David Anderson’s recent appointment as the director general of Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) makes Cardiff the fourth UK capital to have an impact on his life.
Anderson was born in Belfast, went to university in Edinburgh and has spent the past 20 years in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
But Anderson did not start his museum career in any of these places. His first job in the sector was in Brighton and at the time he was teaching history in a secondary school.
“A relative just happened to have sent an advertisement for a museum education job in Brighton, which was close to where I was living. I applied for the job and, to my surprise, found myself leaving teaching without ever having a plan to do so.”
Like many in the sector, he was inspired by his first museum job. He was in his late 20s at the time and was surrounded by a group of people of a similar age who had been appointed by John Morley, the director of the museum service in Brighton.
“It was a brilliant place to go in,” says Anderson. “John Morley was a very visionary man and had transformed the museum service and put it on a modern footing.
“He recruited a number of very talented people [including Jessica Rutherford, who later became the director, and Caroline Dudley, a former head of Hampshire Museums Service]. It was a lovely environment to work in.”
Anderson left Brighton to join the National Maritime Museum in London, and then moved to the V&A, where he spent the next 20 years. The physical legacy of his time there is the Sackler Centre for arts education. This opened in 2008 but Anderson’s says the desire for a purpose-built education space was there from the start.
“The first memo I wrote to Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the director, was to say the thing we needed most was space to work with.”
Esteve-Coll was supportive, although the first plan to create an education space failed as part of a much larger scheme that the Heritage Lottery Fund rejected.
The next attempt to build a centre for education was part of the Daniel Libeskind-designed Spiral project, which was abandoned in 2004 after a lottery bid for the £70m scheme was knocked back.
Anderson is pleased with the Sackler Centre, which has a programme based on a triangle of resources – the V&A’s collections and staff, the expertise of creative professionals, and the skills of visitors. He believes this combination has worked well.
“There is no doubt that there are far more people who have real expertise in design and the arts that are engaging with the public than was possible before we had the Sackler Centre.
“And I calculated that in the six months after opening, about 100 staff had contributed to the programme there, which is way more than had been possible before.”
Leaving the V&A
After 20 years at the V&A, it might have been a wrench to leave, but Anderson says the wide range of roles he had at the museum made moving easier.
“I think if I had stayed as the head of education at the V&A for the last 20 years it would have been a much stranger experience, but in practice there were quite a large number of functions at the V&A that I have managed, from the web team, to visitor services, to audience research, and the Museum of Childhood.”
Anderson has also had lots of involvement in projects outside the V&A, such as the Exhibition Road Cultural Group and his work on digital collaborations, such as Every Object Tells A Story and the National Museums Online Learning Project.
“An important part of my job at the V&A was not being at the V&A,” says Anderson. There were also lots of attractions about moving to Cardiff, including a love of rugby.
On the work side, the aim of National Museum Wales to become a world-class museum of learning fits nicely with Anderson’s views about the importance of education.
Anderson is also excited about the multiple sites operated by National Museum Wales, and particularly their strong individual identities. “One of the things that really appealed to me about the job was that the sites have really strong relationships with the communities and regions in which they are located.
"There isn’t the gap between the staff of the museum and their communities and regions that is inevitable in a major national in London.
“There is a mutual identification and connection that many smaller regional museums, and larger regional museums in some cases, have, but is very rare in a national museum. I think it is something to be cherished. It gives National Museum Wales a very different character.”
Anderson also says his studies of Irish history have made him very interested in questions of identity within nations. This is something that is addressed in national museums in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, but not England.
“There is not a national museum in London that looks at the history of England and I don’t think there will be. To slightly misquote Swift, there is no people that needs it more than the English and is less likely to get it.”
Anderson says the sites operated by National Museum Wales do address questions of what it means to be Welsh, what it has meant in the past and what it might mean in the future.
This is particularly true of St Fagans, which will undergo a £20m redevelopment in the coming years. Anderson believes open-air museums such as St Fagans, which has 40 re-erected buildings from 1500 onwards, are often seen as a separate category of museum.
Rethinking museology
“What I think the museum sector might reflect more on is that museums are places for non-material culture as well as material culture. The aesthetics of ceramics or the narrative of a painting can be an end in themselves and the cultural meaning of it all can be ignored.
“In places like St Fagans the cultural meaning is not ignored, it is explicit. I think there is the potential for a discussion about the future of museums to be had through a discussion about what St Fagans is and to see this as the chance to rethink museology a little bit.”
Whatever the museological potential, the redevelopment of St Fagans will need money and, like museum directors all over the UK, Anderson is having to deal with budget cuts.
But National Museum Wales has not done too badly compared with museums in England and has had only a 4% cut in its revenue grant from the Welsh Assembly Government over the three years up to 2014.
Anderson says that the Welsh museum sector has a closer relationship with CyMAL [Museums, Archives and Libraries Wales, a division of the Welsh Assembly Government] than DCMS has with the museum sector in England.
This strong relationship is helped by Wales having a population of 3 million compared with 51 million in England. There are also 60 members of the Welsh Assembly, making lobbying a manageable activity.
And Anderson believes that, through a series of partnerships, National Museum Wales can support government agendas as well as making a difference to Welsh society as a whole.
“We know what a difficult time this is going to be economically and the Welsh Assembly Government is going to have even greater challenges than before.
“There are lots of areas of government policy where this museum could make a major contribution. But the ultimate purpose of this museum is to try to make the maximum impact for the people of Wales and to be as useful to society in Wales as it can be.”
To achieve these aims, Anderson says the national museum will have to look at its public programmes as well as the partnerships it has with national, regional and local organisations. All this will have to be done in a restricted funding environment. But, after 20 years at the V&A, Anderson is very much up for a new challenge.
David Anderson started his career as a secondary school history teacher before becoming education officer for five local authority museums at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton.
He then worked at the National Maritime Museum in London before joining the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) where he was most recently the director of learning and interpretation. At the V&A he led the development of the £4m Sackler Centre for arts education, which opened in 2008.
He started as director general at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) in October, replacing Mike Houlihan, who left to become the chief executive of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Anderson was born in Belfast and brought up in Warwickshire. He studied Irish history at Edinburgh University.