Steve Gardam (Director, Roald Dahl Museum) explains how small museums can punch above their weight.
The Roald Dahl Museum & Story Centre is a tiny site... with a big name above the door.
Roald Dahl is one of the world's most famous authors and his stories and characters have inspired generations of children and adults alike. Museum Director Steve Gardam shows Tom Dawson (Association For Cultural Enterprises) around, then explains how physical size does not have to be a limitation on the vision of a museum.
This fascinating interview features useful insights into strategy, long-term thinking and clarity of purpose. There are also valuable lessons around community, commercial pragmatism and leadership.
There are plenty of small cultural enterprises around the UK. This episode shares how great things can be achieved by any scale of operation.
Tom Dawson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode two of the Arts and Culture podcast, taking you behind the scenes of the cultural sector. I'm Tom, Director of Digital at the Association for Cultural Enterprises, and today I'm talking to Steve Gardam, Director of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
Tom Dawson: Before joining the Roald Dahl Museum as director in 2015, Steve worked in education and learning in a variety of organisations including the London Transport Museum, the Imperial War Museum and the Postal Museum. The museum itself is based in the village Roald Dahl lived and wrote in for 36 years.
Tom Dawson: Inside you can pull a power pose next to Matilda, measure BFG, test your sparkiness on the spark o meter and come face to face with fantastic Mr Fox. There are over 40 hands on activities in the galleries and you can also take a peek into Roald's famous writing hut. The website says it's for 5 12 year olds and families but if [00:01:00] you've never really grown up like me, it's a great day out for anyone of any age.
Tom Dawson: I met Steve in the torrential rain at the Roald Dahl Museum earlier this year before taking a tour of the magical space and then we ducked for cover in his office. A highly recommended visit, and I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
Tom Dawson: Steve, thanks for inviting us over today. It's very nice to have you here. And we are sat on a very rainy summer's day in your very Quentin Blake esque decorated office, which is lovely, on the road in Great Missenden. And Roald Dahl, he lived in the village, but not in this building, right, for about 30, 36 years?
Steve Gardam: Yeah, that's exactly right. So Dahl was born in what is now a suburb of Cardiff, but both his parents were Norwegian. His family moved around after his father died when he was quite young, but one of his sisters married a Buckinghamshire farmer. And so around the time of the Second World [00:02:00] War, the whole kind of family moved to this part of the world.
Steve Gardam: Some wag, uh, in the family described it as the Valley of the Dulls because they were all close by. And so he rolled himself, bought, uh, a little cottage which he extended called Gypsy House. It's about 10 minutes walk from the museum. It's a private home. We're on the high street of the village, would have been the ancient London Road.
Steve Gardam: There's a bypass now, but, you know, it's a beautiful conservation area village. Loads of listed buildings of which the museum is one. It's a great listed former coaching inn. Yes, you can hear the high street outside. But as you come into the museum, you come into a central courtyard through an archway, as you would have done in a horse drawn coach back in the day.
Steve Gardam: And then there's a new built corridor on one side that connects our first two galleries. There's what we call the Story Centre, really hands on interactive space at the far end. And then, uh, more temporary displays and workshop rooms on the... The other side of the site. So it's a cozy, compact museum. We are not big, but we've got a big name over the door and we've got big ambitions.
Tom Dawson: It's a really evocative building. I think [00:03:00] you can still sense that coaching in history to the building, which I think is quite nice. It has charm, which I think a lot of museums don't. So, I mean, does that present you with opportunities or challenges in terms of running a museum in A village, a small town in the countryside, I mean.
Tom Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. An
Steve Gardam: unusual location. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so I think everything's got like two sides, right? You know, it's yin and yang. You know, you can say something's an advantage, but it can be a disadvantage. But the reverse can be true. Something that's sometimes awkward can also set you free.
Steve Gardam: Depends how you look at it. So the reason that it's brilliant that the museum is here on this high street is this is the village where Roald Dahl lived and worked. And he found his inspiration all around, often in very mundane things. You know, so this is a very ordinary library building. just at the end of the high street.
Steve Gardam: The building itself is not interesting at all. It's just a brick 60s or 70s building, but it's Matilda's library. Literally Matilda's library. You know, there's an old set of petrol pumps over in front of what would have been a filling station. And that connects directly to Dahl's time working for Shell Oil, but actually to Danny the Champion of the World, which is one of my favourite [00:04:00] books, and clearly set in the village of Great Missinden.
Steve Gardam: So Dahl, you know, didn't let his imagination walk any further than it needed to, down this very high street, looking for, for inspiration. What he called, he, he had this brilliant image of, as he walked around, tentacles coming out of his brain, reaching around in the air, grasping what he called, bits of jewellery, good ideas, and bits of rubbish, the ideas that didn't eventually go anywhere.
