In the stacks of Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) Archive Centre, rows and rows of shelves in a temperature-controlled room hold bubble-wrapped artifacts, documents in acid free folders and former exhibition materials of what was the first and only museum of social work in the world.
Heatherbank Museum of Social Work was founded by an ex-social worker and teacher fifty years ago. It was, for almost thirty of those years, a lively, interactive space where social workers, students and schoolchildren could learn about the history of social welfare and its origins in Victorian philanthropy and the Poor Laws.
Today, a joint research project including GCU and the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand is studying institutional records to tell the untold story of Heatherbank Museum and its journey from being a private museum in a family home to an archived university collection.
A visionary's dream
In October 1975, Colin Harvey opened Heatherbank Museum of Social Work to the public in the front room of his early Victorian home in Milngavie. The social worker and teacher had long dreamed of creating a museum dedicated to social work, launching the project "on an experimental basis" from his own residence.
Harvey hoped to spark public interest and attract funding to relocate the museum to a permanent site in Glasgow, Edinburgh or London. Instead, it remained at Heatherbank House for nineteen years, moving only after the deaths of its first two curators.
From the outset, Harvey leveraged his professional networks to build support. He recruited influential trustees including Fred Edwards, director of social work for Strathclyde Regional Council, and Trevor Walden, director of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
To extend the museum's reach, Harvey commissioned a converted Commer motor caravan that took exhibitions on the road to schools, colleges, universities and public events - bringing Victorian-era social welfare history directly to communities across Scotland.
Three dedicated curators
Heatherbank was shaped by the work of its three curators, each bringing unique perspectives to the role.
Colin Harvey led from the museum's founding until his sudden death in 1985, aged 53. His wife, Rosemary, a former art teacher, stepped in to continue their shared vision.
Passionate about education, she developed the museum as a curriculum resource for schools. Her dedication earned recognition in 1990, when Heatherbank received a Scottish Museum of the Year Award.
Following Rosemary's death, assistant curator Alastair Ramage took over in 1993. He oversaw the museum's transition from Heatherbank House to Glasgow Caledonian University, curating a public exhibition space within the university library from 1999 until its closure and archiving in 2004.
In our research project, we want to recognise and respect the memory of all three curators. Colin is remembered as the founder, but Rosemary brought her own unique energy and creativity. Without Alastair, the museum and its collected works may well have been lost to history.
Exhibiting social work history
Throughout its years of operation, Heatherbank Museum mounted many exhibitions designed to bring the hidden histories of social care to public attention.
In 1993, "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" traced the rise of institutional care in Scotland. Organised in collaboration with the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, this landmark exhibition drew over half a million visitors, making previously marginalised stories visible to a mass audience.
Nearly a decade later, in 2002, "Lennox Castle: The Human History of an Institution" examined a former psychiatric institution closed during Scotland's shift toward community care. The exhibition gave voice to those with lived experience of institutional care, incorporating audio recordings of former patients captured by an oral historian.
When Glasgow Caledonian University decided to archive the museum in 2004, academic staff turned to the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (Iriss) for help digitising the collection. With over 2,000 texts, 7,000 images and numerous artifacts, the Iriss team could only demonstrate the collection's potential rather than undertake comprehensive digitisation.
Working with Alastair Ramage, Iriss staff chose to focus their limited resources on digitising a single physical exhibition. The result was the Golden Bridge exhibition, which told the story of Quarriers’ Orphan Homes of Scotland and the British child migration movement - a scheme that sent 100,000 children from the United Kingdom to Canada between 1869 and 1939.
Relevance for social work today
Like professional museums in education, medicine and policing, Heatherbank used the past as a mirror to examine present practice.
Using historical news articles and narrative artwork depicting the poor, the museum captured Victorian values in vivid detail - revealing how judgments about the "deserving" and "undeserving” poor, concerns about the vulnerability of working girls and women, and moral panics over "indolence" directly shaped the nature of charitable services and the design of institutional buildings.
These historical examples can feel remote, almost quaint in their language. Yet the values underpinning them persist in contemporary policy and practice.
We may no longer speak openly of the "undeserving poor" or preach about thrift, temperance and indolence, but these concepts live on in modern euphemisms. Today's public discourse and media representations of poverty carry the same moral undertones, simply dressed in different vocabulary.
This is where Heatherbank's archive retains its power. By making visible the ideological foundations of past practice, the museum’s exhibitions equipped social workers and the public to recognise similar patterns in the present. The museum used history not as nostalgia but as interrogation - and its archive contains material that could still hold a critical lens on social work today.
Opening the archive
The current research project, Heatherbank Museum of Social Work: Opening the Archive, is a collaborative effort supported by the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Glasgow Caledonian University, Iriss, Glasgow Building Preservation Trust and the Scottish Council on Archives.
Using archival research, the project aims to tell the complete story of how Heatherbank was founded and evolved under its three curators, while documenting its current status as a special collection within Glasgow Caledonian University Archive Centre.
The research team hope their work will generate renewed interest in the Heatherbank collection and lead to improving accessibility through cataloguing and digital preservation - ensuring this unique piece of social work heritage remains available for future researchers, practitioners and the public.
Further information
For further information about the research project, email neil.ballantyne@openpolytechnic.ac.nz
For information about accessing the Heatherbank archive, email heather.panayiotaki@gcu.ac.uk
Neil Ballantyne is principal academic, Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Heather Panayiotaki is assistant archivist, Glasgow Caledonian University Archive Centre
