Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery transferred to Trust in May 2011; previously the museum was owned and managed by Carlisle City Council. It is one of the top visitor attractions in Cumbria – attracting over 250,000 people every year. The collections have developed continuously over the past 100 years – in archaeology, social history, art and natural history.

Located in the heart of the historic quarter of Carlisle between the Castle and the Cathedral, Tullie House offers visitors a rich diversity of experiences. This includes an opportunity to understand the long and rich history, archaeology and nature of the area, the best of contemporary art, and beautiful buildings and gardens.  Tullie House is the guardian of extensive archives including those relating to Hadrian’s Wall which passes a few hundred yards from the museum.

The Tullie family owned a house on the present site from the mid 17th century and Thomas Tullie, who was Dean at the Cathedral, built the current house in 1698 in the fashionable renaissance style. The house remained in the ownership of the Tullie family and their descendants until 1825.  By 1890, the house was facing demolition, however, an influential middle class pressure group in the city were advocating investment in educational and cultural facilities to improve the skills of the workforce and quality of life for the local population.  Tullie House was identified as the hub of a new museum, library and college.  The house and several cottages were purchased by local architect Charles Ferguson, and presented to the city with a bequest for conversion into this new public facility. In 1900 in response to the Museum Act, the City Council acknowledged responsibility for the organisation.

Significant developments to the work and buildings of Tullie House have taken place since. The art and technical school left the site for other buildings in the 1950s and the library left as part of the city redevelopment to a new site in the 1980s.

Tullie House today and the Roman Frontier Gallery

Prior to the Roman Frontier Gallery, the last major development was the creation of a new Millennium Gallery and first floor Rotunda viewing platform, completed in 2001. The former being a subterranean exhibition space, measuring some 500 square metres, has now been transformed into a stunning, state of the art visitor experience telling the story of what life was like in Carlisle when the powerful Roman army built a massive wall that still bisects Britain today. The gallery focuses on telling stories, using the museum collections to explore a range of diverse everyday subjects such as living conditions, religion, trade, fashion and hygiene. However, it also, very innovatively, invites the visitor to compare life 2000 years ago with frontier life today; to reflect on whether war zones like Iraq or Palestine are any different from the militarised northwest frontier zone created by the Roman army.

The gallery is structured thematically, allowing the visitor to plot their own course, although inevitably, because of the shape of the space, the journey has to begin in Rome. To ease visitors into the right mindset on your approach to the gallery an audio subtly steers you away from the hustle and bustle of contemporary Carlisle to the militarised world of Luguvalium, full of marching troops and Latin trading. The fist exhibit is the iconic ‘conquest stone’ – a 3m high monument to the power of the Roman Empire, graphically showing a Roman cavalryman trampling over a naked Briton. This sets the scene for power and conflict and through the use of imagery and objects comparisons between Rome and the newly conquered Roman Britannia are brought together to illustrate the Romanisation of the Empire.

Themes such as changing frontiers, arrival, religion and life in Roman Carlisle can be explored via exhibits such as the evidence wall (explaining how to read Latin inscriptions), a replica goatskin army tent (that you can explore), the beautiful silver plaque to the God Cocidius and the sensational Sewell’s Lane Jug. The latter is a stunning copper alloy domestic jug on loan from the British Museum.

Many of the exhibits in the gallery (like the Sewell’s Lane Jug) are of ‘national’ quality, because the development of the new gallery has been a partnership between Tullie House, the British Museum and Hadrian’s Wall Heritage. Objects such as the Iron Age Embleton Sword and the busts of the three Emperors: Vespasian, Hadrian and Severus, sit comfortably alongside jewellery, leatherwork, pottery, building materials and armour from the museum’s own rich collections.

The gallery is aimed at the old and the young, the informed and the novice and in an attempt to reach this broad audience spectrum there are simple (and fun) interactives, which help you learn as you play. Questions are posed: how many goats did you need to feed and clothe a legion? Is your taste native or Roman? Where did the raw materials come from? All of these can be answered by ‘playing games’, pressing buttons and learning through exploration.

There is also a unique ‘high tech’ interactive, which uses new technology to identify ‘who you would have been in Roman Carlisle’. On arrival visitors are given a plastic ‘credit card’ to use in the gallery. At four terminals they swipe the card to activate a screen which introduces Senator Maximus. Maximus then asks the visitor a series of multiple choice questions like: ‘what do you like to eat/wear’, ‘what do you think of Hadrian’s Wall’, ‘how would you like to be buried’? The answer that the visitor provides builds up a picture of who you would have been had you lived in the area 2000 years ago! You could become a native warrior, a centurion, senator, matron, potter or a whole range of other characters. With an original twist the visitor can then have their photograph taken and transposed onto the character they have created; they are then given the option of collecting their ‘Roman Passport’ featuring their ‘Romanised’ image, or emailing an image of it to themselves.

The gallery blends learning with fun; it tells stories in an accessible way; it features stunning objects; and it poses questions and opportunities to reflect on whether life in the north west of England was really that much different from frontier life today.