Steve Gardam: And that's one of the things we try and convey to our visitors, is that. Inspiration is the start of creativity. It's the food for imagination. And it simply starts by noticing the world around you. I mean, Dahl's own phrase, looking with glittering eyes. So being in this village is so critical to the experience of being at the museum.
Steve Gardam: And because the museum itself is small, but we're in this beautiful village, which is only a five minute walk to the beautiful woodlands of the Chiltern Hills, you know, it can be a whole day out. The museum itself is not a whole day out, but coming to the museum in Great Missingdon and the Chilterns, that certainly is.
Steve Gardam: So yeah, that's great. The downside. The downside is we're really, really small. That [00:05:00] means that, huh, on our busiest days, we can literally get full up. Now, that's obviously not always been true recently because of COVID and stuff, but we're having a stronger recovery, particularly in the school holidays this year so far, and that's great.
Steve Gardam: But February half term is always our busiest week, and literally we can be full up, we can be at capacity, and we could welcome more people. So sometimes being small is a pain. My favorite analogy for this, I think of it like tennis. The reason that we know somebody's a great tennis player, Serena, you know, Roger, Novak, is because they have to play within a marked out court.
Steve Gardam: And so you play to the edges, and that's what we try and do. That's how we try and see whatever we are is, okay, this is our court, this is where we've got to play, we've got to play in it as well as possible. It's a great
Tom Dawson: analogy. Thanks. So let's, let's come back. Let's come back to Roald Dahl and museums.
Tom Dawson: So how, how did you get where you are today? How did you become a museum director?
Steve Gardam: Well, I've been, I've been here eight years and I've, I've really enjoyed it. It's the first time I've [00:06:00] been a director anywhere. I did a history degree cause I liked history at school, but I kind of didn't settle to one aspect of history.
Steve Gardam: I kind of jumped around when I was at university. So that didn't really send me towards an academic career. I was all right, but I wasn't brilliant. I just found the past interesting, and then I got a job through a friend. He introduced me to what was then a much smaller version of what it's become, which is the Houses of Parliament Education Service.
Steve Gardam: It was tiny at the time. And they used to run tours for school groups in that window of time between schools going back in September and the houses coming back in October. So I did that for, for one autumn, for like five weeks, got me to London, thought, ooh, London's fun. And then I applied for a job at London Metropolitan Archives, just because it was history.
Steve Gardam: And they said, well, Of the lots of people who applied for this, you stood out because you'd worked at the House of Parliament and that, that was interesting, so we noticed you for that reason, not because of my degree, but because of something more practical that I'd done, which I thought was a really useful lesson to take on.
Steve Gardam: And then, I kind of bumbled my way through a few years working at London Metropolitan [00:07:00] Archives. I wasn't archivist material, I've not got the patience and the mindset for cataloguing, but I really enjoyed meeting the public. Helping them navigate a really complex set of finding aids and, you know, it's the second biggest archive in the country after the National Archives.
Steve Gardam: So just knowing a little bit more than the researcher was a way to sort of guide them through. And that kind of led us into doing more education stuff when they appointed an interpretation officer to do education and exhibitions. I worked with them. They taught me a lot. I moved on from there for it to a sort of a similar marketing a bit web content, a bit education, a bit.
Steve Gardam: I did all those kind of things at London Metropolitan Archives, did a similar sort of thing at what's now the Postal Museum before it had become the, you know, the entity with the bigger museum in Mayoral that it is today. So I was there for an earlier version of that organisation. Got a job at Imperial War Museums.
Steve Gardam: Again, more on the education side. By this time I wasn't necessarily the best person to deliver an education session. I could do that, I like talking to [00:08:00] people, but there are more talented people at that than me. I was discovering that I, I like kind of trying to see the bigger picture. Plan stuff out. Try and think about a change that could happen over time.
Steve Gardam: So I did a couple of years at IWM, which was really interesting. Then I got a really important job for me, which was at London Transport Museum. And it was initially a short term contract to run a project connected to the Cultural Olympiad. But it was really about bringing young people into museums. And I had to do a lot of project management stuff, which I'm, yeah, pretty good at.
Steve Gardam: I'm a good generalist for that kind of thing. I'm not scared of a spreadsheet. Again, there's better people at it than me. Jack of many trades. Not necessarily a master of many. But that generalism, I think, has really stood me in good stead. And I was also able, at London Transport Museum, to work directly with young people, which was amazingly satisfying.
Steve Gardam: And I'm still really proud that the young people's program that me and my colleagues started. Back 10 years ago or more is still real strength and you know as I understand it a key plank of what London Transport Museum Does as a national portfolio organization, so [00:09:00] I'm really proud of that and then I kind of Technically was on lots of short term contracts The transport museum, but then I've been there five years and I was kind of deep deemed generally useful I ended up doing a project with a brilliant Guy, the former assistant director of projects and facilities there.
