Rachel Mackay on visitor experience and the unique challenges and opportunities of running Hampton Court Palace.
Rachel Mackay is Head of Hampton Court Palace - an incredible job title with a fantastic bonus included... she gets to live in a Royal Palace. It's not quite as fairytale glamorous as it sounds, but the role, and the Palace itself, provide Rachel with one of the most intriguing and rewarding roles within the cultural sector. What better place and person to start this new podcast from the Association for Cultural Enterprises?
The aim of this podcast is to discover, highlight and share best practice, innovation and insights from the galleries, museums and heritage sites that make up the UK's rich and varied cultural sector. How can cultural enterprises delight the public and also be financially sustainable? This podcast will find out and share the knowledge for everyone's benefit.
In this fascinating first episode, host Tom Dykes joins Rachel for a quick tour of Hampton Court before settling in her historic (every room has a story here) office to discuss everything from dealing with Royals, to roasting beef in original Tudor kitchens... from the latest theories on maximising visitor experience, to balancing revenue and disruption when it comes to granting filming licences.
The 'Arts & Culture' podcast publishes a new episode every month. Please subscribe to never miss an episode, leave a review to support the podcast and do spread the word far and wide.
For more information on Hampton Court - https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/#gs.6b9zzw
Rachel's book about Visitor Experience - https://facetpublishing.co.uk/page/detail/?K=9781783305490
Arts & Culture Podcast - Episode 1 - Hampton Court Palace - Transcript
Tom: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Arts and Culture podcast brought to you by the Association for Cultural Enterprises. I'm Tom, your host, and in this brand new podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes of the cultural sector, telling the stories of the people who make it all happen. We're starting off royally with a trip to Hampton Court Palace when on a sunny day I made the trip along the Thames to talk to someone with an incredible job and a very cool job title.
Tom: Rachel Mackay is the head of Hampton Court and has been working in the museum's inheritance sector for over 20 years. Rachel created the Recovery Room blog during the pandemic and has recently published a book called Delivering the Visitor Experience. Prior to Hampton Court, Rachel was manager of Kew Palace, four historic royal palaces, and worked at the National History Museum and Dundee Science Centre.
Tom: Rachel is also a trustee of the Pitshanger Manor and Gallery Trust. I met Rachel for a tour of the palace and grounds on a [00:01:00] scorching hot day earlier this year before we headed for the shade of her incredible office. Enjoy.
Tom: So it is episode one, and we're straight into exploring the kind of unique situations this sector provides. I mean, my first question, I'm sure is the question everybody will have is, how and why have you got to live in a palace. How did you end up here?
Rachel Mackay: Well, I guess it comes with the job. I have been working here for about a year as head of Hampton Court Palace and we always have to have somebody on call.
Rachel Mackay: So, myself and some colleagues do a weekend turn where we're able to be woken up at night if something goes wrong. Ready and willing to deal with anything that happens. So that's why some of us live on site at the palace. But it's a very Lucky existence, and I'm always very aware of that. I do literally wake up every morning thinking, how on earth has this happened?
Tom: So, describe the room we're in now.
Rachel Mackay: Hampton Court Palace was a grace and favour palace at one point, and what that means is, people were allowed to live [00:02:00] here. Because they had done something for the crown, or for the country, or if they just happened to be mates with the royal family. Doesn't happen anymore, but it means that quite a lot of the buildings at Hampton Court were converted into people's homes.
Rachel Mackay: So apartment 4244, which is where we are at the moment, this was known as the explorer's apartment, because quite a lot of people lived here who had a connection to Antarctic exploration. But I love it because Robert Falcon Scott's mother lived here. I'm from Dundee, which is where his ship, the Discovery, was built.
Rachel Mackay: So I feel a very close connection to that story in a way. So I, when I found out that he, you know, potentially visited this house, he actually got married in our chapel as well. It felt quite like, it was like fate. It was like a come home. It was meant to be. Yeah.
Tom: Is there anything like a typical day at Hampton Court in terms of visitor experience?
Tom: I imagine not, given the place.
Rachel Mackay: I think that anybody who works in the kind of operations kind of high footfall job would, would laugh at the idea that there is a typical day. It's just the Hampton Court is such an events based palace. We, [00:03:00] especially in the summer, we go from Horrible Histories, a big stage show over May.
Rachel Mackay: Then we go straight into building the stage for the music festivals. We had, uh, Uh, literary festival with the king and the queen in attendance, and that is always a chaotic day, but very good fun. Go from the music festival into the RHS garden show, and then we go into the food festival, and then we go into the classic car show.
