A small patch by the Thames has royal connections going back centuries, which a new £6m centre reveals

This impressive building use to house Royal Navy marine architects’ workshops, but it’s on the site of something much grander. On this spot on a bend of the Thames was not just a royal residence, but for the Tudors the royal residence, their version of Buckingham Palace.

Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I were all borne in Greenwich Palace, Edward VI died here. The campaign against the Armada was planned here, and the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots was signed here.

But after it ceased to be a royal a palace, the site went to have a quite different but just as colourful a history, a story told now in the £6m Discover Greenwich, created by the Greenwich Foundation which now has responsibility for it.

And the news that Greenwich, a World Heritage Site since 1997, is to become a Royal Borough as part of the Queen’s Jubilee in 2012 adds a sheen to the new centre.

Although it emphasises the architecture of Hawksmoor, Wren and Stuart, and life in the Greenwich Hospital for seamen, which it was for more than 150 years, its royal story is the one which fascinates the most – a story which can partly be told now through objects recovered in the series of archaeological excavations of the palace, including the chapel in which Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves.

Greenwich’s royal connections go back much further than the Tudors, however, at least to the 9th century AD. Sixth century Saxon remains have been found in Greenwich Park, and in 916 Alfred the Great’s daughter, Elstrudis, who was married to the Count of Flanders, gave the estate to the Abbey of St Peter’s in Ghent.

Discover Greenwich picks up the story in about 1450, but the small fishing settlement had reverted to royal ownership in 1414 and in 1427 was ceded to Henry V’s brother, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He built an impressive house, calling it Bellacourt, but when he fell out with the queen, Margaret of Anjou, she took it over, renaming it the Palace of Pleasaunce.

It was Henry VII who developed it into a full scale royal residence, calling it Placentia, “a pleasant place in which to live”. Henry VIII was born here while construction was going on, and by 1506 it was known as the Palace of Greenwich. His daughters Mary and Elizabeth were both born here too, and his son Edward died here.

As Discover Greenwich reveals, the palace was a bustling community throughout the 16th century, and objects found in a series of archaeological explorations help tell the story. Particularly significant was the 2005 dig on the site of a car park where the chapel royal, begun by Henry VII in about 1500, stood. This was the household chapel, and although Henry’s fourth marriage is thought to have happened in it, most royal solemnities took place in the nearby friary church.

The monarch’s apartments were linked to the chapel, however, and the royal family would have attended services on a partially secluded first floor space.

Enough detail was obtained in the dig for the chapel to be pictorially reconstructed, and – with incense wafting with the music of Thomas Tallis – this provides a first glimpse of the more humble worship of Tudor royal households.

Two of the more delightful objects are the large oak figures from the mid-16th century representing beer and gin drinking – though the latter’s title is an anachronism because gin wasn’t introduced to England until the late 17th century. They would have stood either end of the buttery screen at Greenwich Palace which shielded diners from the area where food was prepared, and they are a rare depiction of ordinary dress in Tudor times.

The foundation has been a le to reconstruct a Tudor window from the palace using original stonework, re-glazed using medieval techniques with the badges of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

And from the town are more humble finds, like the stoneware “witch’s bottle” containing human hair, fingernails and carpenter’s nails which would have stood at a house’s threshold to ward off evil spells.

“The World Heritage Site is still evolving to meet the expectations of several million people who visit the area each year” said Duncan Wilson, director of the Greenwich Foundation. “Discover Greenwich provides an indispensable starting point for understanding and appreciating this rich history – as well as becoming a contemporary destination in its own right.”



No prizes for which option is chosen at the Management Centre’s National Arts Fundraising School, but how? Practice manager Moi Tu explains.

It’s hard not to be gloomy. Everyone expects cuts in statutory funding no matter who wins the election. There are continued falls in corporate giving. The Olympics are sucking up lottery cash. So is this a time to simply hunker down and cut back – asking the one violin player the orchestra can afford to play louder and collecting together a full season of theatrical monologues for the main stage?