Steve Gardam: And it was a small capital project at the London Transport Museum depot. He really encouraged me, and I realised that my kind of nous of project management from education and engagement projects was more transferable than I'd had the opportunity to put into practice before. And it was weird, you know, we built some toilets in a ticket office, and I say we, you know, obviously there were actual engineers and builders who did the work, but I sort of chipped in, I asked questions because I didn't know the answer, I wasn't afraid to be stupid if it wasn't clear, and I discovered that actually that was incredibly helpful, and it gave me the confidence that I could actually do the generalist job that you need to do where you're trying to understand a whole organization as director, and then [00:10:00] to be blunt, I was lucky, you know, this job came up.
Steve Gardam: I had a year where I had, I think, a couple of other interviews, and so by the time I did this one for the Roald Dahl Museum, I was ready, I was warmed up, I'd kind of got my patter sorted, and it just seemed to land. And, you know, I've had a lot of interviews that didn't work, and a lot of applications that didn't get to interview, but the one for this job, it flowed beautifully.
Steve Gardam: It felt right, and delightfully they gave me the job. And I've been here ever since. So it felt natural.
Tom Dawson: Oh, very natural. It felt like your time. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting talking about. Transferable skills and dabbling in quite a lot of areas. I mean, I feel like that's, would you agree, kind of a common theme in our sector in terms of people not necessarily having the opportunity to
Steve Gardam: specialise.
Steve Gardam: I mean, I think it depends where you end up working. You meet people and everybody has a really... You know, crazy paving path career, you know, when you speak to somebody who you might perceive as being successful in whatever terms you consider them to be successful, when you talk to them, [00:11:00] you often find, oh gosh, wow, that was interesting.
Steve Gardam: And it's usually not a linear path. Now, some people can be in a big organization and move into different roles because a big organization allows you to do that. Sometimes you work in a smaller organization, but because of what that organization is, what it's trying to achieve, you can build up more skills in a different way, get more responsibility sooner.
Steve Gardam: It depends. I feel like I've worked in enough different places to have a reasonably good spectrum of experience of the sector. So worked in a big national, big regional and working now in a relatively small independent book with a big name over the door and a lot of ambition. So yeah, I'm grateful for the diversity of experience that I've got for sure.
Steve Gardam: Well, bringing it back to the
Tom Dawson: museum, Roald Dahl and to an extent Quentin Blake, who was obviously quite synonymous for a lot of British children growing up with the books. I mean, they're iconic, I would say. I mean your office, your office is fantastic Steve. You've got a stuffed toy of the BFG and various posters and it's a very evocative brand [00:12:00] almost.
Tom Dawson: How do you, as a venue, how do you deal with the IP, the intellectual property of that? Are you in control of it or are you having to work with, you know, the owners of the estate
Steve Gardam: in some way? Yeah, so I think this is, anybody who knows a little bit about Roald Dahl is probably aware of this, but the museum, our collection, our founding collection, the collection of stuff.
Steve Gardam: That we were created by Roald Dahl's widow, Lissie Dahl, to look after and use to educate the public in creativity. That's our purpose. The stories and the creative craft of Roald Dahl is a device. The point is to show how everybody can be creative, how everybody's a story maker. That's what we believe.
Steve Gardam: But the collection is Roald Dahl's archive, his working and personal papers, so the earlier drafts of the stories that he kept as his own first archivist, to show the genesis and the growth and the evolution of the stories from draft to draft to draft, and it varies from book to book. It's a fantastic collection.
Steve Gardam: Really lucky that he was somebody who worked in analogue. He picked up a pencil and wrote on paper. Of course you can get something interesting, I guess, from computer files and stuff, but his [00:13:00] is lovely and tangible. So that's our founding collection. Now, that stuff, that physical stuff, that paper belongs to the museum, which is an independent charity, and it's independent of the family, you know, it's independent of the Roald Dahl company.
Steve Gardam: I have a close relationship with them because The intellectual property of the ideas expressed on those pages does belong to the Roald Dahl Story Company, which is now part of the Netflix group. So, yeah, one of the things that's definitely happened in the last eight years working here is my awareness of the issues around IP and copyright is, is sky high.
Steve Gardam: I'm not an expert copyright lawyer. I've learned a lot. And then Quentin, Quentin Blake, he's a different entity altogether. You know, so he owns his own copyrights. He... And his business managers, I guess, work closely with the Roald Dahl Story Company on merchandise and, you know, with the publishers on book design, but Quentin Blake is his own thing, he's got his own archive.
Steve Gardam: There's a new project excitingly happening in London, I know the director, it's going to be the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, a new iteration of what was previously the House of Illustration. [00:14:00] So, yeah, there's a mixture of relationships and entities. And I think, summing all that up, what I like about it is...
Steve Gardam: We are a small museum, physically not a small museum, in a small village in rural Buckinghamshire, but... It never feels like a small job, because it's part of this bigger world that we have to work within. We have to swim in these waters in order to make progress on our own terms, and that's fun. He gave us a bit of a
Tom Dawson: tour, um, before we sat down to talk earlier.