Rachel Mackay: So it's just, there's just things constantly, constantly happening, and as a team we all get really involved in everything. So you're looking out for the protection officer saying that the king's about to arrive, and the next day you're cleaning beer off of a seat in the music festival because... Somebody spilled beer, you know, so everybody is just very hands on and doing what needs to be done.
Rachel Mackay: And that means that there are certain days where you just got to down tools and just be very reactive to whatever needs done. Wow, I'm
Tom: exhausted just listening to all of that. So much.
Rachel Mackay: And that was just Sunday.
Tom: Hampton Course is still owned by the King. Is that right?
Rachel Mackay: That's right. So we almost have like a management contract which [00:04:00] expires and has to be renewed.
Rachel Mackay: So it's not a done deal that we will be the charity that's always running this. But we are the only charity that has ever run it. And we think we do a pretty good job at it. So the King still owns all of our sites, but we, we manage them.
Tom: So did that present any particular challenges having such high profile guests?
Rachel Mackay: Challenges and opportunities. Actually, since the king became king, he's kind of, he's been here twice, so already we're feeling like he's going to be very active in coming to see our places. I mean, yeah, since I've been at Hampton Court, I didn't necessarily know that it was going to be this year where the queen would die, and then we'd have a coronation.
Rachel Mackay: So these are things that you don't necessarily plan for, but when it happens, and we're royal palaces, everything changes, and a whole new stream of work comes into managing. How do we respond to that?
Tom: I bet. And just before we started recording this, he gave us a really great tour of the palace. And we were going around going, oh, I think I recognize this bit, or I recognize that room from somewhere.
Tom: And obviously Hunter Court's fairly well known for being a filming location. I [00:05:00] mean, what's that like, having to host these massive crews? And you've had people like Bridgerton, and who else have you had recently?
Rachel Mackay: I mean, first of all, you're being very generous in saying that was a great tour. I mean, it's such a terrible tour guide.
Rachel Mackay: All I did was tell you the name of the room that we were in. We have much, much better tour guides on staff. But um, filming is, has become, has become a really big kind of business for us and it's not just that, you know, it generates income for our charity and our conservation, which is obviously a big part of it.
Rachel Mackay: But it does help get awareness out there. We've had big films at Hampton Court, so we've done Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack the Giant Slayer, which was a big film before my time. We have done The Favourite, which is one that a lot of people will recognize the palace from. And yeah, Bridgerton, as you say, Bridgerton has filmed a lot here.
Rachel Mackay: Queen Charlotte last summer. And we also do a fair amount of kind of documentaries and things like that. And we've also done our own thing. So there, there is a Hampton Court Palace behind closed doors documentary on channel five. There's a similar one for the Tower of London. So we've really opened our doors and let the cameras in.
Rachel Mackay: Obviously that comes with a [00:06:00] lot of logistical challenges, but it's kind of one of the most fun things to manage really when filming requests come in. It's kind of my job to look at it and say, okay, is this something that we can accomplish? whilst we're open? Or does this mean that we're going to have to shut certain things?
Rachel Mackay: And then what does our visitor offer look like? What else is going on that day? Because we're always doing some maintenance. Is there a festival going on that we need to build that actually is going to clash with that? So it's, there's just so much going on on site at any one time. If we have a big film film shoot, that'll be one of like five things that are happening that day.
Rachel Mackay: My main job almost is that kind of coordination and facilitation of like people talking to each other and figuring out how we can make. All the different parts run and the visitors can still come in and enjoy it and not really notice anything is happening. Although when they do see filming going on, they love it.
Rachel Mackay: It is exciting. Yeah. And it has driven visitors as well. You know, the Bridgeton audience are very passionate about, about the palace. And it doesn't mean that we all have to watch it because we all have to be able to say, Oh, this scene happened there. It's quite [00:07:00] enjoyable actually. So that's fine.
Tom: And do you have to prioritize the visitor experience above everything else then?
Tom: So when you're looking at offers of people coming in and potential income generation opportunities. Is it always, how does this affect the visitor? We've got to stay open. Is that the
Rachel Mackay: priority? First of all, yes, that is a priority. It's definitely a balancing act. However, since COVID, we've changed our business model slightly.
Rachel Mackay: So it used to be that we were open seven days a week at Hampton Court. Now we're only open Wednesdays to Sunday during term time, and that's given us a lot more flexibility. So when we have big film shoots or big events or things going on, the things that we need to build. We try and as much as possible, fit that in on our closed days to really minimize the impact on the visitor.
Rachel Mackay: So that has helped a lot with that kind of balancing act. It has meant that we can do more stuff than we did before. We always want to make sure that we are maximizing our open times and, and maximizing what people can see, especially people about membership. You know, we want to make sure that people are getting good value for money and that they're having a nice time when they come here.