“No” says fundraising guru and director of the National Arts Fundraising School, Bernard Ross. “It’s an incredibly tough and competitive market for arts fundraising” he says, but argues “success means you have to work in an integrated and innovative way, pulling out all the stops to ensure success.”

“All the stops” for Ross means coming on the longest residential training course in the arts and cultural sector – the National Arts Fundraising School. The school is an intensive – some say, eye-wateringly intensive – six-day training programme, exclusively tailored for fundraisers working in the arts and culture. Despite its hefty £1,785-a-place price tag, the school attracts 25 fundraising professionals twice a year, and has been doing so for 21 years with almost 1,000 alumni now out there working in the sector. These alumni come from theatres, museums and galleries, film schools, mixed media, archives and local authority cultural departments. And they’ve been successful with a recent research follow up showing alumni raising funds upwards of £100m.

Why does the School seem to succeed? Ross points to three factors.

First, the school is run by The Management Centre (=mc) which doesn’t just work for the arts and cultural agencies but also numbers high achieving charities like The Red Cross, The National Trust, and UNICEF among its consultancy customers. So the result is that the programme offers expertise and ideas from the very best fundraisers around – in and out of the cultural sector. We share what really works, and tell people candidly what doesn’t.

Second, the 18 different modules that form the school are integrated and constantly updated. The modules cover essential fundraising approaches from writing a strategy to crafting proposals, tax breaks to running a major appeal, and sponsorship to legacies. But in recent years there are new modules on social media and major donors, and each programme is different and tailored, thanks to an intensive online survey completed by participants before they come.

Third, the school delivers results. A confident Ross has no qualms backing his bold “this works” claims with a money-back guarantee. The marketing brochure for the events is quite explicit: “You get your money back if you don’t raise a sum equal to the course fee within 12 months.” He’s sure this is the only fundraising programme in the world to offer that simple unequivocal commitment.

All very impressive. But what do the alumni make of this? “Inspiring, life-enhancing and fun” says the former development director of the National Gallery, now chief executive of The Charleston Trust, Colin McKenzie, a well-respected fundraiser joined one of the earliest schools. “Every success I’ve had in the last 20 years owes something to the School – not only to the fundamental principles of fundraising and good practice that it teaches, but also to the awareness it instilled in me that there are endless possibilities within fundraising”.

The school has also proved to be a huge source of confidence and inspiration for newer fundraisers such as Lisa Bradshaw, development officer for the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. Lisa attended last year, just two weeks into her new role and with little fundraising experience; seven months later she secured two foundation grants totalling £75,000. On top of her financial success, the school offered a networking opportunity and support network. “I was never made to feel under-qualified or inexperienced” she says. “There was a real mix of fundraisers, people who’d been in it for years and years, and those who wanted to learn more about particular areas. The school put everyone on a level playing field, which is partly why we’ve all stayed in touch since”.

Critics may wonder what would happen if every arts fundraiser attended the school – surely this would just raise the stakes and make the playing field even more competitive. It’s all relative, right?

Bernard Ross believes that the sector has lots of opportunities. “The coming cuts send a simple message: arts organisations can no longer survive, far less thrive, at the mercy of statutory funding. What we do is help apply the creativity and innovation people bring to their cultural work to their fundraising. With that approach there’s never a shortage of sources of money for the persistent fundraiser”.

The next National Arts Fundraising School runs on 18-23 April (fully booked) and 7-12 November in East Sussex. The school features three leading fundraising consultants and guest speakers including Jenny Oppenheimer from The Pilgrim Trust, who will provide insights on foundations, and Howard Lake of UK Fundraising, who will tackle social media fundraising. Visit: www.nationalartsfundraisingschool.com

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
Well, not knowledge anyway, says Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, of the National Gallery’s warders

I’ve just returned from the press preview of Christen Kobke at the National Gallery in London. It wasn’t that much different from other previews I’ve been to, so the scene I’m about to paint could apply to almost any opening.