Tom Dawson: And there's some really fantastic... Props you've got that was good, quite evocative of Darl and his, his life in the museum. Massive chocolate bars as you go into one room about his, his early life. But I think probably the most famous thing I certainly remember from visiting the past is his original writer's hut, which you've got in the middle of one of your galleries.
Tom Dawson: Tell us about that and how
Steve Gardam: that came to be. Yeah, so when the museum was founded, Our founder, Lissy Rhodes Widow, gave us the archive. She was instrumental in getting the museum off the [00:15:00] ground. At the same time, the contents of the writing hut were donated to the museum charity as well. But they, for some reason, I don't know, it's before my time, they were left within the hut, in the grounds of their home.
Steve Gardam: And then it was after the museum had been open maybe five or six years, they were in a position then to move the interior of the hut and redevelop one of our galleries. Around it. And there was a real step change of visitor numbers, actually. I think it was to do with better marketing and stuff. But if you look at the history of our visitor numbers, there was a marked change once the hut came into the museum.
Steve Gardam: And it really is the heart of the museum. Because it's the, you know, the magical, messy shrine to creativity. You know, we're not a shrine to dial the person. We talk about his life in so far as it relates to his creative craft. He was a complex, prickly character, not everybody's cup of tea, you could say one thing about him and the exact opposite would be equally true.
Steve Gardam: Don't really want to get into that today, but the Hutt is really important because it's, you know, it's as exciting as, you know, Dickens writing desk. For some people it might be more exciting than [00:16:00] the first photo of Shakespeare, you know, because people have a connection with these stories and characters, and so to see the The space, the, the little nest, the womb as Dahl described it, where these stories and these characters were born.
Steve Gardam: Yeah, it gives you a frisson, a thrill. It should do. That's what art can do and that's what that presentation of the, the hut in our museum does for our visitors. And it's great to be working at an organization where people come so fired up with enthusiasm and love for our content. And just to be on the receiving end of that is brilliant.
Steve Gardam: You know, ask me how I got here in my job. When I told people that I was going to be the director of the Roald Dahl Museum, well, two things. Having worked in the cultural heritage sector, I've had a lot of weird job titles that you really have to work hard to explain to people. Being able to just say, I'm going to be the director for the museum, people are like, oh my god, you're going to be the boss?
Steve Gardam: And it's the Roald Dahl Museum? That's really cool. And of course, it's not really anything to do with me, but what a nice thing to be on the receiving end of that excitement and that enthusiasm and that love for [00:17:00] the stories and characters. And the heart, I think. For me, it really embodies it, it really centres the museum, it's very much the heart of what we are.
Steve Gardam: I mean, it's a great space,
Tom Dawson: I mean, I particularly like the, uh, 1990s yellow pages in there, which, you know, brings back memories, and all sorts of these sort of knickknacks on the table. But it, it kind of strikes me as something that, we were talking earlier, and I... I could have casually said, oh, it's a children's museum.
Tom Dawson: And you corrected me and said, oh, it's a museum for families as much as other people. And it strikes me that it's, there's that great balance of something for everybody. Is that clearly central to the kind of the visitor experience and the user journey of the museum that you're always conscious of?
Steve Gardam: Now, yeah, it is.
Steve Gardam: But I mean, you have to bear in mind that the museum that I run today, I didn't design it. No one personally designs any museum, but you know, I wasn't around when the museum was set up. We work with what we've got, the team that's here today. Yes, very much. It's about trying to create an experience for everybody.
Steve Gardam: I can't speak for the original concept of it. And you know, I can be fussy and say, Oh, it's not a children's museum. Of course, children are a really important part of our [00:18:00] audience. But it's also very important to remember that no child can visit. They literally can't get here. Unless an adult brings them.
Steve Gardam: So the experience of the adult, whether that's a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, teacher, that really matters. And, you know, so there's that nostalgia thing too. This isn't just to do with us and this museum. It's the truth of children's literature. Children's literature has a real power in publishing because it can become generational.
Steve Gardam: You pass on the stories. The Potter books are becoming generational, because of how old they are now, from when they were first published. C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, you know, and The Hobbit. These are generational books. And Dahl is a generational author. And so... So, our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers having a good experience is really critical.
Steve Gardam: Because they make the choice, they pay the tickets. If they're not having a good time, we're getting it wrong. Absolutely.
Tom Dawson: Always taught in retail, get the grandparents in the shop, and you're onto a good thing. Um, do you ever sit back and go, on a day and go, Ah, this could only happen at the Roald Dahl.
Steve Gardam: Ah.[00:19:00]
Steve Gardam: So I've, you know, I've done media stuff that I wouldn't have done if I didn't have this job, because it's not about me, it's about where I work. We had an amazing year in 2016 in particular, which was Roald Dahl's centenary of his birth, but just, it was an excuse to do tons of Roald Dahl activity. And loads of stuff happened around the country.
