“If people wonder what drives me, it’s because I work in cities like Liverpool. I don’t work in South Kensington. And that concentrates the mind on the potential social value of museums...”

David Fleming, Director, National Museums Liverpool, talks to Gregory Chamberlain about what drives him to take a lead on the future of museums:

David Fleming is driven by the social value of museums. And as Director of National Museums Liverpool, with all its financial clout and resources, he’s in a unique and powerful position to pursue his agenda on a grand scale.

Geography helps provides a key to understanding David’s determination in proving the social value of museums. He has never worked in London. Before Liverpool it was Hull, Sunderland and Newcastle. Big northern cities have formed the backdrop to his long and successful career in museums. It makes a difference. As he remarks: “When you’re working in cities like this, with the kinds of social issues they have, you’ve got to, for goodness sake, think what kind of contribution can we as a museum make?” It’s this experience that has shaped his vision of the role of museums.

David is an influential and vocal member of the museum community, yet one somehow outside the establishment. It gives him a freedom to experiment he obviously relishes: “museums can be whatever they want to be. There is no rulebook, beyond hopefully making a beneficial impact in society.” And it makes for a lively interview; this is how our conversation continued:

You came to Liverpool in 2001 and the organisation now seems busier then ever. How do you keep the momentum going?

You keep working at it. I remember some berk writing, I think in the Museum Professionals Group newsletter in the 1980s, something about there being a lot of money ‘sloshing around in Hull’.Well how do you think an organisation ends up with money? It doesn’t do it by sitting on its backside. It’s like the old Gary Player adage when somebody remarked how lucky he was, and he replied – “the harder I practise, the luckier I get”. It’s the same with museums. The point is that winning money is all about ideas first and foremost. If you’ve got good ideas and you are able to articulate those ideas you’ll end up being a busy organisation.

But you also have to get results, prove you can deliver on the funding you receive...

You’re right that if you can build a good track record it makes the job of securing new money easier. You’ve got to produce convincing business plans and become like a blue-chip bet. The people in charge of giving away public funds have to be confident that it will be well spent. You’ve got to be able to demonstrate you can make it happen. 

So there’s a technique to it and it’s one that National Museums Liverpool seems particularly successful at it.

It’s the only way to be. You have to keep developing on all fronts. It’s that energy and variety that builds big audiences. I sometimes wonder how many museums sit down and think, ‘how do we make an impact?’ When I came here in 2001 there were 700,000 visitors a year. I made our target 2 million by 2010. It was about raising the bar, saying let’s do something ambitious.  We broke the 2 million target in 2007, three years early according to my ‘great plan’. And we did it again in 2008. We’ve now said 3 million by 2011, and 4 million by 2015. 

It’s a strategy that clearly works here but overly ambitious schemes sometimes work against museums – setting them up to fail...

True, you do have to be realistic about your ambition. I’ve seen some wild estimates of visitor growth and it makes it difficult for the rest of us because funders lose confidence. There have been some places that haven’t got anywhere near the visitors they said they would. That means when I go asking for money from the same sources I have to put in a lot of work to turn them around again.

At least those funders can be confident  when you say you’ll get 3 million visitors, based on the increases you have delivered so far and your current figures...

I’ve always been interested in winning new visitors, and work on the assumption that if what we’re doing is varied and high quality then the existing visitors will come more often as well. It’s just about a quickening of the atmosphere, activity levels have to rise, and you do something for everyone. That’s the great power of museums, that unlike many experiences, they offer something for everybody. So you mustn’t get overly precious about the more esoteric end of what we do and equally you don’t do everything for five-year-olds. You have a balance. That’s the mark of a great museum service, which is what we’re trying to be here.

And by taking that approach you counter those who argue that museums have to dumb-down to win big audiences...

When you’re building big audiences you are always accused of dumbing-down. But show me where that dumbing-down is happening? I can’t think of any museum service, including the big nationals in London, who have dumbed-down to build bigger audiences. There is no proof. But we are mindful of the possibility of dumbing-down and think carefully about what we do. We’re not Disney. Our prime purpose is educational, and Disney’s prime purpose is making money. That’s a world of difference.