We journalists began by hovering around the paintings, not really understanding much about them or why we were being asked to admire them, waiting for the curator to arrive and fill in the gaping holes in our knowledge of “arguably one of the greatest talents of Denmark’s Golden Age” (according to the press release). When the curator appeared, so did a number of National Gallery staff, straggling in from other departments, only identifiable by the tags hung about their necks. Presumably they, although expert in their own fields, were not completely up to date with the Danish Golden Age either, and wanted to find out more.

We all – press, assorted National Gallery staff from other departments and those directly associated with the exhibition –trotted after the curator for fifteen minutes, learning everything we could about Kobke. There were only two people in the short string of galleries – the exhibition only spans three small rooms – who didn’t move around with the crowd. They were dressed differently to the rest of us, in dark suits and ties. They hung around in the adjoining gallery, sometimes making small talk to each other, not listening to the curator, not looking at the iridescent paintings. They were the gallery warders. They are also the only people the public will come into contact with when they visit the exhibition.

I don’t believe these warders were particularly lacking in curiosity about Danish art. Indeed, I would like to believe that they’d heard it all before. I would like to believe that a special tour had been laid on for them by the curators, so they would be able to answer visitors’ queries about Kobke’s “simple motifs with a universal significance” and share their enthusiasm for his “unique treatment of light and atmosphere”. Unfortunately, I doubt this is the case (Although I’d be delighted if the National Gallery wrote in to tell us it was).

Why do museums squander their best resource – people? It would take so very little to include these guards in the tour, to hold out a hand of invitation to them. To let them know that it’s important to the museum, and especially important to visitors, that they are well informed about and involved with the art they treasure. It would also make their job considerably more interesting.

At Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum – the first winner of the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award – they run an excellent programme to involve front of house staff from the outset. They recognize that the museum’s reputation depends upon them, as they are the only staff with whom visitors will regularly engage. So instead of an interview, Killhope invites prospective candidates for a front of house job along to the museum for a day, just to hang out. They’re observed as they go around; it’s noted how comfortable they are with visitors. It’s only after this has happened that a formal interview is offered. In this interview, they’re told quite clearly that their main job is to work for and with visitors. The slogan they’re given is “to your face, not in your face”, in recognition that some visitors like to be left alone, while others want to ask questions or even be approached. Sensitivity to these different visitor needs is considered crucial in a successful Killhope front of house candidate.

So why do so few museums see their gallery warders, room wardens or assistants as part of their visitor services rather than security? If they did, visitors would not be continually told “Don’t touch!”, “Keep quiet!” or to turn off their mobile phone, but asked, “What do you think of that painting of Kobke’s mother? It’s my favourite”.

Get this bit of a visit right, and the rest will flow from it. You might even get London audiences interested in something as obscure as Denmark’s Golden Age.

Dea Birkett is Director of Kids in Museums.
To order your free copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.

As we reported in ai 250, Newcastle’s new Waygood Gallery is five years overdue, and though it should open this summer, its budget has doubled and ACE and the city council are planning to withdraw funding. Pauline Menard reports on what happened

Few people outside the North East are likely to have noticed, but a major row over the future of Newcastle’s Waygood Gallery has been simmering busily for the last few months, with a massive capital overspend, a government minister accusing Newcastle City Council of “misleading” him over the affair, employment tribunals, and various leaked reports and resignations.

Waygood, a largely artist-run space in the centre of Newcastle, was originally due to re-open as a gallery with artists’ studios in 2005 at a cost of £4.7m – the first building in the UK designed by the esteemed Viennese practice Jabornegg and Palffy, who worked on Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz in Vienna. At the moment, the final cost looks likely to be around £10.5m, and the gallery may re-open this summer.

However, it now seems as if Newcastle City Council and the Arts Council are going to refuse to fund Waygood and try to get another operator to run the gallery. Newcastle City Council has already pulled the plug, saying “the city council has decided that it cannot move forward with Waygood as the operator”, while the Arts Council meets on March 31 to decide on the future of the gallery, having “formally notified Waygood that we are considering withdrawing funding from the organisation”. Oh, and the district auditor has been called in to investigate as well.

