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Verdant Works Museum

Dundee Climate Fund Supports Green Industrial Revolution at Verdant Works

Dundee, 1833. The age of steam power. Thousands of Dundonians work in the factories and mills, producing textiles for sale across the world. It is a time of rich opportunities, but also unprecedented social challenges. And it is the beginning of a dangerous increase in carbon emissions, which today threatens all life on our planet…

Dundee, 2023. The age of climate change. A new industrial revolution is afoot. Green technology is changing the way we live and work, and has the potential to make life better and fairer for everyone. But how can we harness it? And how can we make sure no-one gets left behind?

Verdant Works has long been a symbol of the Dundee jute industry and its people. Operated by a lively team of staff and volunteers, the mill is today an Accredited Museum welcoming 15,000 visitors per year, and  responsible for a Recognised Collection of National Significance, including an original Boulton & Watt steam engine and replicas of the machines used by the city’s mill-workers for over 100 years.

During the industrial age, Dundee was an intensely polluted place. Dozens of mills burning coal to power their machines produced soot and harmful gases, clouding the city’s air and damaging the lungs of its workers and residents. We are fortunate that our heritage machinery runs on electricity today, meaning we don’t have to burn fuel to demonstrate to our visitors how the mill worked in the past. Yet because so much of the building is old, we are still heated in many places by gas—at a serious cost to the charity, but also, increasingly, to our warming planet.

View from Dundee Law looking over the city, 1965. The chimneys of the mills were a familiar sight in Dundee throughout the twentieth century. Online Collections Ref: DUNIH 2008.105.5

In 2023, Dundee Heritage Trust was one of the first local groups awarded funding from of the Dundee Climate Fund, Scotland’s first ever green participatory budget.

The Climate Fund was created to give local people a decisive say in how public funds should be used to help local charities and community groups to tackle the causes and impacts of climate change.

This could include efforts to save energy and reduce emissions, install new renewable energy systems, prevent useful materials going waste, enable greener travel around the city, encourage local plant and wildlife, support local food-growing, or engage people with climate change.

Thanks to the support of the fund and our many wonderful voters, we were incredibly excited to able to address some of our energy challenges at Verdant Works for the very first time.

By replacing the old, inefficient, and expensive gas heating in our Machine Hall with an infrared electric system, we have been able to cut the use of regular gas heating in this space to zero, while improving conditions for our visitors and volunteers.

And, by installing the same system in our beautiful but sadly underused High Mill, we were recently able to host our first winter exhibition in many years, Tackling TB: Dundee scientists fighting the killer cough.

An exciting partnership between Dundee Heritage Trust and scientists at the local University of Dundee, the exhibition saw 9,000 curious people visit the mill to learn about one of the world’s most dangerous diseases, TB (tuberculosis), once a serious public health challenge in Dundee.

We were also able to host a local primary school for several weeks of educational workshops and games on STEM, social history, and public health topics, including how air pollution has affected Dundee over time, and how local scientists are working to discover a cure for TB today.

Local primary school children learn about the search for a cure for TB.
Learning how TB can affect different parts of the body from an X-ray scan.

More widely, we have welcomed over 1,500 schoolchildren and community learners to the museum since the project, with a wide range of talks, tours, and workshops exploring the industrial revolution, its social and environmental impacts, and how people have played a role in transforming Dundee throughout its long history of energy transitions.

We have been able to work with more local community groups at the museum, including ScrapAntics New Scots Family Club for families from different countries and cultures living in Dundee, the Dundee International Women’s Centre, and Dudhope Multicultural Centre, as our team is now able to arrange learning and community group visits in all seasons of the year.

Our first Disruption Night at the High Mill, made possible by the new electric heating. The event was a chance for local people to have their say on the museum and how we can work even more imaginatively with our community.

Since the project, we have also been proud to achieve our first Green Tourism Silver Award at Verdant Works, and we are very excited to be planning to build on this work through our evolving Sustainability Strategy for both museums over the next few years.

The next big step on this journey will be our upcoming Discovery Point Transformed project, which is at the heart of the Trust’s strategy for both museums for the next 100 years. As well as supporting exciting heritage and STEM learning, the project promises to advance vital conservation works aboard the RRS Discovery and transform Discovery Point for the future.

This work will make the museum more environmentally sustainable, and create a new permanent exhibition exploring the sciences pioneered by Discovery on its polar expeditions and how these continue to inform our global understanding of our climate today.

With huge thanks again to the Dundee Climate Fund for supporting the Green Verdant Works project. We would also like to thank Museums Galleries Scotland for supporting the development of plans in the project’s early stages.

Lastly, thank you to all of our local voters, visitors, supporters, and partners who have helped to bring the benefits of the project to life. Thank YOU for powering our green industrial revolution!

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