Rachel Mackay: That's. It's certainly my priority. And one
Tom: of the things that [00:08:00] really struck me when we were walking around was, Hampton Court is the sort of place which really engages your senses, um, it's not just a kind of visual feast. I mean, we walked into the kitchen and you had a fire on and it smelled like people who'd been cooking there for hundreds of years and had that wonderful, that wonderful smell of a real open fire.
Tom: And it seems like you've got a lot of experiences available to the visitor here.
Rachel Mackay: Yeah, I think it's definitely, I think to engage with history and all we have to have to offer is important to try and engage as many senses as you can. And I love the kitchens where we have that big fire. It's, I think, probably the best kind of experience fireplace in the world because, you know, you have the smell.
Rachel Mackay: We also do keep cooked beef on it on Sundays as well. And kids can come in and actually take a turn of turning the spit. I mean, at one point in history, that would be a really normal thing for children to do. I imagine most children would never have done that before. And then of course you see the parents.
Rachel Mackay: taking videos and just being so delighted [00:09:00] that their kid is getting to have that experience. I think that is one of the coolest things that we do. When we cook the beef, which obviously is done in conditions so that it cannot be given out to members of the public. But we do a sort of staff lottery where we can win the beef and take it home.
Rachel Mackay: And I love that because. Well, the beef is great, for one thing. But it's what would have been done in the Tudor times as well. If there was leftover food from the kitchens, it would have been distributed to the staff. And I love it when we can use rooms and spaces how they would have been used historically, because that is how these spaces work well.
Rachel Mackay: A lot of historic houses have not been designed to hold thousands and thousands of people traipsing through every year, and that brings challenges. But I find that when we try and use And were historically used. Everything clicks. It was a lot of that queue when I was at Q and we were managing Queen Charlotte's cottage.
Rachel Mackay: We were spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the inside of that cottage work as a visitor experience. And it wasn't until we started putting garden games outside and deck chairs outside. That we realised that was built as a base so that people could enjoy the gardens, so that the [00:10:00] royal family could go to that end of the gardens and enjoy the gardens.
Rachel Mackay: It's about the gardens, it's not about the house. That just clicked all of a sudden. We were using it how it was meant to be used and everything just worked a lot better. So I, I'm a big advocate of find how that space was used and try and lean into that because then you're working with the building rather than against it.
Rachel Mackay: I
Tom: love that. I mean, your expertise is obviously visitor experience, and some of the stuff you've written about in the past, and I know you've done courses for us, the words impactful and unforgettable. Often come up in this to experience those. The most important qualities, do you think to give a really great
Rachel Mackay: visitor experience?
Rachel Mackay: Yes, they're important. I would say that fun is an important one as well. It sometimes gets forgotten about, as professionals. We want everyone to come into the sites that we love and find them very impactful and learn lots and go away completely transformed. But we sometimes forget that most people, when they go out, they're just looking for a fun day out, a social experience with their family.
Rachel Mackay: And actually, it's not necessarily about the space. It's about the space being a backdrop to what they want to get out of their day. So there [00:11:00] has got to be that kind of impactful visitor experience, definitely. But it also has to be me giving people space, giving people time to have their own experiences and their own kind of social interactions as well.
Rachel Mackay: So I think. People have a range of different motivations for coming to places like this, and it's about respecting them all equally. Just because somebody doesn't want to read every single object label and go away with the equivalent of a PhD in Tudor history doesn't mean that that's not a valued visitor experience.
Rachel Mackay: If you've just come here and had a lovely picnic in the gardens with your family and you haven't even gone into the house, that's absolutely fine. If you've just gone to the Magic Garden playground, that's absolutely fine. You know, we're here for the visitors and what they want to get out of it, so it's about respecting all the different reasons that people want to come.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a little bird tells me that you've actually written a book. Was that little bird me? Possibly.
Tom: Tell us about that. So, uh, what's that about
Rachel Mackay: and when is it coming out? Yes. So this is the book that I wish existed when I was kind of coming up because nobody has written a book as far as I can see. It's just about the practicalities of delivering the [00:12:00] visitor experience. So the book looks at kind of creating a visitor experience from scratch.
Rachel Mackay: Most of it is about people. because that is about people, your visitors, and it's about the team that are delivering the visitor experience. So a lot of it is focused on them, their recruitment, the induction training, working with volunteers, and then the kind of nuts and bolts of managing visitor experiences.
Rachel Mackay: So things like performance management, guided tours, crisis management. The third section goes more into developing visitor experience in the future. So looking at things like innovation. Advocating for the visitor experience, change management, professional development for front of house staff, that sort of thing.