Steve Gardam: We loaned some items from the archive to an exhibition that happened at the Southbank Centre and Wales Millennium Centre. There was a massive three day arts festival in Cardiff called City of the Unexpected. There was loads of micro and major. Dial activity around the UK, around the world, particularly in the States and Australia, which are big markets for the books.
Steve Gardam: We weren't really in a position to do anything different that year. We don't have temporary exhibitions. And actually what we've got from our audience data is we know that a lot of people say they'll come back, but most people are first time visitors. You know, we have to be canny with the limited amount of space and, you know, the limits of budgets.
Steve Gardam: Rather than indulging ourselves by trying to run a temporary exhibition program, which means we have to shut off part of a tiny site every so often to reset it, what we try and do [00:20:00] is... Is make our site dynamic by programming workshops and, you know, storytelling, performed readings from Roald Dahl's books.
Steve Gardam: The difference in 2016, which was our biggest ever year in terms of visitor numbers, was that we got to do a lot of press. And people heard about us. And it really taught me such a powerful lesson that our core offer is strong. It's really strong. People love it when they come here. Getting them to know about it in a crowded leisure marketplace.
Steve Gardam: with, you know, since the pandemic, everything, you know, just recovering from the pandemic changes in society, cost of living crisis and stuff, getting people's awareness. That's hard. So it's precious to have it. It's really precious to
Tom Dawson: have it. I mean, at the time where we're talking, there's, um, a new Willy Wonka film about to come out with Timothee Chalamet.
Tom Dawson: I mean, will that have some sort of effect that will bump on your visitor numbers?
Steve Gardam: Yeah. Probably. It looks great. I'm super excited. When Matilda the musical movie came out at Christmas 2022, it was really helpful to us because we had a rotten autumn. In [00:21:00] 2022, the Queen had died, there was a World Cup filling up people's weekends, and the cost of living was starting to bite, and that was not fun.
Steve Gardam: And then Matilda came out, and crucially, it was good. That's important. People love the show, and they've enjoyed the movie. I believe the UK was the only territory where it got a cinema release, and it's now on Netflix. Yeah, it's definitely gotta be part of why our visitor numbers since have been stronger.
Steve Gardam: So we are looking forward to a Charlie. Well, that'll be our theme, you know, Charlie and Wonka themed Christmas, and if the full movie proves to be as good as the trailer looks, happy days for us. You know, we're really fortunate. It's a small place, physically, but we're part of this bigger world, and that's, that's a lovely thing to have.
Steve Gardam: There's not necessarily a direct connection for us. It's not easy for a small independent museum to get the attention of the press teams at massive Moosvie studios. The halo effect is real, so it's great when there's a Roald Dahl screen event, [00:22:00] and we're looking forward to that one. And you've mentioned, you
Tom Dawson: know, you've got this, this big name over the door and you've got that, uh, from a commercial side of things, you know, you've got a great asset in a way.
Tom Dawson: I mean, your shop is fantastic. If anyone hasn't been, can have a look. Uh, do you have an
Steve Gardam: online shop? Uh, we don't at the moment because we're in between websites. We used to be part of RoaldDahl. com, which was the company website, because they offered a space for free, so we didn't have web... posting charges and all that kind of stuff.
Steve Gardam: And it made sense. They were putting their marketing efforts into getting people to rolldial. com and it worked really well in the 2016 year. But then to be honest, that website sort of aged and then the sale to Netflix happened. And then somebody identified in Netflix that, you know, the site was really old and needed to be taken down.
Steve Gardam: And so it was done in the middle of August last year when we were open for the summer holidays. Now, fortunately, our Our ticketing website's separate, so we managed to fudge it through. But that was a good example of where a big entity like Netflix isn't really thinking about the issues of a small museum.
Steve Gardam: So that was [00:23:00] frustrating. We threw up a quick, static website as quickly as we could, and that's what we've been working with since. And we're doing a really cool project to just make a fit for purpose website, which the designs I've seen look absolutely gorgeous. Really bringing the photography that we've already got to the fore.
Steve Gardam: And that will be online from... Sometime this autumn, September ish, I think, that we'll definitely have a Shopify shop. But we're kind of rebooting to the start of online retail from scratch. Back in 2016, I do hark back to this big year. A lot of new merchandise was produced by the Roald Dahl Story Company.
Steve Gardam: And in 2016, we were the first place to stock most of it. So we had an absolutely blockbuster year for online retail. Because it was a centenary, loads of people were going to RoaldDahl. com. Loads of people were going to the site. Understandably, the company diversified how many places could stock that, they struck deals with big grocers, all that kind of thing that makes perfect sense for them as a brand.
Steve Gardam: Unfortunately, it denuded our online retail significantly. [00:24:00] I mean, significantly. And then COVID's been a, you know, a state. I would say that for us, online retail has a place because of the scale of the brand and the potential reach. But I would also say it's as much as anything, it's a follow up for people who actually make a real visit.
