How Discovery Museum Turned an Uncomfortable Histories Into a Hopeful Exhibition

What do you do when the objects you celebrate are part of the problem you’re trying to solve? That was the central challenge facing the team at Discovery Museum in Newcastle as they developed Steam to Green: A North East Energy Revolution — a landmark 2024 exhibition that took on the climate crisis head-on, with families and children as its primary audience.

Presented at the Green Museums Summit 2026, Assistant Keepers Alexandra Longrigg and Daniel Stoker walked delegates through the making of the exhibition: the discomfort that sparked it, the partners who shaped it, and the lessons they’re carrying forward.

An Honest Reckoning with the Collection

Discovery Museum tells the story of the North East, and a central part of that story is industrial and scientific innovation — the lightbulb, the steam turbine, William Armstrong’s work on hydroelectricity. These are objects the museum has long celebrated. But over time, a quiet unease set in.

“There was always a little bit of discomfort about the fact that whilst we celebrated those things, they contributed in some part to causing the climate crisis,” says Stoker. Steam to Green was the museum’s attempt to address that honestly — not by disavowing its collection, but by recontextualising it. The exhibition connects the North East’s industrial heritage to the region’s current role in developing green technologies, making the argument that the same inventive spirit that powered the industrial revolution is now driving the energy transition.

The resulting exhibition brought together over 18 companies working in the North East on green technology, from air source heat pumps and smart washing machines to solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls. Five hands-on interactives let visitors test a wind simulator, power solar aeroplanes, and operate a hydrogen ball.

The Challenge of Hope

Deciding what to say about the climate crisis proved as demanding as deciding what to show. The team were clear from the outset that they didn’t want to feed climate anxiety — particularly given their core audience of families and children. But finding the right balance between acknowledging a serious problem and maintaining a sense of agency and optimism was genuinely difficult.

“When you’re working on a project around the climate crisis, it’s quite hard not to get too bogged down in the negative side of it,” says Stoker. The team were also alert to the opposite risk: that in celebrating green technology, they might inadvertently be accused of greenwashing — glossing over the scale of the challenge.

Their academic partners at Newcastle University’s Centre for Energy helped resolve this tension. The team had expected the researchers to push them toward starker, more alarming messaging. Instead, the academics urged them to go further in the hopeful direction, reinforcing the evidence that people who feel hopeful about the future are significantly more likely to take action. That endorsement gave the team the confidence to commit to a tone that might otherwise have felt too optimistic.

“I think the really important thing to understand is that when people are hopeful about the future, they’re much more likely to become climate activists,” says Stoker.

The Partner Model

Working with both academic and industry partners was central to how Steam to Green came together — and not just because of the loans and objects they provided.

For a team of generalist museum professionals tackling a technically complex topic outside their specialism, the partnerships offered something just as valuable: confidence and credibility. Newcastle University helped the curators navigate the science. Industry partners including Vattenfall, Nissan, JDR Cables and Gateshead Council provided contemporary loans, real-world context, and a sense of where the technology in the region actually stood.

“Working with academic partners and experts was really crucial to being able to have the confidence to tackle a topic as big and as daunting as the climate crisis,” says Stoker.

The process wasn’t without friction. Partners from industry and academia were sometimes unfamiliar with how museums work, or with the demands of communicating complex topics to non-specialist family audiences. Information arrived in a level of technical detail that needed significant translation. But the team found that partners, once they understood the museum’s approach, were willing to adapt.

“It was our job to temper that and make it engaging in a way that was still retaining all of the accuracy we were getting from our partners,” says Stoker. “I think our partners ended up really buying into that.”

Involving Audiences

The team were equally deliberate about involving the public in shaping the exhibition’s content. A public call-out invited people who had already adopted green technologies in their homes to share their experiences — the benefits, but also the problems. These real stories gave the exhibition a grounded, human dimension that the technical material alone could not provide.

Biographical profiles of people working in green technology were also displayed prominently, with the explicit aim of encouraging visitors — particularly young people — to consider careers in the sector.

When the exhibition opened, the response was largely positive, though not without complexity. The presence of industry experts in the gallery — including a Nissan representative stationed beside an electric car — generated lively discussion. Attitudes toward some technologies, particularly electric vehicles and heat pumps, were more divided than the team had expected, with cost and accessibility emerging as genuine concerns.

“It does tend to be adopted by people who are a little bit more well off financially,” acknowledges Stoker. “But we did try to address that in Steam to Green by making suggestions for changes in everyone’s behaviour regardless of cost.”

Expanding the Audience

Beyond the exhibition itself, Steam to Green prompted Discovery Museum to think differently about who it was reaching. Alongside the existing education programme for schools, the team developed a series of evening events aimed at 18 to 30-year-olds — an audience not typically associated with museum visits.

Held in the atrium and galleries after hours, the events combined a bar, music, craft activities and programming loosely themed around sustainability and climate — including a comedy night with professional comedians. The offer was deliberately light-touch. As Longrigg notes, one of the draws was simply the chance to be in the museum without children around.

“We do think we are gradually bringing this new audience in,” she says, “but we’re going to keep going with the events and see how they go.”

Lessons for the Sector

The team were candid about what they took away from the project. Collaboration with specialists was the most important enabler — without it, they would not have had the knowledge or the confidence to tackle the subject at all. And they are taking that lesson directly into their next project: Things That Go, an exhibition aimed at very young children, which will have a climate narrative running through it despite its audience’s age.

But perhaps the most honest reflection was about the limits of what a museum can realistically achieve. “We don’t actually have all of the answers,” says Stoker. “We’re not going to be able to solve the climate crisis as museum professionals — that’s not our job. All we can do is pick something that’s achievable, like getting people to really think about their behaviour and becoming more hopeful, and go from there rather than taking on too big a task.”

It’s a quieter ambition than some climate exhibitions stake out. But it may be a more honest — and ultimately more effective — one.

Alexandra Longrigg and Daniel Stoker presented Steam to Green: A North East Energy Revolution at the Green Museums Summit 2026. The exhibition ran at Discovery Museum in Newcastle in 2024.