Well lockdown seems to come earlier every year! With the third national lockdown now in place, we do not expect to be able to re-open much before Easter, although we continue to use digital channels to reach out to our visitors and supporters. 2020 was the year we all ran out of adjectives to describe the maelstrom through which we have worked; challenging, relentless, exhausting, a roller-coaster ride, depressing and tough, often all those within one day, and 2021 starts in a similar vein, albeit with vaccination offering a light at the end of the tunnel. This is a good moment to look back at all we achieved in a year which will prove hard to forget.
Before entering the first lockdown, we had time to welcome a royal visit from the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall on 4 March 2020 to celebrate 20 years of Transport for London, but had to postpone the 40th birthday party we had planned to celebrate the founding of London Transport Museum, one of London’s younger museums, on 28 March 2020.
Looking back across the period since we closed on Thursday 18 March 2020, we have not only faced down a major crisis but also emerged a stronger and more confident London Transport Museum; our new online shop has traded consistently well all year, the Hidden London exhibition won the Museum + Heritage award for Temporary or Touring Exhibition of the Year, and we innovated quickly moving our programmes on to digital platforms, from our Thought Leadership and STARS programmes, to the Hidden London Hangouts series on YouTube and Hidden London virtual tours.
Later in the year we were able to host a summer programme for families at our Acton Depot, and launch the Museum After Dark events at Covent Garden, whilst with the launch of a brilliant new website in October our stories and collections have been travelling around the world. All this was delivered by our busy and creative teams, working for the first time from lofts, bedrooms and kitchen tables, many of them taking one for the team by earning furlough gold for extended periods. Even the re-opening of the Museum Depot in Acton and the Museum in Covent Garden was created and managed remotely.
Our visitors showed their loyalty and appreciation by returning in much higher numbers than at our neighbouring museums. This has also been the case during the most recent thirteen-day fling up to closure on Wednesday 16 December 2020.
We start the New Year in a strong place thanks to the Culture Recovery Fund from Arts Council England and emergency funding from TfL, but winter will seem longer this year and re-opening might have to wait until later than we hoped. With the vaccination programme underway, we can begin to view the approaching horizon with more optimism. Somewhere between Easter and the summer holiday, a new normal might emerge and London Transport Museum will be in a good place to respond to all that pent-up demand for getting out and consuming culture once more.
We have made a huge leap forward in the digital delivery of our programmes and content in 2020 and this will form a strong blend with the unique experiences we have to offer when they can be taken up once more. We will be investing time and resources in the coming months in some much-needed improvements in our galleries, such as adding new digital screens and upgrading the vehicle information points, and getting a head start on our recovery.
We have had brilliant support from our visitors, funders, London Transport Museum Friends, and shoppers through the indescribable year that was 2020 for which we are very grateful. We will need you again when we re-open for the third time. Thank you for buying just short of 33,000 pairs of moquette socks and for your many messages of support. Let’s look forward to a better time as time goes by in 2021.
