New Walk

53 New Walk, Leicester LE1 7EA, UK. New Walk is a pedestrian road in Leicester. There is some parking near by but the access point is on the walk.

New Walk is free to access. As always I recommend leaving a donation or purchasing something in the shop/cafe.

Ease of Access

See this PDF for the accessibility statement for New Walk including, but not limited to, parking and Service Dog information. This PDF does not reflect the most recent renovations that changed the toilets to single-stall and included a Changing Place.

As stated above: New Walk Museum fronts onto a pedestrian road. It is within sight of the train station and the road is very well maintained. The museum does have a car park and their website states there are two parking spots for blue badge holders. They even have a wheelchair for borrowing if you require it but suggest calling ahead to ensure its availability.

The museum is on two levels. The first floor – second to fellow Canadians – (fine arts and Egyptian artifacts) can be accessed either via a wide spiraling stair or a large lift. The ground floor has geological, natural history, the cafe, shop, more fine arts and more besides has a ‘dip’ down into the natural history exhibition. The Ramp is well placed and is not a simple replacement of stairs.

All the toilets are single stall and gender neutral. There is even a Changing Place Toilet!

Signage is at a good height for children, short adults, and wheelchair users. It is often at an angle so that visitors tall or short can read it without issue.

Tour Notes

I have been to New Walk museum many times. My master’s school is a little bit farther down New Walk so we would often wander over to the museum for tours, class work, or just to see a real museum in action. Despite their proximity the museum and the School of Museum Studies have very little in the way of formal relationships.

One thing this allowed me to do was observe first hand, the transformation of the Egyptology gallery. According to one of my Egyptologist friends it was upsetting and sick. I tend to agree. The old gallery had some accessibility issues (very low lighting, sloped floors, tight corners) but even more than that the displays were in a word tasteless.

Ideally museums, if they choose to display human remains, give warning. Nothing too big just a sign saying ‘There are human remains in this gallery, please treat them with dignity and respect.’ This is partly out of respect to visitor who may not wish to see the dead but it is more respect to the dead than the living.

The old gallery surprised you with the dead. Including a severed head with an interpretation panel that read ‘Do I scare you?’ The new one has a separate room with proper signage and reverential messages.

This Blog is not about respectful museum practices.

I forgot for a minute that not everyone is as enthusiastic about museum practices. Sorry about that.

Moving On!

While I visited in January there was a community interpretation event called Museum Takeover where guests wrote interpretation for specific objects. These were largely ‘Object makes me feel X, Y, Z because of my background as an A, B, C’ but it shows that the gallery works with their community to create meaningful interactions.

It was hard to tell if the labels were written by someone from New Walk’s community or from the source (or originator) community. The second option means that New Walk is working to create access for communities who, despite having objects in museums, have often felt as though museums were inaccessible due to their history as colonized and marginalized communities.

Fine arts baffle me. But my grandmother loves them. She absolutely loved exploring the first floor galleries. As she is in her 80s and often needs to take breaks and she was able to do so in every gallery. She also took the lift and found it much nicer than the one at our hotel. My Grandmother sat for what felt like 15 minutes to watch an art installation from beginning to end – It was likely closer to five minutes – while I did a quick circuit and went on to the next gallery. I found the noise isolation of that particular installation to be problematic: I could hear it from half the museum away.

Accompanying the Museum Takeover one of the temporary art galleries had works done by local artists that members of the public could buy. I took this photo to send to my sister who likes horses.

Ground Floor

I prefer the ground floor galleries at New Walk. They include geology, paleontology, Natural History, a Children’s section, and three more art galleries.

The geology section has some great interactives. Things like looking through scopes to see things close up to jumping on a sensor to try and set off an earthquake! So many children did this. So many parents encouraged them.

The Natural History gallery has many similar issues as the old Egyptology gallery. It is full of taxidermy animals and some of them are scary. Taxidermy has issues that are not present in other types of museum objects: the chemicals can degrade and become toxic, the person making the object might not be that great such as this lion*, and no matter how hard you work your taxidermy animal will fall apart over time. Not at all like a Roman alter stone.

*Note: this is not from New Walk

New Walk’s Natural History gallery has some really good information in it about habitat, endangered/extinct animals, biomes around the world. It also has this zebra.

I have high hopes for the future of the Natural History gallery.

The Den

The children’s area called “The Den” is set up for children to explore art and history. It has the usual items: squishy toys, low tables, places to crawl and things to open. New Walk has also framed and hung what look like finger paintings to me. They have little labels and are hung at children’s height.

There is a small raised section of the Den made to look like you were up in (one foot tall) trees. This was accessed by a ramp. New Walk cares enough about access that they do not forget that wheelchair users come in all ages. This is one area where many locations need more work.

New Walk Cafe

New Walk’s cafe is your basic museum cafe. It has premade foods including gluten and allergy friendly options. It has Costa coffee as well – for my American readers Costa is like Starbucks but with better prices and better hot chocolate.

There is lots of seating ranging from low couches to picnic benches. The Museum grounds also contain a nice little park. On sunny days I often stopped there to sip my tea.

New Walk Score out of 10:6

For those who are new to Museum Spaces I rate each museum out of 10 where 10 is the best of the best and 1 means there is no hope, go back!

The Not-So-Great

1. Natural History. This gallery is darker than the others. This is common in older galleries as light is a majorly damaging factor for museum objects. Back when UV glass and LED lights were either less common or just unknown it was the norm to create ‘black box’ galleries. However, as this is the only one left at New Walk it is very jarring and can pose a hazard for individuals with vision, balance, or other issues.
2. Sound-scape. As I said before I found the art installation on the first floor to be particularly loud.

The Brilliant

1. The new Egyptology gallery. I bet you could guess I liked it. If not for the new gallery I would have written this purely based on my notes form last summer instead of visiting again in January.
2. This 11 page access PDF. I like it. One thing to note is that on page 2 they reference the old location of the Egypt Gallery. I have contact the museum to see about having this updated.
3. The care. During my studentship I thought that maybe the staff at New Walk might have given up. It was a rather depressing museum to visit as a self professed history nerd. I have friends who refuse to go back for just that reason. Having seen the new Egyptology gallery I have new hope.

I’m done with New Walk

My desire to visit New Walk Museum is fulfilled. I cannot count the number of times I have been to the museum in the last year. And that’s enough. That is not to say that it is not worth a second visit – especially if you haven’t seen the new gallery. It just means that when I get back to the UK, New Walk will not be on my itinerary.

Have you been to New Walk? did you have any issues that I didn’t talk about here? Do you know what a Changing Place toilet is? Do you know of any other museums that have one? Let us know in the comments down below!

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