What on earth went wrong? There seem to have been a number of factors, and the city council cannot escape blame for the cost over-runs. Indeed Peter Allen, the city council’s executive member for resources, admitted that one of the questions the council needed to ask itself was, “how did we get ourselves into this mess”.

In November, the gallery was condemned in an employment tribunal. Artist Topsy Qur’et brought the case against Waygood on grounds of unfair dismissal. After an acrimonious case the tribunal found in Topsy Qur’et’s favour, saying he was “without blame”, the evidence given by Waygood’s chief executive Helen Smith was described as “lacking credibility”, and that she acted in a “not normal and unpredictable” way, had “inherently weak” judgement and was “prone to lose control”, and that one of the witnesses called by the management gave evidence that “bordered on the ridiculous”.

After the tribunal, the Arts Council and Newcastle City Council commissioned Susan Royce to write a report on the organisation’s viability.

Although initially refusing to make the report public, a Freedom of Information request extracted a heavily redacted version from the Arts Council. Nearly 50% of the report is a sea of black ink, sometimes inconsistently applied - for example, on one page the size of a loan from the city council to the gallery is redacted, while on another it is left in at £335,000. What was left in includes the statement that Waygood has “a worrying lack of strategic and management skills and experience”, a recommendation that the chair of Waygood, Esther Salamon, resign immediately, and a plan for the replacement of Helen Smith be implemented.

Very unusually for the part-time non-executive chair of a not-for-profit organisation, Ms Salamon was handsomely paid for her work - around £12,000 a year according to the latest accounts. Some weeks after the recommendations were made she resigned, and in the last couple of weeks has been followed off the board by a city councillor and a partner in Evershed’s, a local law firm.

Partly due to the chair’s initial refusal to go quietly, the Arts Council and the city council have clearly lost confidence in Waygood, and another organisation will be brought in to run the building. In the meantime, Waygood are being taken to a second employment tribunal by another member of staff who is claiming constructive dismissal, and in April have to attend the “remedies hearing” of the first tribunal,at which financial compensation to the unfairly dismissed Topsy Qur’et will be awarded.

Tony Durcan, head of arts and libraries at the city council, conceded: “It is not Waygood’s fault that the capital project has cost a lot more money than was originally thought” - begging the question of whose fault it was. And Newcastle’s arts and libraries department do have form in squandering public money - only last year they gave planning permission, under delegated officers’ powers, for an artist to construct a hotel bedroom around the statue of Earl Grey on top of Grey’s Monument – the Newcastle equivalent of Nelson’s Column. They then changed their minds and insisted the project apply for planning permission to the councillors in the normal way, where it was turned down - and between being granted planning permission and subsequently being turned down for it, some £250,000 of public money was spent.

What next? Waygood will limp on for a few months while it still has some funding before probably folding, and confidence in Newcastle’s arts bureaucrats has taken another bashing. But it remains a fact that a very splendid new gallery and artists’ studio complex has been constructed right in the heart of the city centre, so let’s hope that another organisation - the excellent Vane Gallery, currently housed in what can only be described as a dump behind Newcastle station, has been mentioned - will come in and successfully run the gallery that is now nearing completion.

There has come a tide in the affairs of the RSC. Samuel Jones of Demos explains the dramatic way in which it’s turning

A process of organisational change is underway at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its chairman, Sir Christopher Bland has described the value of the story of this change as being of a company in turnaround.

In 2007, the RSC’s executive director, Vikki Heywood, asked the Demos culture team to observe the change process, and examine what other organisations in the cultural sector and beyond might take from it. In itself, the RSC’s decision to open itself to external scrutiny reveals much. Alongside a desire to contribute to learning, it shows that the RSC sees itself not just as a cultural institution but also as being part of and contributing to the public realm.

In the early 2000s, the RSC had faced severe financial and organisational crisis. Morale and trust in leadership were shattered and the work was receiving poor reviews. Since then there has been a remarkable transformation. The critical and financial success of the work during this time tells its own story. However, the transformation has also been physical – the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been utterly revamped – and organisational in the way that the RSC operates and relates to its public.

