Simon Stephens, Profile: ‘There’s a sense of culture being under attack’, Museums Association, 18 September 2024

Former MP Tristram Hunt, now director of the V&A, on why he left politics and the challenges of leadership in the era of the culture wars.

With the Labour party securing a landslide victory in the recent election, Tristram Hunt could well be thinking how his life would have turned out had he not decided to resign as an MP and become the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in January 2017.

A number of push and pull factors informed his decision to abandon his political career for the cultural sector.

“On the push side, I wasn’t a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and I couldn’t tell my constituents that he should be prime minister,” Hunt says.

“And then my constituency, Stoke-on-Trent Central, had voted 70/30 for Brexit, and I thought Brexit was a terrible idea. No one wants to vote for someone who thinks you’ve made a terrible mistake, so I felt like the clock was ticking.”

Tristram Hunt

Tristram Hunt was appointed director of the V&A in 2017. Prior to that, he was the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central and shadow secretary of state for education.

He has a doctorate in Victorian history from Cambridge University and has presented many radio and television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. His books include Ten Cities That Made an Empire (2014), The Lives of the Objects (2019) and The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (2021).

Hunt is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a fellow of Queen Mary University London, a member of both the Council of the Royal College of Art and the Court of Imperial College, president of the William Morris Society, and patron of the British Ceramics Biennial.

He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Staffordshire, Northumbria and Keele universities.

Fortunately for Hunt, the clock was ticking at the right time, as the V&A was looking for someone to replace Martin Roth, an urbane and charismatic figure who led the organisation for five years and sadly died in August 2017. Hunt had long been an admirer of the V&A, having visited as a child with family on trips from Cambridge where he grew up.

“It was always a place that I was drawn to,” says Hunt, who has a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in Victorian history, a period that is
well represented in the V&A’s collections and in its foundation as an institution.

Art and design were always important for Hunt as his grandfather was an artist and his mother a landscape designer. He says he became passionate about history at school and followed that into his undergraduate studies.

“I was always interested in connecting academic history with the public realm, so always thinking about how that sense of the past can be made accessible to as many people as possible,” he says.

After university, Hunt went on to communicate history to the public through writing several books and as a radio and television presenter.

He has also been a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and a patron of the British Ceramics Biennial. And together with the Art Fund, he played an important role in saving the Wedgwood Collection in 2014.

Hunt has the self-assurance that often comes with those educated at private school and then a historic university such as Cambridge. Perhaps this is what gave him the confidence to apply for the V&A job, even though he had never worked in the sector.

“It was a long-old process – I think they initially interviewed me as a sort of amusing, ‘why not’ candidate,” he says. But Hunt got the job and has been at the V&A for nearly eight years, longer than he was an MP. How did he find the museum sector when he first joined?

“What struck me was the generosity and collegiality,” Hunt says. “I think people were a little bit wary of me coming in, but everyone was supportive and engaged.”

Hunt’s background as a historian and an MP means that the V&A is very different to organisations that he has been part of before.

“The size and complexity of the V&A is a challenge, with its complex staffing structure spread across various sites and departments,” he says.

“What’s exciting, and also challenging, is the multiplicity of the organisation – there are collections, capital projects, fundraising, and then there is diplomacy and government relations.”

With such a large and complex organisation, having supportive senior colleagues is vital. “I’m very blessed with an incredibly strong executive team, who are all able to make decisions swiftly,” Hunt says.

“And you can never communicate enough with staff. Hopefully, we have a culture of openness and transparency around what we’re trying to achieve. But it’s hard because we’re moving at pace and the critique we always get internally, which is understandable, is about prioritisation. We’re doing so much, but how do we prioritise accordingly?”

Growth period

Like other museums, the V&A faced a difficult time during Covid and had to cut staff numbers, with a big impact on its retail and visitor experience teams.

But the V&A is growing again as an organisation and next year it will open two new sites in east London – the V&A East Storehouse and the V&A East Museum, situated close to each other in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

This follows the £13m redevelopment of the Museum of Childhood, which reopened as the Young V&A in July last year and was named the Art Fund Museum of the Year 12 months later. V&A Dundee joined the family of museums in 2018.

Hunt keeps a keen eye on the institutional history of the V&A and how that influences the museum. Its mission, to champion design and creativity, advance cultural knowledge, and inspire makers, creators and innovators, is important to him.

“I have a strong passion for the collections and for the origins and purpose of the institution, and updating that and ensuring that it has relevance and meaning today,” Hunt says.

“You can go to some museums where you feel that the leadership don’t like their collections much and feel either embarrassed or disappointed by them. I think you’ve got to have a passion and ardour for them.”

The V&A has a big emphasis on fashion, which drives much of its temporary exhibition programme through blockbuster shows focusing on key industry figures such as Coco Chanel, Naomi Campbell and Alexander McQueen.

