our staff over the next year.

We’ve also received Bronze Level Carbon Literate Organisation status for our training and we’re taking part in the first Carbon Literacy Action Day on the 1 November. As part of the training, staff made pledges to reduce their carbon footprint and you can find out more in this short video:

Our staff

To help us become carbon neutral, we’re in the process of recruiting a Sustainable Development Co-ordinator. They will shape our response to the climate crisis by developing our carbon management action plan, as well as our carbon reduction and green land management projects. We’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon!

Our ways of working

All our museums are currently undergoing a Carbon Audit, carried out by an Environmental Consultancy, GEP Environmental. The audit will tell us what our current carbon footprint is and identify new opportunities to reduce our carbon across our work. It will also help support the delivery of the Welsh Government’s ambition of achieving a carbon neutral public sector by 2030.

Our exhibitions and outreach
Climate change and sustainability will be incorporated into our public programming for exhibitions and learning. The upcoming Mining for Mobiles exhibition will look at the environmental impact of everyday objects such as mobile phones.

Our events
We’re always looking at ways that we can make our activities more sustainable. We’ll be again hosting our sustainability event Olion to empower others to take action.

Our engagement

Through our 700 volunteers and 100 young creatives (Amgueddfa Cymru Producers) we’re promoting carbon literacy through partnership working with young people. By working with communities we hope to create a greener Wales and make sure that everything we do is better for the environment.

What is the Youth Forum?

So what is the youth forum? We have a Youth Forum at each of our Museums across Wales. Young people aged 14-25 are encouraged to be partners in decision making and organising activities. The forums explore the views of young people and will address issues they think are important. At the moment we meet online, but are looking forward to getting back together in real life once restrictions ease.

An example of 'scratch out poetry,' created during a workshop facilitated by one of our members

What do we do?

Amgueddfa Cymru’s Youth Forums have been involved in lots of exhibitions and activities, such as:

• Kids in Museums Takeover Day and Teen Twitter Takeover Day
• Writing blogs
• Writing an alternative interpretation booklet [PDF] for the exhibition Fragile? at National Museum Cardiff (Funded by Colwinston Charitable Trust)
• Producing a cartoon map, Our Cardiff, to coincide with Treasures on display in National Museum Cardiff with artist Huw Aaron.
• Building a bread oven at Bryn Eryr, Iron Age farmstead, St Fagans National Museum of History.
• Delivering and displaying an Ethnic Youth Support Team project, Chips, Curry and Cappuccino (Funded by Heritage Lottery Fund), National Waterfront Museum.

Instagram stories on the Mabinogion for Kids in Museums Digital Takeover

Our 'Dippy About Nature' exhibition, created from recycled materials

A page from Smashed, our guide to the Fragile? exhibition at National Museum Cardiff

About us

There are currently over 20 of us in the Youth Forum, and we are always looking for new members! Meet a few of our members below to get to know us better:

What are we going to be doing?

Over the coming months we’ll be sharing updates on projects that we’re working on plus some of our favourite things from the museum.

How to join us

We’re always open to new members, so if you’re aged 14-25 and would like to join us, please email volunteering@museumwales.ac.uk or follow this link Youth Forums (14-25) | National Museum Wales 

The Craft group of volunteers had been “coasting” for some time waiting for our next assignment from the museum. We’d made rag rugs for the houses at Rhyd y Car, we made mediaeval costumes for the children visiting Llys Llewellyn and we’d used the lavender grown in the castle gardens to make lavender bags to sell in the shops. For a few other meetings we’d been doing our own crafting projects in Gweithdy, talking to visitors, showing them how we made our various quilts, rugs, throws, and tapestries, but we were ready for a new project.

None of us had been familiar with the term Tip Girls, or the work they did in the mining industry when Noreen and Ceri from Big Pit visited us to ask for help in setting up a new temporary exhibition at the big pit Museum.

We were asked to design and make an outfit suitable for a Tip girl as would have been worn in the Welsh coal fields. Little research has been done on these girls in Wales but some records were kept of those girls working in the coal fields of Nottinghamshire and Durham. There were similarities between the two but also some distinct differences; most notably the names: Tip Girls in Wales and Pit Girls in the north of England

We obviously needed to research these Tip Girls and the period in which they were working, to find out the type of clothes they wore in order to undertake our task.

Until 1842 women and children had regularly worked underground, but after a dreadful mining disaster in Barnsley, Queen Victoria demanded an enquiry. This resulted in the Mines and Collieries Act banning women, girls, and boys under 10 from working underground.

This was a blow to many women who earned their living, or supplemented their household income from working underground, but women who needed to work adapted. They worked at loading wagons or hauling tubs up from the pithead and some became Tip Girls, sorting rocks and stones from the coal when it had been brought up from the mines below ground.

In our research we found that Tip girls developed a distinctive style of dress and different areas develop their own distinctive styles

The work was cold and wet and very dirty and the girls’ dresses catered for this.  In Wales, W. Clayton had taken photographs of these women; although they were posed and in a studio setting we still get a good idea of how they were dressed.  They wore long flannel skirts or frocks covered by leather aprons. Some wore breeches under their skirts, but this was frowned on in some mines, although it was commonplace in the mines in the north of England. They clothed their heads in hats and scarves, ensuring all of their heads were completely covered to prevent the coal dust saturating their hair.

