About Timespan
Timespan is a cultural organisation and accredited museum based in Helmsdale, a remote village in the far north of the Scottish Highlands. Founded in 1986 by the Helmsdale Heritage and Arts Society, it was established to preserve and share the history of the local area while serving the needs of the community through culture. Over nearly four decades, Timespan has evolved from a small community heritage centre into an internationally recognised institution working across heritage, contemporary art, digital research, education, community development, and social justice.

Timespan delivers a holistic and integrated cultural model, combining a local history museum, a contemporary art gallery, a public archive and library, a digital laboratory, a youth programme, an online broadcasting platform, a herb and geology garden, a shop, and café. This structure supports a wide range of audiences and enables cross-disciplinary practices rooted in both local relevance and global engagement. Each year, Timespan engages over 20,000 onsite visitors and reaches an estimated 110,000 online participants through hybrid programmes and digital resources.

Helmsdale, like much of the Highlands, is shaped by a long history of land dispossession, forced migration, labour struggles, and changing economies, from fishing and crofting to gold mining, oil, and renewable energy. These histories profoundly inform Timespan’s approach. Rather than presenting heritage as a fixed celebration of the past, the organisation interrogates history critically, connecting local memory to wider narratives of colonisation, social inequality, extractivism, and climate change. Timespan’s mission is to ensure that heritage is not only preserved, but actively used as a tool for public understanding, collective empowerment, and cultural democracy.

Institution of the Commons

At the heart of our strategic vision is the aspiration to become an Institution of the Commons: a space where communities converge to promote cooperative processes of knowledge and resource sharing. As a small-scale cultural institution located in a remote and rural area, we strive to address local issues while also adopting a global perspective. This approach, defined as ‘situated knowledge’, is applied holistically to all our initiatives, including art, heritage, education, well-being, and community building. Many of our programmes are based on significant participation by our communities. This enables us to listen to people as they express their needs and interests, and respond by shaping programmes with them. This level of participation requires a significant amount of time and resources, and with increased funding support, we will be able to increase our level of participation.

Moreover, Timespan does not assume neutrality or universalism; instead, it recognises that all heritage interpretation is shaped by perspective. By embracing this position, Timespan embeds transparency, ethics, and accountability across all its activities—from museum practice to public programming, research, publishing, and digital development.

Museum Without Walls

Timespan is an accredited museum with Museums and Galleries Scotland, with a collection that offers the opportunity to delve into questions of identity, place, and environment. Through our objects and archive, we tell stories that connect us to our past, present, and future, fostering dialogue, understanding, and collaborative action. Our arts, educational, and community-led projects have a tangible impact. The museum works beyond the limits of its building through a museum without walls approach. Heritage is activated through community research, site-based storytelling, collaborative fieldwork, and immersive reconstruction and digital twin. This extends the museum’s role from custodianship to public responsibility, connecting landscape, people, and history in meaningful ways.

Programming

In 2022, Giulia Gregnanin assumed the role of Director and Arts Curator, launching the arts and heritage programme Coastal Commons, dedicated to examining the impact of extractivism on coastal communities. Additionally, under the curation of Heritage and Digital Curator Jacquie Aitken, we launched the People’s Mobile Archive, a wellbeing initiative bringing the collection into people’s homes. Recent years have seen Timespan’s continued dedication to revising policies, reshaping its vision and mission, and enhancing resilience.

Redevelopment
In 2025, Timespan began an ambitious process of capital redevelopment aimed at translating its radical programme into built form. Guided by principles of accessibility, climate justice, and community empowerment, the project seeks to mirror the institution’s holistic model within its architecture. This transformation will create more cohesive and adaptable spaces for collective learning, civic gatherings, and artistic production, ensuring the building reflects the values it upholds. The architects selected to lead the project are the award-winning Assemble and Office Corr Higgins, whose socially engaged and interdisciplinary practice resonates with Timespan’s vision of the museum as an active commons.

Awards and Recognition

Reimagining cultural heritage through digital opportunities (Winner): Timespan was one of nine partners in CINE (Connected Culture and Natural Heritage in a Northern Environment), a digital heritage project led by Museum Nord and funded by the Northern Periphery and Arctic programme (ERDF) from 2017 to 2020. The Interreg NPA Award highlights the dedication and teamwork of all our partner organisations in Norway, Scotland, Iceland, and Ireland.