Rachel Mackay: And each chapter has a case study, and that was really the most fun part of writing the book, was going out and finding these examples of best practice from across the sector. So we've got things like, um, we've got Stonehenge in there, we've got the Scotch whisky experience, which was very hard to research.
Rachel Mackay: I must have said terrible. Very draining, actually. Um, the Mary Rose Museum is in there. The Ashmolean Museum. I had to include something from Dundee, my hometown, so we've got a really good case [00:13:00] study of a volunteer experience in, in Virgin Works, which is Scotland's Jute Museum. That's what it's all about, sharing best practice.
Rachel Mackay: We're all doing the same sort of thing. There's no point in us reinventing the wheel when other people are doing great things and we can steal with pride from them.
Tom: Sounds great. I mean, you reminded me the, um, the Dundee connection and the Bridgerton effect. I don't know if you ever watched Succession.
Tom: Yes. It was a really famous scene. Didn't they, they film They filmed a whole episode in Dundee. Yeah. Logan Roy's birthday in the V& A Dundee. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering if there'll be a
Rachel Mackay: Succession effect. They might have done it, the V& A Dundee actually. They might have had people coming in to ask them. I was trying to figure out, I was there last week and I was trying to figure out which balcony it was that they were kind of standing on.
Rachel Mackay: But it was hilarious watching that because They drive in such a mad way around the city. You're just like, where, where are you? You've gone up that road and then you come down this other bit. It's across, you know. So that sort of stuff was, was good fun. Give
Tom: me an example of something bizarre that you just say to yourself, God, this could only happen at Hampton
Rachel Mackay: Court.
Rachel Mackay: Oh my God, I say that all the time. And I've said that in quite a few jobs that I've had, actually. I have [00:14:00] memories of specific things that I've said, or that have been said to me where I've gone. That's. That's a weird sentence to hear or say. My first job in London was at Madame Tussauds and over the radio I heard somebody go And unless you work for the Secret Service and something awful has happened, I don't think you would hear this sentence anywhere else.
Rachel Mackay: Somebody just went, Oh, a leg has just come off Obama. I was, when I was at the Natural History Museum, we were meant to be doing some early morning filming in the mammals gallery. And I had to get on the radio and say, no, we can't do it this morning. They're vacuuming the giraffe. That's weird, isn't it?
Rachel Mackay: Somebody's got to do it. Yeah. But there, yeah, there's, there's definitely a lot of stuff like that that happens here. There's a quite a unique event that we do called the Tudor Pool. Which involves the Royal Watermen, who are the people who are meant to accompany the monarch whenever the monarch is on the water.
Rachel Mackay: Uh, and they row the Royal Barge from Hampton Court to the Tower of London. Sort of to demonstrate their ability at rowing, that seems to be the reason for doing it. And there's this ceremony where we have to present them with this artefact, which is called a [00:15:00] stele, which is a part of an ancient water pipe.
Rachel Mackay: So that they can then row it to the Tower. Now, it is at the Tower, so I had to go and get it from the Tower. And bring it to Hampton Court. And it's big, it's in a big sort of case. So I had it in this sort of taxi beside me, thinking this is a weird job that I'm doing. And then on Sunday, I had to present it to them.
Rachel Mackay: And as part of the ceremony, I had to thank them for bringing it back to me. And I was like, I got it in a taxi on Thursday. The ceremony seemed to involve drinking some champagne at 10 o'clock in the morning. It was the first time I've done it. It was a really cool event. But one of the things we were like, wow, this could only
happen
Tom: here.
Tom: I suppose one of the other unusual things about this is that You had people actually living there until fairly recently.
Rachel Mackay: Yeah, so we had our, the Grace and Favour scheme was sort of stopped in the 1970s. However, people were allowed to live here for the rest of their lives, so we had one resident who lived here until just two years ago.
Rachel Mackay: She was very much part of the palace community, as is everybody that lives here, it's like a little village, and quite social in a way, which is nice, you know. Everyone kind of goes to [00:16:00] church on Christmas day and, because we have a church. Yeah, so she was sort of an active part of the community and very, very well known, very generous at Christmas time, apparently.
Rachel Mackay: I wasn't here when she was, when she was still here, but everybody was very fond of her. So, and it's, it does feel quite nice to, I mean, I'm not a Grace and Favour resident, I do pay rent, but to sort of carry on that tradition of living at the palace, it does feel very privileged, but. Quite a good fun as well.
Rachel Mackay: And to be able to research your house and who lived in it before and all that kind of stuff, to be sort of part of that ongoing tradition is really fun. As a
Tom: group of colleagues, what do you do after work when you live in Hampton Court Palace? Is there like a local pub? Do you go and sit in the gardens?