Speaking in 2007 the artistic director, Michael Boyd explained the philosophy guiding the transformation: “ultimately, it’s about love”. In a speech at the New York Public Library in 2008, he spoke similarly of ideas like terror, empathy, compassion, daring and, again, love “without apology”. Such words are a long way from the hard lexicon of management consultancy that often goes with organisational change. However, they run deeper than any bottom line and are at the heart of the organisation and the transformation of its fortunes.

Boyd, Heywood and the management team have taken the RSC’s foundational idea of “ensemble” and used it as a lodestar for the change process. An ensemble is a collective of actors working collaboratively over time. Applied to an entire organisation, it has created a conceptual space in which the RSC’s staff can work together, contributing and recognising the contribution of others to meeting collective challenges.

Within the organisation, budgets have been devolved, giving managers greater responsibilities and ownership over their areas. Strategic vision is discussed with all the staff in workshops using the principles of organisational development. While artistic planning decisions used to be taken by a closed and hierarchical group, now they have been opened to others. Take education, for example. Seasons now relate more closely to curricula, and actors take part in educational training and work with the RSC’s network of partner schools.

Ensemble also helped the RSC respond to difficulty. It has had to go through two rounds of redundancies since 2000. The first, advised by external consultants, was disastrous and the outfall well-documented in the media. The second, managed internally by devolving human resources responsibilities and discussing issues openly went as smoothly as could reasonably have been managed.

The Demos team observed the changing attitudes within and around the RSC over three years, using network analysis to examine the overall effects. When we started our observation in 2007, the networks of informal relationships operating within the RSC were stronger than official working networks. New open plan offices and spaces had enabled new connections to grow. This fostered collaboration, enterprise and new ventures. In 2009, when we interviewed the same cross-section of the organisation, the strength of the informal networks was replicated in working relationships. Ensemble, with the flattening of hierarchy and the greater awareness of others that it encouraged, had brought resilience and flexibility.

Boyd places great emphasis on the trust on which such changing relationships depend, and it will play a big part in the RSC’s future. Trust creates confidence in others and the capacity to accommodate risk and failure. It also allows people to learn from one another. Trust depends upon connecting values and having conversations. One of the RSC’s boldest steps is in seeking to extend the trust on which it depends as an organisation to the public. The new theatre design has halved the maximum distance between the stage and the furthest audience member. In 2009’s As You Like It, Orlando’s poems, pinned up in the Forest of Arden, were painted by the RSC’s technical crew but they were contributed by members of the public. The distance between expert and public is diminished, physically and conceptually.

Demos’ interest in the RSC’s story is as a cultural organisation seeking to be genuinely democratic and to play an active role in the public realm. The story might ultimately be about love, but the successes that the RSC has had and the difficulties it has encountered hold wider interest because, in transforming itself, it is also responding to changes in organisations and the society in which they exist.

All Together: A Creative Approach to Organisational Change, by Robert Hewison, John Holden and Samuel Jones is available on the Demos website: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/all-together

The Jewish Museum has reopened with a £10m remake - and new stories. Simon Tait reports

It’s hard to present something like the Jewish Museum without making it a kind of sectarian memory bank, said Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director. “But it’s not just for religious people, not just for Jews, it’s for all people interested in their history and in their shared past” he said.

He and Nigella Lawson were opening the museum behind its genteel Georgian terrace façade after a £10m transformation. The space has been tripled, the museum having been able to acquire an old piano factory.

It has enabled them to do more justice to their colletions, and those of the London Museum of Jewish Life with which the Jewish Museum amalgamated in 1995.

It is a story, as Nigella Lawson said, of a people maintaining its distinctiveness but also being deeply interwoven in the society around; a lesson, Yentob added, that is relevant to all immigrant issues, currently to the French government’s confrontation with its Muslims of the wearing of the burka. “It’s a debate that has to happen” he said.

The museum does not debate, however, but sets out its stories clearly with humour, scholarship and sometimes almost unbearable poignancy.

