The New Normal interview series: The future of museums

‘I have to be very careful not to look back with complete rose-tinted spectacles on the BC [Before Covid] period, but the Imperial War Museums [which comprises five museums – The Churchill War Rooms, HMS Belfast, IWM Duxford, IWM North and IWM London] were collectively having one of the best years in our history. We've been incredibly successful in fundraising, attendance, exhibitions and reaching new audiences. And then of course, it all fell off a cliff. Like anybody that's in a business where you rely on a customer to visit you, we have been badly affected financially. We're currently losing about a million pounds a month. It's a really weird time, isn't it? Because we're an organisation that spends our entire life going, “Come in. We're great. Come visit us.” And then we changed all that to, “Don't visit us. Stay away. Stay home.” It's just not what we do.’

‘I've been in museums for 35 years. I've always managed people, but I've never managed people who were scared before. I have an incredibly dedicated team. They are people who understand our cause and understand our purpose, and just want to deliver it, but some of them are scared – they are fearful for themselves, for their families, for their livelihoods, for their purpose. How do you take away that fear? It's an almost impossible task, because it's so individual. I’ve found talking helps. Letting people voice their fears and, if possible, we can face them together. So, when it comes to opening the museums again, one of our big concerns is making sure that our staff are not afraid to come back to work and that we do it as sensibly as possible. It’s important to remember our job is not only to make museums safe for visitors, but safe for our people as well.’

‘We just couldn't face the thought of staying closed, so we've done a lot of planning about reopening. Obviously, we are guided completely by the government advice and making sure that anything that we do wouldn't contribute to spreading the virus in any way. Each branch is different for the IWM, so the challenges of the current social distancing guidance on HMS Belfast [the most significant surviving Second World War Royal Navy warship] are very different than the social distancing challenges at somewhere like Duxford, which is a massive airfield. So, we might end up opening in phases.

‘The other thing that we've got to consider is, will there be enough people to make it financially viable? Will people want to return to museums? Will they feel comfortable using public transport to get there if they need to? Otherwise, we'll just be pulling staff back from furlough, increasing our base cost, and the visitors won't be there to supply an income. So, there's a balancing act. First and foremost, it needs to be safe, but secondly, that it's viable to do so. That includes, obviously, the return of international travel and all of those things for our international audiences. Sadly, it could be a while until we see them again.’

‘One thing we could do immediately is to offer digital experiences. We have a really strong digital programme with family activities you can follow up at home, so things were in place [before the pandemic], but we've enhanced them so that they have a wider reach. I had the most amazing feedback from an Australian family that was home-schooling. The mum wrote to us to say the family had built an air raid shelter under a table, which is one of the activities in our WWII pack, and said it was the most fun exercise that they'd done. Not only had the kids said it didn’t feel like schoolwork, they were even sleeping in it and as a result couldn’t wait to go to bed every night! That's a success for us. We’ve not only helped them understand the Second World War and the consequences, but the fact that they will also remember a positive experience and having some fun was a great reward. It shows that you can have an impact doing things differently and digitally.’

‘The most immediate concern is the sorting out of the financial situation: there are significant financial consequences to this pandemic, particularly for national museums and that's partly to do with the lack of international tourism. There's a conversation to be had with the government about funding and protecting the collections, because the collections belong to the nation. They don't belong to the individual museums, they belong to the people. We'd started a conversation with them about the capital needs of the national museums before the crisis, because we've really got some serious issues with our buildings infrastructure, and those were going incredibly well, but I don’t know how that will go after this.

‘There are opportunities for all of the national museums to come together and share things more. If we'd had a national museum shop portal with a distribution centre all together in one, this crisis would have been slightly less onerous because we would have still been making some money, instead of each individual museum going it alone. I can see that digitally too, us working together to spread our reach and help people understand art, science, history...

It's time to rethink how far that could go and what we could do. We have to prepare, because sadly it is probably not a case of if this happens again, but when.’