Tom: What can you do? There
Rachel Mackay: are several good pubs. There's quite a lot of kind of sports social stuff that happens. So a group of us do trampolining every, every week in our learning center. But it's weird because I do find that I've Gone, kind of, a week or so and not left the palace at all. And I have to sort of check myself and go, Okay, I need to leave the palace grounds at some point.
Rachel Mackay: Because... [00:17:00] When everything you sort of need is on site, you just get very lazy. When I moved here from Chiswick in January and I thought, Oh, I'm going to be back in London like all the time. And I just didn't. Um, so you can, you know, and that's, that's the danger about living on site, actually, is that, you know, your, your work life balance does begin to become very blurred and you have to be very good at making that separation.
Rachel Mackay: Otherwise, I think eventually you'll probably just go mad. But I'm, I have two doors out of my house. One goes into the palace, one goes into... And so I have a rule that if I'm on a day off, I'm only allowed to use the outside world door because the second I step out of the other door, it's, you get dragged into, you know, something to do with work.
Rachel Mackay: So you've got to be quite strict with yourself if you live on site, I think. I bet.
Tom: That's really interesting. I mean, one of the things I'm always curious about people who work for cultural attractions, and even more so if they live there, is, is there a risk of. It becoming almost too normal that kind of familiarity breeds contempt kind of view that you you are working an amazing place And you [00:18:00] know, I've had this in my career.
Tom: You can just become a bit blase about it And how how do you deal with that every day?
Rachel Mackay: That's a good question I've worked, you know, I worked at Kew for five years I think and I worked at the Natural History Museum, which you know, people don't think of as a historic building But it is a beautiful historic building.
Rachel Mackay: It never wore off. I worked there for eight years It never wore off being in that building and walking into The central hall. I remember we used to sort of, after closing up, walking through that central hall when it was empty, like, it just was awe inspiring every single time. It never wore off. And that's why, I guess, I work in these sorts of places, because I love that.
Rachel Mackay: If it does begin to feel like just another office job, then it would be... Kind of pointless. And that's why I think that furlough and things like that were so difficult for a lot of us in this industry because we're not designed to work from home. We work in these places because we love the places. And that's why we put up with the fact that there's no heating and many different issues that we have to deal with maintenance wise because we love the spaces.
Rachel Mackay: So, I can't imagine ever being blase about it or [00:19:00] ever thinking. I mean, it's fun when I bring in, like I brought you in this morning. Um, as you walk in just through the palace, it's like, wow! So it's nice to have new people coming in every so often and you go, oh yeah, yeah, it is, you know, mad.
Tom: That kind of, that childish wonder at a place that you don't see very
Rachel Mackay: often.
Rachel Mackay: But I definitely still have moments of that. I mean, I hadn't seen the music festival set up since the year before, and walking into the base court and seeing the audience there, I mean, it just, it's amazing. There's just... It's a feast for the eyes every single day here. It's ridiculous. I'm starting to sound really ridiculous.
Rachel Mackay: I'll stop talking now, but it's In summary, it's fun.
Tom: It's mad. I mean, but that's the thing. It is a slight it's a ridiculous sector. Yeah Yeah, yeah So if you were to give any advice to someone else coming into visitor experience It could be really small venue. It doesn't have to be a palace. What's the biggest bit of advice you would give them on how to, how to do that job.
Tom: Someone in a front of house role. Yeah. Dealing with, you know, the flow of visitors day in, day out.
Rachel Mackay: Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah. So I think that it's an interesting area because I think that sometimes how we recruit for those positions isn't quite right. There's a whole issue in the sector at the moment about front of house staffing incredibly overqualified because it's quite hard to move out of those positions sometimes.
Rachel Mackay: And. you know, what are we actually looking for? There's a tendency to go for people who have degrees in whatever particular subject that your museum is about, so, and you do get, you get people who are really passionate about history who want to kind of get a step in into an organization and then go and be a curator or whatever it is that they want to do, which is, of course, absolutely fine and it's a great way into the sector, but actually.
Rachel Mackay: We've really changed here now, what we kind of look for, because we can teach people history, but what we, what that job is really about is people. If you're a people person, then you can do that job. It's not about knowing all the history of the building. I mean, I don't know all the history of the building.
Rachel Mackay: It would take years to learn all. I always look for people who've got catering backgrounds, retail backgrounds, just anything to do with customer service. You know, you've been in that kind of pressured environment where you've got to just step in and deal with things. The [00:21:00] confidence to be able to go up and, sort a queue out of what has become a crowd, the confidence to just kind of deal with issues as they arise.
