Royal Academy

Just over 10 years ago, when I was in the Royal Academy, a museum in the centre 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, is shown in this picture. And one of my children, three years old, shouted. And I've never denied he shouted. 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 got a three-year-old that's appreciating prehispanic art. How good can it get? So, I bent down. I said, yes, it looks just like a monster. And at that moment, a security guard came over, then a gallery assistant came over and said, we're being too noisy and threw us out. Roll the family. During that time, I was a journalist with The Guardian newspaper. And two days later, I wrote a big piece in The Guardian about being thrown out of the Royal Academy. And what was really interesting was by the end of that day, at the paper we had 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 garden. We set up a campaign for the kids' museums campaign. It didn't really exist. It was just a few pages long run, those stories on it. I began touring the country talking about how to make your museum more family-friendly.