Steve Gardam: And so a little
Tom Dawson: bird tells me that there's quite a big development program going on here. Can you give us a bit of a sneak peek and what might
Steve Gardam: be going on? Yeah, I can. It's really exciting. I mean, I've known since I joined the museum that because all things age and museums age, that at some point you need to, you know, figure out how to make it better.
Steve Gardam: And that's probably going to take a capital project. And because this is a small site, it has to be kind of an all in. We can't, we're not big enough to do it in a phased master plan where you've got one section of your site shut off but there's still like 14 wings of your grand stately pile that the public can explore.
Steve Gardam: We're, we're not that place. So we always knew it had to be all in. Which is a great thing but also again, like I said earlier, you know, it's the dark flip side. It's harder to fundraise for, it's, you know, feels like a scarier proposition. So we had two swings at [00:25:00] getting National Lottery Heritage Fund money.
Steve Gardam: Came close but didn't make it. And then. Really excitingly. So we were quite frustrated in the autumn of 2021. We just had our second pushback from the Lottery Fund. Ah, this is, this is hard. We know our project's worthwhile. They're telling us our project's worthwhile. But we are in a, undeniably, not the most deprived part of the country.
Steve Gardam: You know, Buckinghamshire is the fourth most expensive place to live in the UK after London, Surrey and Hertfordshire, you know. We're worthwhile, we've got real popular appeal, but there's lots of other great projects out there. That's the nature of public funding. But then that same week is when I was told by the company that the family was selling the company to Netflix and we've always had a subsidized business model.
Steve Gardam: So family be incredibly generous to us over the years, you know, family the museum and then, you know, we would earn a lot of our turnover. About 70 percent of our turnover was earned from, from visitors through tickets and retail. And then annual donations from the family owned company would make up the difference.
Steve Gardam: Well, with the sales of the company, those donations are stopping. That's [00:26:00] scary. But in a wonderful, generous gesture, the family have made us a big. One off donation. It's a big number, but it's literally got to last forever. So when you put it in that time frame, it's like, it's, it's still gorgeously generous, but you have to look at it really for what it is.
Steve Gardam: And so over the last sort of 18 months, we've been really weighing up. What's the best thing to do with that money? And last year we ground through the gears. We spoke to investment managers. Should we have an endowment? We'd love an endowment. But the first thing we have to do, the first thing we have to do is we have to invest in ourselves on this site.
Steve Gardam: We made a commitment to. Invest and improve the Roald Dahl Museum to evolve it. Again, here's an analogy for you. It's our Doctor Who project. It's our Doctor Who project because Doctor Who is fundamentally the same show it was in the 1960s and they literally, to keep it fresh and relevant, periodically regenerate.
Steve Gardam: They regenerate the Doctor. They reskin the TARDIS. They slightly redesign the villains and find new ways to bring them into stories. You know, but it's, it's, it's an evolution of the same show. And we, we get a lot [00:27:00] right today. I'm proud to say that. I've had You know, enough external verification from Visit England or the awards that we won for our schools program and in our visitor feedback, that's not me just blowing smoke, you know?
Steve Gardam: Yeah. We know there's awards behind you. Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, yeah. You know, there's, you know, we know we get a lot right, but we also know the limitations of our side bet than anyone. And because it's aging, we want to do it better. We want to do a more relevant, a regenerative version of the museum. So we've got this amazing seed funding, not enough.
Steve Gardam: a lot. A really great start but we'll still need to fundraise more and that's a new challenge for this organization. But we've also got this extraordinary extra opportunity which we did not look for. So I've mentioned many times what a small building we are and we're in a conservation area, historic grade two listed site, we're bounded on all sides.
Steve Gardam: Extraordinarily. Just a few weeks after the promise of this big donation, I thought our dreams of a capital project were dashed by the second opening of the Lottery Fund, and then got this offer of this donation, [00:28:00] like, oh my goodness, maybe it's game on still. Within a few weeks of that, we got a letter, an old fashioned letter in the actual post, from the owners of the only property in the village that adjoins us, into which we could expand without running a split site.
Steve Gardam: You know, I mean, I say it's the only one in the village, it's the only one in creation that we can expand into, which is just amazing. And suddenly we had the wherewithal to buy it. They wanted to rent it to us. It's got a now very tired looking office suite in it. It had fallen empty. High streets, villages are evolving all the time.
Steve Gardam: This is not the high street that Roald Dahl knew. So it's this commercial property that was really hard for the owners, happened to be another charitable trust that owned it as an asset. They couldn't get use out of. They said, do you want to rent it? I said, no, but I might buy it. It took a while to grind through the gears of that whole process, but we were kind of setting things up and then eventually, just in the spring, the Easter of 2023, we got a very large check.
