Kids in Museum

So we were founded just over 10 years ago when I was in Royal Academy, a museum in the center of London with my three children at the Aztec exhibition. I don't know if any of you saw it. I had an older child and two younger children, twins, strapped in a push chair. And one of my children, three years old, shouted. I've never denied. He shouted. He shouted, monster, monster. At this statue which looked just like a monster, had snakes for eyes, a big beak for a nose. And I thought, this is fantastic. I've got a three year old that's appreciating art. How good can it get? So I bent down and I said, yes, it looks just like a monster. And at that moment a room warden came over, a gallery assistant came over and said we were being too noisy and threw us out. I was at that time a journalist with the Guardian newspaper and two days later wrote a big piece in the Guardian about being thrown out of the Royal Academy. What was really interesting was by the end of that day we had had at the paper over 500 emails from other families saying, museums aren't working for us, let's try and make it work. So that's what we did in the Guardian. We set up a campaign and we called it the Kids in Museums campaign. But it didn't really exist, it was just a few pages. We ran loads of stories on it. I began touring the country talking about how to make your museum family friendly. I was a journalist. I was called in to see the then director of National Gallery in London. And I'll never forget this moment when he called me in and said, we really like this Kids in Museum campaign and we've been talking on our board about it and we have some ideas on how we might work together and I'd like you to take them back to your team.