Several members of the Craft group luckily have experience in costume design and they shared their expertise with us, helping us to design the costume.

We needed to decide what fabric we could use for the costumes, and we were lucky to be allowed the opportunity to see the museum exhibits in storage that would help us in designing the costume. We saw skirts, aprons, petticoats, stockings, socks and even boots that were all being carefully conserved by the museum.

We had been given a shop-window mannequin to use as the Tip Girl and were expected to dress her. However, her solid hands and feet posed a problem in that we needed to give her gloves and boots, and her elegant pose made making her resemble the Tip Girl very difficult.                                                                 

It took some time to work out that she couldn’t be used and something else had to be sorted out. There was no other mannequin available from the museum, so our resourceful team got together and manufactured one from various sources. (It does help having costume designers in the group!)

We used the original mannequin as the basis to design the clothes and even used our own members as models.  The tip girls hats seem to have been of special interest to the girls. They were all decorated quite lavishly with beads, ribbons, bows, flowers, and even birds and cherries and other fruit.  This seems to have been their gesture to glamour in the midst of the grime of the pit head.

We were getting on nicely with the manufacture of the clothes when Covid hit and we were locked down. We carried on our monthly meetings over Zoom but the Tip Girl project was side-lined for a while, while we made masks and protective clothing for the NHS. Edwina however was still working on our model and when a year later we resumed, we were nearly there with our very own Tip Girl, who we had nicknamed Brenda, for some unknown reason!

In discussion with a friend who is also doing research on the Tip Girls of the Welsh mines, I discovered that these girls were not the lowly workers they seem to be from their photos. In fact, they were quite well-paid and regarded themselves as better off than girls who had to go into service at the local “big houses”. Photographers also wanted to take their photographs and make them into postcards to sell to the public which made some of the tip girls into minor celebrities.

During lockdown we have made headscarf, skirt, chemise and socks. We’d made hands (ready for gloves) hats, bloomers and a bodice.  On returning to face-to-face volunteering, we collected what we had been working on and found we had been quite productive during lockdown.

The home-made mannequin was coming along at pace and caused some hilarity when we first assembled the legs and body as they weren’t quite compatible. Caroline, our expert in period costume, had knitted a wonderful pair of stockings that fitted the homemade legs perfectly.

The figure of the mannequin at the beginning caused much hilarity, and the arms and legs both had to be considerably altered. Having it made by different people in different places had its difficulties!

Our next meeting was at Big Pit, when we collected the disparate pieces of the costume and put them on the model. Our home-made model was not in use, and the museum was using another mannequin that was being altered to fit the brief. It was rather tall for the display case, but the staff intended shortening it discreetly.

The main reason for visiting Big Pit was to make the costume look as realistic as possible for the exhibition. They all looked newly made and pristinely clean, and we had to make them look as grubby and dirty as possible. So, after dressing up the model, we then undressed her again, and took the clothes over to the Forge where we had a good time rubbing them into the dirtiest and most filthy parts of the machinery.

It’s finished now, and we are waiting eagerly for the opening of the exhibition. We’ve left the clothes with the museum, along with both models, and it depends on which model best suits the display cabinet. When we visit the exhibition we will be very interested to find out more about the Tip Girls, and proud to see the small contribution we made to the exhibition on display. 

‘Who’s who in Magelona’ is a question I have asked myself for the 20 years or more that I have worked with marine bristleworms, but are we closer to knowing the answer?

Marine bristleworms, as the name suggests, are a group of worms that are predominately found in our seas and oceans. They are related to earthworms and leeches and can make up to 50-80% of the animals that live in the seabed. 

Collecting marine bristleworms at Berwick-upon-Tweed

I am a taxonomist, and as such, part of my role is to discover new species that have never been seen before, which I then get to name and describe, so other scientists can identify the newly discovered species. I may also rediscover new things about species we have long known about. Although people may not know much about marine bristleworms they are vital to the health of our seas, so understanding what species we have and where they live is an important part of protecting our oceans.

Drawing marine bristleworms down the microscope using a Camera Lucida which helps us "trace" what we see

Magelonids, or shovel head worms to give their common name, are a beautiful group of worms, whose spade-shaped heads are used for digging in sands and muds at the bottom of the sea. Of course, I may be biased in thinking they are beautiful, having spent over two decades studying them, I shall let you decide! They are unusual, even amongst bristleworms, and it is for this reason that we have often had trouble relating them to other marine bristleworm groups, or even understanding how they are related to one another.  As part of my job, I have discovered and named species from around the world, including species from Europe. I am currently investigating up to 20 new species off West Africa, and the similarities they share with those here in Wales, but that is a story for another day!

A plate taken from the journal article 'Who’s who in Magelona’ 

We cannot understand the natural world without first understanding how life on earth is related to one another. With this in mind, we have been looking at shovel head worms and the relationships between them. We have been working with colleagues in the USA and Brazil to answer this question, looking at different characteristics, for example, the size and proportions of the head and body, whether they have pigment patterns or whether they are known to build tubes. Due to the number of different characters and the numbers of species studied it has taken a long time to process the results. However, the results have just been published in the journal PeerJ, so we can share with others our findings. If you want to read more about ‘Who’s who in Magelona’ then the article can be downloaded here from their web-site.

Explore the collections at National Museum Cardiff with our team of volunteers! In this video you will learn more about ammonites with our volunteer Sue.