Rachel Mackay: So those are the really important kind of skills, I think, as opposed to somebody who's You know, super interested in history and has all that knowledge. Now, a lot of them do have that anyway. If you come into that role and you're not a people person, you're not going to enjoy it. And I think that, you know, visitor experience really is, it's a specialism, it's a profession as much as any of the other professions that are in the museum industry along with kind of marketing and curation and collections care, it is as much a specialism.
Rachel Mackay: It's the sort of thing that everybody kind of thinks that they can do, but actually it's a skill, you have to develop it, you have to work on it. I'm very keen to To make more of that side of things, to make more of it being a kind of continuing professional development while people are here. And I think one of the
Tom: things you're clearly brilliant at is really championing the role of visitor experience and those people.
Tom: Like you say, it's difficult controlling a queue of people. I mean, it reminds me of the blurb for your book. It says visitor experience is the [00:22:00] single biggest factor which will influence visitors returning to your museum or recommending a visit to friends or family. pretty key to our organizations and how we
Rachel Mackay: run them.
Rachel Mackay: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a trend in the sector a few years ago. Thankfully it's gone away now, but there was this, all the kind of big museums were contracting out their front of house teams and using kind of agency staff. And that seems to have kind of slightly gone away now, but there was a point where everybody just seemed to be doing it, including the natural history museum where I was working.
Rachel Mackay: And I was really against it because. You wouldn't, you know, contract out your, your marketing team or your curators. Why would you contract out your front of house team? When you, when you think about it, they are the people that your visitors are most likely to speak to. They're the first people that they're going to meet.
Rachel Mackay: So they've got to be so engaged with, with your organization, so engaged with your brand. So why would you contract that out to somebody else? And if you contract it out to somebody else, You're also sort of contracting training and development and recruitment. All those things that are so important for maintaining, you know, engagement with people.
Rachel Mackay: So, I'm really glad that we've, we've, as a sector, moved away from that now, and [00:23:00] I think there is much more of an understanding. But I remember going to a conference in 2010 when I first started at the Natural History Museum. It was the Museums Association Conference, and there was nothing, nothing at all on the agenda about visitor experience or front of house staff.
Rachel Mackay: Nothing. And when you think how important, as a visitor yourself, when you go somewhere, That is what you remember. That is, the visitor experience is everything. The front of house staff that you meet to, you speak to, will make or break that visit. And yet, in a Museums Association conference, there was nothing about it.
Rachel Mackay: And yet, in that time now, if you look at the work the Museums Association are doing, working with front of house museums, creating a front of house charter for change, so much stuff that they're doing now. And it's always on the agenda when you go to conferences now. The sector has come a long way since in quite a relatively short space of time.
Rachel Mackay: You know, in 13 years, that change has been massive. But, There's been a lot of work to get to that point as well.
Tom: For those people who've never been to Hampton Court. Yeah. Describe it to people who might not be familiar with
Rachel Mackay: it. Yeah, so Hampton Court Palace started off as, um, a Cardinal's Palace. It was Cardinal Woolsey's Palace [00:24:00] originally, but it looked quite different then.
Rachel Mackay: And then when he kind of fell from power, Henry VIII. took it, and made it into what people would recognise now, from the front anyway. So he made it into this great Tudor palace for entertaining, it has a great hall, it was feasting, it was parties, it was masks, entertainment, all sorts of fun things. It's the only building left where all six wives were at one point, so it's a really important kind of Tudor place.
Rachel Mackay: Over the years, different monarchs have made different changes, so William and Mary did a lot to it, the Georgians did a lot to it. So now it has a weird kind of impact where you walk into it from the front, you're looking at this traditional Tudor façade, and then when you come out of the back door, you look back and you sort of think that you're in Versailles.
Rachel Mackay: It's really... Amazing. It really is a palace of two halves. After George III came to the throne and decided he wasn't going to use it personally, that's when it became that grace and favour palace. And that's such a, to me, such an interesting kind of part of its history. It just really became its own little town, almost, with all these really interesting personalities kind of going [00:25:00] on.
Rachel Mackay: English Heritage just unveiled a plaque across the road for Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who was a princess who lived, an Indian princess who lived at the palace, and was also a suffragette. And, you know, she's just a fascinating character. And... We'd love to make more of that history because all my friends who've got little girls are, they're all, they're all obsessed with princesses despite their parents doing everything they can to try and stop them being obsessed with princesses.