Surely part of your success is advocating the core value of the organisation and then giving key staff the freedom to innovate...

Getting as much buy-in as possible to the core value of the museum is essential. And that’s a case of recruiting and promoting the people who get it. Richard Benjamin [Director, International Slavery Museum] is a good example. He came to us quite inexperienced, but he had exactly the right attitude. I’ve realised during my career that you recruit first for attitude, and skills you can learn. Setting the standard is certainly an important job for a director and you have to have the courage of your convictions. But then you’ve got to give talented people plenty of room to operate and manoeuvre. I like to think I do that. Most importantly, the director has to have credibility with the senior staff. If you haven’t got that none of it is going to work. If you have then it works almost like a charm.

Talking to some of your senior staff today I got the impression they often know what you are thinking...

They tend to be able to second-guess me which makes life easy for everyone, for them as well as me. And it’s better if working relationships are built on mutual respect rather than fear. I have to be able to communicate clearly to lead properly. It isn’t just about control. It’s about taking the responsibility seriously for the job we do and getting clarity amongst the staff. That’s the keystone function of a museum director. I do believe the standard of leadership in museums has been going up in recent years. The museums sector was badly led in the post-war years, and it’s become much stronger as museums have acknowledged their social and educational relevance.

Many people working in museums may only work on a major project once or twice in their career. Why have you been involved in so many?

It’s recognition of the potential of museums. If you really have high ambitions for what they can do, it drives you into bringing about significant improvement and change. I’ve probably been involved in the creation of maybe half a dozen museums in my career but I don’t keep moving around. I’m not one of those people who like to set up new museums and then leaves to let somebody else pick up the pieces. Everything I’ve done is within the context of building a museum service and sometimes the best way to do that is to come up with an innovation. I’m attracted by the variety of a great museum service like Liverpool. If I have ten museums I want to improve all ten at the same time. I think I might get bored if I was working in a specialist environment.

Museums have changed massively over the last 10 or 20 years, in terms of how they engage with the public and how they view their role in society...

It’s how they think that has been the biggest change. And they’ve changed how they think because the people in them now think differently. Our role has transformed. When you think about our social value it makes you behave very differently as an organisation. For example, it makes you very partnership orientated, because you acknowledge that you can only deliver your full potential if you are working with other agencies. In the past museums had a tendency to be isolationist, only talking to other museums. They didn’t engage with parts of the community and now it’s unthinkable that a museum service could succeed like that. That’s a real sea change. People coming into the sector now could be forgiven for thinking it’s always been like this. But it hasn’t always been like this. In fact it’s still quite new.

So are we in some kind of ‘golden era’ for museums?

I came into museums right at the beginning of the 80s, and I knew lots of people who worked in them in the 60s and 70s. I could see what museums had been like and I’ve seen how they’ve changed. So I don’t know if it’s a golden era yet, it’s probably too soon to say, but certainly there’s been a rapid evolution, and it’s come not before time, because the way that we’ve seen successive crunches in public spending, museums have had to change their ways, in order to justify the expenditure. And this year many museums are going to have to fight exactly those same fights in town halls up and down the country, to explain to politicians why they should continue to spend money on them, and those that are best placed to do that are those that have been following social justice agendas for the longest time. If you’ve been sitting around worrying about the state of your documentation, and not worrying about what your politicians think of you, then you’re going to have a bloody hard job negotiating standstill budgets right at the moment. But it’s not just a self-defence mechanism. It’s a more generous approach to how big an agent of social change museums can be. So a golden age is probably going a little too far, but I would certainly say I’m pleased with the way museums have developed. But there is still a long way to go and I would personally like to see more evidence of a shift in thinking in the national museum sector.

What kind of shift in thinking? You say there has been a sea change in museums so hasn’t the social value argument been won?