Museums Change Lives Award 2025 (Winner): Timespan was recognised by the Museums Association, an organisation for all museums in the UK, for exceptional work bringing communities together to create a positive and lasting difference and for demonstrating the value of museums to society and a force for good in tackling many of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Delivering Change: Museum Transformers (Participating organisation): Timespan is one of seventeen organisations across Scotland leading anti-oppression training and support in museums, empowering museum professionals to improve cultural access for all. This initiative was developed by Museums Galleries Scotland and an Expert Advisory Group, with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Lottery players, and the Scottish Government.

Creative Scotland Regularly Funded Organisation 2025 (Awarded): Timespan has been recognised as a leading example of a place-based cultural institution combining contemporary art, heritage, and social action. The award acknowledges Timespan’s progressive governance model rooted in Fair Work, equality, and environmental sustainability, and its impact in delivering high-quality cultural provision in a remote rural context.

Paul Hamlyn Foundation 2025 (Awarded): Timespan was selected as one of 29 organisations across the UK to receive support through the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Arts Fund, which centres justice, community, and joy. The award recognises Timespan’s place-based, anti-oppressive practice and its role in addressing structural inequalities through art, heritage and social action: “rooted in the Highlands yet connected to global movements, Timespan exemplifies how culture can advance social justice, wellbeing and collective empowerment in rural contexts”.

Art Fund Museum of the Year 2021 (Shortlisted): The Art Fund judges were impressed and inspired by Timespan’s ability to bring together its in-depth knowledge of the community, heritage, and culture of Helmsdale with a global vision for a better world. Its unique blend of rural and radical is outward-looking and international. It offers practical grassroots support to the local community and digital connectivity through online exhibits like REAL RIGHTS and discursive forums.

Timespan’s contribution to HERITALISE
Digital Curation Expertise: Timespan leads the way in digital curation for cultural heritage in the Highlands and Scottish sectors. We have over ten years of experience developing high-quality, affordable, and reusable digital tools. Our partnership with the University of St Andrews, Open Virtual Worlds, has enabled us to co-create immersive exhibits for the museum environment with our community and groups, exploring colonial legacies, land injustices, and the impact of changing climates. We offer HERITALSIE a dedicated public space for testing new technologies, including VR, Xbox, touchscreen, and digital twin collections. We provide training for staff and volunteers. We aim to advance the use of high-quality and standardised digital methodologies and tools. We focus on digitising cultural heritage objects, sites, and landscapes from the past, present, and future.

North Sea Beatrice, Kildonan, and The Flow Country: Timespan is on the coast in the historic fishing village of Helmsdale, linking the North Sea Beatrice decommissioned oil platforms and offshore wind farm with the vast peatland of the UNESCO Flow Country. Our digital heritage research covers key periods of environmental and societal change, from the Jurassic Coast to over 6,000 years of human activity, including Iron Age settlements and post-medieval Highland Clearances townships along the Helmsdale River. The area is shaped by colonial landowners, land resistance and reform, migration, and is impacted by energy transition, climate change, and challenging social and economic issues. HERITALISE enables exploration of these themes through VR, AR, drone photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and landscape mapping, fostering discussion and debate on local and global issues through a multiplicity of voices, stories, and experiences.

Methodology and Digital Equity: There is an opportunity in HERITALISE to develop fair and inclusive guidelines for cultural heritage digitisation and to lead the way for a more equitable digital heritage framework, supporting diverse and marginalised groups, as well as economically and digitally impoverished areas. Timespan is part of the Delivering Change: Museum Transformers programme, which aims to help all people access heritage and embed anti-racism practices in the museum and its workforce. By sharing our museum practices and operational methods, we can foster a common understanding and create practices that are suitable and tailored for the museum working environment. We have the opportunity in HERITILISE to engage in technical, practical, proprietary, and ethical discussions to determine how best to facilitate this process for the EU and Scotland to develop it into a standard digitisation practice for other museums and cultural organisations.