Museum

So, we were founded just over ten years ago, when I was at the 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 pushchair, and one of my children, three years old, shouted and I've never denied he shouted, 'Monster, monster! ' at this statue which looked just like a monster, had snakes for hair, 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 to the wrong family. 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. 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.