Rachel Mackay: They're all just obsessed with it and When you go, when you go around the kind of Tudor parts of the palace, you know, women don't get a great shake in the Tudor times, it's if you can't, you know, have a baby then, whereas if we look at our Grace and Favour history, you've got an Indian suffragette, or you've got this, her sister was this lesbian kind of Jewish ally who tried to get people out of Austria during the war, or you've got a Russian kind of refugee that lived in Wilderness House who was also a princess, so you've got all these incredibly modern Fun personalities who did amazing things with their lives that are princesses and actually we can start to tell some of those more diverse stories if we look at that side of our history as well.
Rachel Mackay: So I'm very keen that we Do more on [00:26:00] that in the future. It's not just the Tudors. It's not just the Tudors. Although obviously the Tudors are awesome. They are awesome.
Tom: Is it? Maybe this is a futile question. Is it possible to have a favorite room at the palace?
Rachel Mackay: You know what? I think I've been asked this on about five different interviews and I've given different answers for each time because I actually go find new places all the time.
Rachel Mackay: I went into two whole apartments just last week that I'd never been in before. But I do love the old Grace and Favourite apartments because we haven't done anything to them. They're still there. We can't really use them because they're in disrepair or plumbing doesn't work or there's issues with the floor loading, but we've still got some of the.
Rachel Mackay: Old wallpaper that hasn't been kind of changed. And so they have this really, I love a bit of kind of abandoned glamour. And so I really like those rooms. On the public route, I really like the dining rooms. For some reason I just, food calls to me. So I love the Georgian dining rooms. Because of Q, I'm actually more interested in the Georgian era than I am of the Tudors.
Rachel Mackay: So I do like the Georgian bits of the palace as well. Even though they're, [00:27:00] most people would definitely go straight to the
Tom: Tudors. So does the grace and favour history of the place throw up any interesting challenges? Well it
Rachel Mackay: did. There was a fire in 1986 that was accidentally started by a Grace and Favourite resident who unfortunately lost her life in the fire.
Rachel Mackay: That caused basically one kind of wing of the palace to go and have to be rebuilt. It's interesting because a lot of our, a lot of fire legislation and salvage stuff in the whole industry really comes from that event. We learn such a lot from these big incidents. But obviously it was devastating kind of at the time and I showed you earlier a chandelier that had fallen through because of the fire and that they had to put together all these tiny little bits of crystal and they managed to find every single piece apart from one.
Rachel Mackay: So just that as a sort of example of the work that had to go into recreating that wing after the fire just shows you how kind of devastating that was. But yeah, as a palace, it's a real kind of cautionary tale that we have in the background. Our kind of um, fire and health and safety manager. I think he makes a point of doing this to any kind of new [00:28:00] operations manager or head of palace that starts, where he just sits you down and says, Imagine It inflames, and you're like, okay, thanks Terry, but you know, you've got to have that responsibility at the back of your mind, where we are custodians of these places, but they're not our personal homes, even though they're our kind of home, and so there is a huge responsibility there.
Rachel Mackay: And so, for example, in my house, I'm not allowed to have candles, I'm not allowed to have a gas stove, you know, there's those, which for my mum was like a deal breaker. She's like, well, you can't move in then if you can't have candles. candles. But you get some great battery ones now, so it's fine. But yeah, there's certain conditions that we have to take very seriously.
Rachel Mackay: And I love there's
Tom: that real mix of the serious and the fun working in a place like this I've got from you. What's the name of those, uh, the little things where if you get too close to a painting or a tapestry, this alarm goes off quite
Rachel Mackay: alarmingly? Um, I mean, they probably have a name that is not what we call them, but we call them bing bongs.
Rachel Mackay: Bing bongs, great. Because they make a noise that goes bing bong. [00:29:00] That's what I will call them from now on. That's what our conservation team call them, so I assume that's the proper name. Yeah. They might still be hazing me. And I, and
Tom: I love just sort of sitting talking to you in your office. I notice there's a, you just have a casual, portrait of Frederick the Great's sister
Rachel Mackay: hanging above your desk.
Rachel Mackay: She makes me feel underdressed every single day. It's depressing. Yeah. I know it's a mix of sort of like IKEA kind of office furniture and priceless art.
Tom: That's the cultural sector for you right there. I mean, you mentioned earlier COVID has obviously put everybody in this sector under huge pressure and changed almost everything I would say from a few years ago, but it was also a chance to innovate.
Tom: Have you been able to build back your visitor experience offering differently, and actually has it provided you an opportunity to do things
Rachel Mackay: better? Yeah, I guess the stuff that I was kind of mentioning before in terms of now we have two closed days a week, that was something that has allowed us to do a lot more than we did before.