Steve Gardam: Dropped into our bank account and within a couple of weeks we'd spent quite a large amount of it buying this building next door. And so [00:29:00] the opportunity is amazing. We'll increase through this project. If we, if we manage to get it done, if we get planning permission, if we raise the funding, you know, all that kind of stuff, we can keep it on track with budget.
Steve Gardam: We'll increase the public space in the museum by 50%. So we'll still be a small museum, but we'll be a heck of a lot bigger in our own terms. We will increase the number of our galleries from three. It's a seven because although we're not gaining net that much more space is how it allows us to move things around and use space in a smarter way and play to every corner of our particular tennis court, if you like, our slightly expanded tennis court.
Steve Gardam: I feel really fortunate to have stuck here long enough that these things have started to come together. Job's not done. It's a whole new job on top of my day job, and I'm really enjoying. I'm working with some amazing people, my team here at the museum, some brilliant colleagues and who consultants, designers, that kind of thing.
Steve Gardam: But. It's a lot and it's not done yet, but it's, it's really exciting. So only very recently we've been starting to talk about it. More publicly, because we've reached a certain stage of [00:30:00] design, we've still got planning permission to come all that kind of stuff. We've got about another 18 months of design from the day that I'm talking to you now, we're going to close probably at the end of 2024.
Steve Gardam: And then we've got about 18 months and then we want to reopen. And this is critical. We want to reopen in time for the school summer holidays in 2026, and hopefully have our best ever summer. It's the way that we shift from that subsidized business model to hopefully one of self sufficiency. And that's a hope.
Steve Gardam: It's not proven, but we've done the business plan forecast. It's not crazy either. You know, the numbers we're talking about are numbers we've seen on our current site in the past, but sustaining them and being able to charge, let's be blunt, a more realistic ticket price than the one that we currently charge.
Steve Gardam: Our current price is too low. There are valid reasons for this. Not only do we have COVID. And we didn't want to push the prices too hard when we were trying to recover after COVID. A couple of years before that, we actually had a flood and we were shut for five months. Now we were insured, it was okay, but again, [00:31:00] a closure and then a reopening, we didn't want to push the prices.
Steve Gardam: But that's what this project is all about. From a business point of view, it changes our business model, hopefully to one that's self sustaining. It's a long way off done, but I like where we are at the moment. I mean,
Tom Dawson: that sounds incredibly exciting. It is. Yeah. Brilliant. We always talk in the podcast about new initiatives and new ideas.
Tom Dawson: That's what we always talk about in the sector. But I think sometimes it's refreshing to, to just reflect and be brave and honest about things that maybe we should stop doing or shouldn't, shouldn't be doing. Have you found anything either here or earlier in your career where you've, you've sat back and said, actually, no, this isn't, this isn't the right
Steve Gardam: thing.
Steve Gardam: for us. I mean, without getting into specifics, there have definitely been times in my career in other organizations, which has informed what I've tried to do here, where I've gone, this seems like a bad use of time and money. Surely there's a better way of doing this. And I, I wasn't necessarily experienced or wise enough to influence that or, or have a better idea at the time, but it's certainly something that I try and do here.
Steve Gardam: I [00:32:00] mean, without hopefully being too pretentious, there's that. Really quite well known quote from Steve Jobs, which I'll try and paraphrase, which is about being proud of the thousand things you said no to, because it allows you to focus on the thing that you should be doing. And that sort of thinking, that, the spirit of that idea is really important to me.
Steve Gardam: Keep emphasizing we're a small site, you know, so we have to be efficient, we have to be tight, we have to be focused. We don't get any regular public funding, you know, so we have to really think about what we're doing and not waste time on things that seem like perfectly nice ideas, but actually are a time and energy sink.
Steve Gardam: So the classic example here is having a cafe. So when I joined the museum, we had a cafe and it seemed popular and bustling and busy. And I think this is a long time before COVID. The high street felt a bit different to what it has done in the last few years. Even in this village, it was, it was busier and there was passing local trade.
Steve Gardam: But the thing was, the museum paid an outsourced caterer several thousand pounds a year to [00:33:00] have the cafe. And this was an arrangement that had been put in place because I think previous museum management had been given that advice that the, the physical space of the cafe, cute though it was, just didn't have the covers.
Steve Gardam: So in order to make it work you'd have to pay somebody to run it. So that was the model. And one of the things I wanted to do was like, well actually if we could stop paying that out. It stopped subsidizing the cafe, it made the outsourced caterer run things a bit more efficiently. And we'd be saving ourselves some money, which seemed like a good way to go.
Steve Gardam: So over time we reduced and got rid of that subsidy, which unfortunately the caterer didn't find very comfortable. And I think it's just a good example. They were trying to run a small catering business. But they were also, you know, they were a young parent. They weren't necessarily able to work in it full time themselves and to be blunt I mean no, no disrespect to the person trying to do that.