There are four distinct sections, beginning with a multimedia array of a range of contemporary Jewish people and a brief account of them, from a marathon-running great-grandmother who was born in India, to a fourth generation smoked salmon manufacturer, to a taxi driver, to an ex-army engineer commended for her bravey during the 2005 London bombing.

Then, being shown in public for the first time, is a mikveh, a ritual bath dating from about 1270, found in London and the oldest object in the museum. Many of the objects on show now haven’t been on display before.

The Living Faith gallery gives a pragmatic and respectful introduction to Judaism, with a representation of a synagogue, a description of the life rituals of Jewish life, from birth through bar mitzvah, marriage – and divorce – and death. Four rabbis from four different schools of the faith give dissertations on their beliefs, and there are precious Torah scrolls, including a travelling silver scroll made by George III’s silversmith, Frederick Kandler.

The history gallery should begin with the bringing of Jews to this country for the first time by William the Conqueror because they had already proved the huse as businessmen in France, but instead the visitor is greeted by a panel with a few of the personal stories of Jewish immigrants to Britain: the tiny doll Edith Rothstein smuggled in her clothing when she joined the Kinder Transport from Germany to England in 1938; the hazelnuts Simon Berman brought from Lithuania in the 1880s as a souvenir; the Washington Senators baseball Ned Temko brought with him in 1987.

The story of the Jews in Britain is by turns glorious and shameful. Edward I banned them from Britain in 1290 and they did not have their reswidency rights restored until 1656. But during the exclusion Jews had lived, worked and risen in English society, keeping their faith secretly. Elizabeth I had a Jewish physician, Rodrigo Lopez, who was eventually executed, though as a suspected spy.

AI Profile
Peter Jenkinson, cultural broker

Peter Jenkinson gazes over the battlements of the last walled city in Ireland, the oldest walled city in Britain. He’s looking towards the Bogside, where more than 38 years ago British soldiers fired on British civil rights demonstrators and killed 14 of them dying on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The Saville Inquiry into the massacre has just concluded but the report has yet to be published.

Although Derry~Londonderry, as the city is officially known, has been at peace for 15 years and there are no soldiers garrisoned here now, the history refuses to fade – even though the majority of the modest 110,000 population with the official inquiry expected to report this year. Jenkinson hopes to put that particular history in its place: firmly in the past.

He once described himself as part-time showman, part-time labourer, implying that there is little intellectual substance to what he does. His disingenuousness fools nobody: after spending more than 12 years creating and opening the Walsall New Art Gallery, and then moving on to start Creative Partnerships, the kind of nervous hyperactivity of which be became a personification doesn’t just stop.

He is part of a global inquiry of his own devising into culture and conflict and the effects one can have on the other, which has recently taken him many of the world’s hotspots. He was part of Channel 4’s Big Art Project series last year. With CultureLab he is advising on a major new cultural centre in the Middle East, and his consultancy has taken him to Alice Springs, Belfast , Dublin, Hong Kong, Liverpool, Shanghai, Seoul, Gongju and Damascus in the last year or so.

Jenkinson’s preoccupation now is closer to home. As specialist adviser, he is behind the bid of Derry~Londonderry to be the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013.

He is Essex boy made good, going from Bungay Grammar School to Cambridge to read history, and then moving effortlessly into and through the museum profession - Norwich in 1978, Birmingham in 1984, Weybridge 1985, the Grange Museum in Brent in 1987 before landing Walsall in 1989 where his achievements won him an OBE in 2000, the year he opened the £21m New Art Gallery. Creative Partnerships was, he said at the time. CP was nothing less than “a policy for survival in the 21st century” but after 30 months the scheme was funded, launched and losing its fascination for him. “I’m always searching for the next edge” he says.

He has found that edge in Derry, a particularly distressing centre of The Troubles and a city has had a split personality since James I commissioned London’s livery companies to set up trade there with the city, originally Doire meaning oak grove, being renamed Londonderry. These walls are still owned by London.

ResponseIn response to reports that funding for the arts will inevitably suffer after the election, culture minister Margaret Hodge calls on us to…