No. For reasons that I can’t quite work out, there are still forces that don’t sign up to the social change agenda. I say I can’t work them out and I’m not being disingenuous. I cannot understand why people can’t sign up to this agenda, because it seems to me that everybody wins. The public wins, the people working in museums win, the collections win, research wins. Everything wins because you are winning resources. The notion that your research and collection care suffers because you’re concentrating on the public is absurd. The whole idea is that you win over the public, in its broadest sense. You therefore win access to resources, and you are therefore able to do what many regard as the essential core job of museums, looking after collections. There’s no conflict there, but there still seem to be people that don’t quite get it.

So there is a certain reticence in the museum profession to signing up the progressive agenda you advocate.

I think there will always be reticence. I think the reticence is probably born of the fact that museums will always have a scholastic underpinning of what they do, and scholasticism can, at times, be a solitary pursuit. It can certainly be exclusive and elitist. But I think that great museum services have to work as teams and be open to public engagement. That can create tension. I personally think it is nonsense to say that scholasticism has suffered in any way in museums. I don’t think it has. In fact I think it’s been prospering. I don’t see any core museum work suffering because museums are seen as more socially relevant now.

And you mentioned that you’d like to see national museums doing more... 

I think so, because I think they are the natural leaders. They should set an example. They operate on a scale that smaller museums can only dream about. But the trouble is most national museums are based in London and London is different from the great regional cities. You’ve only got to look at the sheer volume of overseas tourists in London.  Regional cities have different pressures and this is why Liverpool is such an interesting experiment for museums. We are a national museum service that operates on a large scale and yet our core work is in a regional city. What we want to do is demonstrate that museum activity can genuinely make a huge difference in a big urban community like this. The challenge is immense. We are  conscious of showing, given the right kind of resources, what a museum service can really do. For social impact, you have to look around other parts of the country than London. And ultimately people ought to be looking at Liverpool.

Does the public realise museums have changed? Has the image of museums shifted in the public consciousness?

I think it is better. I think they are seen by more people as more relevant, but there’s still a long way to go. Kids, of course, have no idea that museums have changed, all they know is what they are like now. Museums should be what the public wants them to be. As a museum director I’m not going to write my own bylaws, saying there must be no talking or you’ve got to look neat and tidy to come here. We have to be a part of the community and museums can be as lively as they want. Sometimes you get people saying, well, what’s that doing here? Why have you got dancing in a museum, why have you got a kids’ band in a museum? You get all these strange prejudices, and the answer is, well, museums can be whatever they want to be. So choose your weapon and do it any way you like. It’s the motivation, to me, that’s important and you can employ any number of techniques in order to achieve that.

Isn’t one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, things about museums the fact that they are shared public spaces and can influence how people behave and interact?

I think that’s right. Museums are rare places where you do get real adult/child interplay. You get interchange, you get generations talking to each other, and that doesn’t happen that often in society anymore. Museums are places where you can get intergenerational exchange, and if you’re based in a city like Liverpool and you are popular you do start to have an impact. Museums have become the kind of place that religious buildings used to be. Museums have become an important part of the community fabric, somewhere where you can go where it is different. We have to get the message across that museums are cool. That we’re relaxed, we’re not going to throw you out, you don’t have to have been to university to get it, that we are friendly. Get that message across and you can have an impact. But it takes time. You can only judge it over periods of years. I suppose what we’re doing in Liverpool at the moment is as near as you’re going to get to a great social experiment, because of our ability to work on a large scale in a city with such definable problems. But it does take time, not least because you make mistakes along the way. You don’t get everything right first time, and you’re making it up as you go along – anybody that says different is lying. There’s a lot of guesswork involved, there’s a lot of hope involved, and a bit less calculation than I think some people would like to admit.

We are obviously living in difficult economic times and that’s going to affect museums and have a far reaching impact in society. So what does the future hold here in Liverpool?

Ultimately the bedrock for us is our sense of purpose, our core aims, values and mission. I think with our new chairman, Phil Redmond, we’ve got real clarity now in Liverpool. He and I have identical views about what a museum service can achieve in this city, which gives me ever more encouragement to go on and try new things, because I know that there is a board of trustees that are as up for it as I am, and as the staff are. This is a great national museum service, and we’ve got a board of trustees that understand the social justice agenda. That’s an experiment people should be watching.