Rachel Mackay: So just changing our operating model, but at the back of that and why we did that was because there has been a [00:30:00] fundamental shift in the way that we consider now our charities since COVID. The charity shrank massively, we cut 40 percent of our kind of staffing budget, so There was a lot of change and a lot of change that we're still recovering from.
Rachel Mackay: But what we didn't want to do is just put everything back the same as it was before. We wanted to really have a think about we're a UK charity. What, what benefit are we providing the UK public? Because we kind of used to think that just being open seven days a week. was making ourselves really accessible.
Rachel Mackay: Actually, if we are not open seven days a week, and instead we are saving that money and using it for something else, does that demonstrate charitable, um, impact slightly better? So we're looking now at you know, instead of building up the staffing to do exactly where it was and opening days where we know it's going to be really quiet, opening every single room on every single day, what if we now invest that money in different places?
Rachel Mackay: And so we've since then Have much more kind of subsidized school places, whereas paying for school transport started a trial of a 1 ticket. for people on universal credit. So [00:31:00] we're starting to just think in a completely different way than we did before about our reach and how that, how that manifests itself.
Rachel Mackay: It's not just about opening the doors and be like, there you are, it's open. That's good enough for anybody. Actually, we need to think much more cleverly about the different barriers that exist for people. So at the moment we've chosen the price and that makes sense because, you know, there's a cost of living crisis to see if we can make a difference to that.
Rachel Mackay: I think the 1 ticket, which A lot of places are doing this now. Kew Gardens is doing it, the zoo, we're doing a 3 ticket, London Zoo. I feel like at the moment it's a bit of a blunt instrument because just because you're not on universal credit doesn't mean that you're really well off and can afford a ticket to Hampton Court Palace, which is expensive.
Rachel Mackay: I feel like over time it's going to evolve, that tool. Within the sector, as we all learn kind of how to do it, and it's interesting, there's only a few people that have done it. We've all kind of been talking about what training do the staff need to bring it in? How does it work? What is the booking process?
Rachel Mackay: And all kind of trying to learn from each other. And I think it is definitely a work in progress. And there's a lot more we need to do to make [00:32:00] that tool perfect. But I think this is the beginning of something kind of quite exciting that will evolve and become more nuanced so that we can make sure that everybody can come and visit.
Rachel Mackay: So yeah, that change in how we kind of view our charity and what our charity does has been really profound since Covid and made us think quite differently about what our action plan is for the future.
Tom: And given our venues are under increased financial pressure and we've got to think about the long term sustainability of the charities, what's working commercially for you at Hampton Court?
Tom: I mean, obviously events are a huge part of your business. Ticket sales. What's working for you?
Rachel Mackay: I mean, our filming business has massively grown since COVID. Again, because of those closed days, which gives us a bit more flexibility, we've been able to take on shoots that we wouldn't have done before. It's the sort of thing where once you've worked with one production company, they'll come back in again and again if they've enjoyed it.
Rachel Mackay: So we have a brilliant filming team who have developed really good relationships with lots of production companies, and it just makes it really easy. We don't say yes to [00:33:00] everything. We wouldn't do the crown here, for example, because We have to be aware that we have, you know, this connection with the royal family, and we don't want to say yes to things that potentially are not going to go down very well.
Rachel Mackay: We wouldn't say yes to every single thing. There's some things that are just not appropriate. But actually it's been big business for us, the filming side of things, and the event side of things. Having those whole closed days means that we can build big stages and marquees and things that we wouldn't have been able to do before.
Rachel Mackay: So that's been really, really good for us.
Tom: Thank you, Rachel. It's been a real pleasure. Um, as always, what does the rest of your day look like?
Rachel Mackay: After this, I have a meeting about opening up a hut that nobody's used for years and years and years and seeing if we can make it into a catering kiosk, which is quite common of somebody just finding a space and thinking, can we do anything with this?
Rachel Mackay: I mean, there's 1600 rooms here and We're not using all of them, obviously. Some of them we can't use, some of them don't have any floors, and you would just go right through to the room below. But, there are little bits and spaces where we're thinking, okay, well, could we make something out of this? Could this be something that visitors would really enjoy?[00:34:00]
Tom: Thanks for listening to the Arts and Culture Podcast, brought to you by the Association for Cultural Enterprises. We are the only organisation dedicated to income generation in the arts, with a community of over 400 organisations and thousands of professionals across the UK and beyond. Sustainable income generation is vital to the future of our museums, galleries, national parks, historic houses, theatres, and so much more.
Tom: We exist solely to provide an extensive programme of education and support, and within our large community, our mission is to help the cultural sector to not only survive, but thrive. Find out more about our mission and how you can get involved at culturalenterprises. org. uk. Thanks for listening, see you next time.[00:35:00]