Steve Gardam: There just wasn't enough turnover for that to work And that's hard, that's harsh, and I'm no catering expert, but it is jolly difficult to make [00:34:00] money from hospitality. It can be done if all the circumstances work, but the circumstances here were not perfect. See, even when the museum was super busy, like in a February half term or something like that, like the cafe was of a size that it would get full and then it couldn't keep up.
Steve Gardam: So it's not that the people who got to eat in the cafe were having a bad time, it's just literally there was a point you couldn't get in so you couldn't get served. And so our tickets have always allowed people to wander off and patronize the other food and drinks. businesses in the village and that means we actually have a really good reputation and relationship with our neighbor traders.
Steve Gardam: We eventually took the cafe in house and then we had this flood closure for five months back in 2018 so that was awkward. It was insured so it was okay. So we had 2019 trying to make the cafe work. It was starting to look like it might be able to break even, maybe even turn a modest profit, and then, of course, we had COVID.
Steve Gardam: And then, critical thing, you've got to have good staff. And a long standing staff member who two peed over to us from, from the outsource caterer, he decided, good on him, that he wanted to change careers. So, one of his [00:35:00] assistants ran the cafe for us in what was still a quite quiet post COVID summer of 2021.
Steve Gardam: Remember, museums couldn't even reopen legally until May 2021, so that summer was pretty quiet. We kind of muddled through that summer, and then... That assistant, they had other things they wanted to do with their time, so they moved on. And we tried really, really hard. And we could not find a good quality person to take over.
Steve Gardam: And I don't think it was badly paid, you know? I mean, I'm not saying we'd made anybody rich, but it was reasonable money compared to other hospitality salaries. It wasn't, you know, unsociable hours. We just couldn't find somebody to do it. And my team were like, we can't, we don't, we've got to shut it down.
Steve Gardam: And I was like, do you know what? Yeah. Because rather than it being, you know, a time and energy and Eventually money sink. Better to stop cleanly. So since the winter of 2021, at holiday times, which is when the museum is viable, and when the cafe in the past could actually make money as opposed to lose money, because that's when the museum visitation principally happens, it's weekends, yes, but holidays in particular, we've brought [00:36:00] some catering carts in, into our courtyard, which worked pretty nicely, but obviously was logistically a bit challenging, took up space in the courtyard.
Steve Gardam: But we've retained the cafe kitchen and we've got a current arrangement. With another outsourced caterer, runs a few cafes in the local area, and they're running what I call like a kiosk level of service. So you can get tea and a bun, a sandwich, and we serve directly into the courtyard, which just, without trying to explain the site, which just works better logistically for our visitors.
Steve Gardam: I think they're making a bit of money, because I think they're running it more efficiently than perhaps it was run in the past, and it's about the right level. But I think the key thing is that we're not trying to make money from our cafe, we're really good at not losing money from it anymore. And that's the smart move.
Steve Gardam: My board of trustees go, because they want us to have better income figures, we should be more commercial. My position is, being commercial in the first instance is not doing stuff that's uncommercial. Commercial businesses that are successful happen to be working on something that allows them to make money.
Steve Gardam: A lot of museums, a lot of cultural enterprises are in a [00:37:00] context and a setup that is inherently uncommercial. Because we've got to run these large Old buildings, you know, we've got to look after collections, which cost time and money. We've got to do this public good as charities. It's not easy to make a profit if you're a non profit, the clue's in the name.
Steve Gardam: Being savvy is often about stopping something that's a bad idea, even if there's an element of it that's desirable. So we're really happy we've currently got to a point, and it's still kind of a trial, but we can provide. Food and drink is part of the visitor experience. We're not kidding ourselves that that's a route to riches.
Steve Gardam: Even when we were running it and business numbers were higher and all that kind of stuff directly, annual profit could have been a few thousand pounds a year. Now, a few thousand pounds is always welcome, but the time and energy you've got to put into it, you've got to weigh up the cost benefit and it's not just about.
Steve Gardam: Hard cash it's about energy and effort of your people where they might be putting that into giving a better visitor experience Which improves our trip advisor reviews, which means more visitors come [00:38:00] and spend more money in the shop Well, maybe that's the thing we should be concentrating on. Well, there's no maybe about it.
Steve Gardam: That's absolutely what we should be concentrating on
Tom Dawson: Thank you, Steve so much. It has been a real pleasure to continue your tennis analogy the museum It's a grand slam. It's a six love, six love, six love, three sets. Get on the train, get in the car, come and visit it, and thank you so much for having us.
Steve Gardam: Thanks very much. Yeah, I mean, we're, we're open all the way through to the end of 2024 and we're running a great little museum today. It's exciting to think we're going to be even better. Um, and that's what we're working hard to do, but we work really hard to stay in shape as we are. And yeah, come and see us.
Steve Gardam: It's a lovely way to spend a day up here in Great Michigan in our Chiltern Hills. Brilliant. Thanks, Steve.
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