LT Museum turns 40
London Transport Museum Director SAM MULLINS OBE discusses with STEFANIE FOSTER the importance of the world’s leading urban transport museum
London Transport Museum marks 40 years at its Covent Garden site with a focus on the past, present… and future.
F ew museums have such a coherent collection that covers so many different areas of interest as the London
Transport Museum. At face value, it is a collection of urban transport in London. In reality, it is so much more.
Aside from the obvious buses and Tube trains, what makes the LTM so interesting are the many social and economic history stories associated with its collection, and the vast subjects they cover - from design and architecture to textiles and engineering.
The famous Johnston typeface, the iconic Underground roundel, Harry Beck’s ingenious map design - all are part of what gives the museum its unique quality.
As the country entered lockdown on March 23, what is the world’s premier urban transport museum was just days away from celebrating a significant milestone - its 40th anniversary at Covent Garden’s iconic old Flower Market.
Leading the museum as director since 1994 is Sam Mullins, who received an OBE in 2019 for his services to the LTM. He spoke to at one of the toughest times in the museum’s history - a few weeks into lockdown.
With four-fifths of its income coming from visitors and corporate supporters, having to shut its doors for an extended period will undoubtedly come at a high price. How is Mullins feeling about its future?
“Step one is survival. We will undoubtedly come out of this different from how we went in, that’s for sure. We know that this is going to have a big influence on Transport for London, which is our parent company. It has a big influence on the industry and the visitors who support us.
“Most of our income is derived from the visitors to Covent Garden, and that’s just not there at the moment. So, the main objective is finding a way through this. In a way, like a lot of organisations, we developed a business model that is quite self-reliant. TfL gives us a grant of £ 3 million a year and some help in kind, but we raise the other 80% ourselves. And that’s what’s currently disappeared.”
There are some surprising successes, though - the LTM’s online gift shop is currently selling 75% more products during lockdown than it was in the same period last year. With most people at home, away from family, they’re turning to online retail therapy and treating themselves or a loved one to items they’ve maybe had their eye on for a while.
Despite the uncertainty and difficulties that the museum is currently experiencing, Mullins is optimistic about the future:
“There will be some choppy waters to navigate, but I’m confident we’ll get back to business. And I guess when we come out of this, the lines of what we do will be broadly the same. We will continue to run the world’s leading museum of urban transport. There’s nothing else quite like it in the world.
“I guess one of those reasons is that London as a city - its personality - has been formed by transport perhaps more than any other city in the world. It’s appropriate for us to sit at that interesting crossroads between the past, the present and the future, because we know that the London around us has been formed by transport since 1829 or so, and we know the future of big cities needs transport infrastructure to sustain them beyond the next generation.
“So, we’re in an interesting position. And in the past decade we’ve come to really appreciate that sense that we’re about how the past has informed the present and how the present shapes the future. That’s become the positioning for the museum.”
It’s this relevance to the future that has enabled the museum to attract the support of more than 50 corporate members, including the likes of Bombardier, Jacobs and Siemens.
Their invaluable financial support affords them use of the museum for their own events (there is a large lecture theatre, for example), as well as access to some of the LTM’s specific corporate programmes such as increasingly relevant thought leadership events.
This aspect of the museum is a fairly recent development, resulting from relationships established with the rail industry during a £ 22m refurbishment project that was completed in 2007. Fundraising for the huge transformation of the museum meant building relationships with companies such as Cubic and Siemens, who still support the LTM today.
Says Mullins: “When we reopened in 2007, I walked Sir Peter Hendy, who was then commissioner [of Transport for London], around the place a couple of days before we reopened. And he said words to the effect of ‘oh great, this is no longer a museum of old buses’.
“It had become something else. It always was a museum about the social and economic impact of transport on London’s history. It wasn’t a narrow technological museum like many transport museums are, it was already a bit more than that. But the 2007 refurb, which seems like a long time ago now, was a fantastic platform for establishing relationships.”
While these corporate partners are enormously important to the financial stability of the museum, its main source of income is the 400,000 visitors who flock to Covent Garden every year.
Every museum has to wrestle with the differing interests and needs of the varied demographics of its visitors - and none more so than the LTM, with its mix of tourists ( both domestic and foreign) seeking an ‘experience’, transport enthusiasts indulging their passion, and families looking for education and entertainment for their children.
But it’s a challenge the museum is well prepared for, by tailoring different programmes to its varying visitor
groups throughout the year.
In the past decade we’ve come to really appreciate that sense that we’re about how the past has informed the present and how the present shapes the future.
Most impressive is its focus on the family market.
“We’ve always been pretty strong on families with young children,” says Mullins. “We realised some time ago that lots of museums tolerate families but not many positively encourage them and provide for them, so we’ve done that pretty hard in recent years.
“We had an extraordinary February half term - I think we had 22,000 visitors in the seven days. Which actually is a bit like bedlam at times.”
One of the museum’s greatest strengths is its focus on educating and enthusing children from an early age, and it’s something that Mullins is especially proud of. The museum works with children in every borough across London in their last year of primary school, when they’re about to start using public transport to attend secondary school.
Mullins suggests that the museum has a natural advantage over other museums when it comes to engaging children, in that buses and trains are big and bright and don’t require any explanation for a child to appreciate and enjoy seeing them. But the LTM goes much further than simply getting children excited about seeing a train - it encourages them to consider transport as a future career:
“I think the industry has gradually understood that people’s ideas about future careers are formed earlier than everyone used to think. It’s not careers advice time - that’s too late.
“We do this programme which is sponsored by a consortium of industry players called ‘Enjoyment to Employment’, which takes the enjoyment of four- to six-year-olds in the museum and seeks to hang onto that into top juniors and the early years of secondary school, just bridging those few years until children have to start making decisions about subjects they want to study.
“We opened a gallery in 2018 called ‘Future Engineers’ which posed the question: ‘Are you a fixer, a dreamer or a planner?’ Because those are the qualities which all engineers have to have.”
Future Engineers consists of a number of interactive exhibits and videos, including some of female engineers from the museum’s sponsors. They talk about the work they do and show children that engineering isn’t all about mucky boots and high-vis jackets on a building site.
These programmes run in London schools or through schools, bringing children to Covent Garden or to the museum’s store at Acton Depot (where the undisplayed collection is held).
Says Mullins: “Around 65,000 children went through our STEM-based [Science,