Photography has also become an increasingly high-profile area, particularly with the development of a new centre at South Kensington that is now the largest space in the UK with a permanent photography collection. Architecture is another key area.

A multi-site organisation

The museum’s temporary exhibition programme is important, but Hunt’s success as director will also be judged on how he manages the V&A’s transition to a multi-site museum.

“There are lots of complexities within the move to a multi-site museum,” he says. “Where’s the energy, what’s the identity, does it speak to a locality, how do we manage the different feel of the galleries in different places? There are all those tensions that colleagues at the Science Museum and Tate have been wrestling with for a while.”

And the complexity Hunt is having to deal with comes not only from overseeing an expanding organisation, but also from some of the wider issues he has to tackle, including the legacy of empire.

“It is tricky at either end,” Hunt says. “There are some in the UK who want to wrap themselves in the flag and say none of this should be returned, what’s ours is ours. And there are some in source countries who say the only way we’ll have this conversation is if you return the object and they think we’re just hiding behind the law, when we’re obeying the law, as we should.

“But then if people think you’re serious and want to engage in the conversation over the long run, then there’s trust. I have always felt around the long-term loan of items there’s the transactional element, but then, as we saw in the Manhyia Palace Museum in Ghana recently, there is great work around conservation, curatorial, security, interpretation. It’s about thickening those relationships.”

Hunt highlights the opportunities for telling new stories provided by explorations of colonialism, such as the Tropical Modernism show (on until 22 September at the V&A South Kensington), which looks at modernist architecture’s arrival in India and west Africa.

“You cannot decolonise the V&A because the colonial past is embedded within the history, the collections and the very building,” Hunt says. “But what you can do is surface it, challenge it, highlight it and engage with it.”

In its attempts to open up its collections and tell new stories in new ways, the V&A has been hit by culture war controversies that flare up from time to time in museums.

The latest example was the V&A being criticised in the media for a label that described former prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a “villain” alongside Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and emir of al-Qaeda Osama Bin Laden in a display about British humour. The text, in the Laughing Matters gallery, is five years old and was changed.

For Hunt, criticism can be perfectly legitimate, but problems perpetuate if the level of anger around these issues erupts at speed on social media.

“There’s a sense of culture being under attack, and a higher level of anger or fearfulness,” he says. “Those who are criticising always assume the absolute worst intentions, rather than saying: ‘Do you know what, I think you’ve got this slightly wrong.’ And then the institution can say: ‘Ok, let’s reflect on that, and then we can respond accordingly.’

“But it is so antagonistic, and so the space for a calmer debate is much reduced. It behoves us as institutions to come up with a considered response, without being patronising, self-satisfied or uncommunicative.”

Like other national museum directors, Hunt is also trying to tread a careful path through sponsorship issues. He had originally said that the V&A was proud to receive money from the Sacklers, the family who made huge profits from the US opioid crisis. The museum reversed this decision in 2022, removing the Sackler name from the Kensington site.

“It’s this balance between safeguarding the reputation of the institution, versus not putting everyone off who wants to give us any money,” he says.

“Hopefully, we’ve walked that line correctly. We’re 45% funded by the taxpayer, so it’s absolutely right that there’s transparency and accountability around where the other money is coming from. But also, in terms of public debate and discourse, we need to ensure that we celebrate and support people giving philanthropically because sometimes the mood music is almost punitive around it.”

Media scrutiny

Sponsorship issues often hit the headlines, and dealing with controversy in the media has been a big concern across the sector following the news that artefacts had been lost and stolen from the British Museum.

The direct fallout from this was dealt with by another former MP, British Museum chairman George Osborne, and a former V&A boss, Mark Jones, who was interim director at the British Museum.

Hunt says that impact on the V&A has been endless Freedom of Information requests from the media and questions from trustees about how the organisation is approaching collections documentation issues. He says procedures will be improved, but costs will no doubt increase.

One thing Hunt won’t be doing in the foreseeable future is following in Jones’s footsteps and leading the British Museum.

He says he did not apply for the role following Hartwig Fischer’s departure as he wants to see the V&A through its two east London capital projects. For Hunt, it’s a time to look forward to the opportunities that will be created by unveiling the two new venues.

“For us, 2025 is a big year. With all the hard work that colleagues have put in over the past 10 years, it is a moment of transition. And I want to be here to work with them on that – it’s going to be a really wonderful moment for the institution.”

Victoria and Albert Museum

The V&A describes itself as a family of museums, and from 2025 will comprise six UK sites: V&A South Kensington and Young V&A in London; V&A Wedgwood Collection in Stoke-on-Trent; V&A Dundee; and two venues opening at Stratford, east London – V&A East Museum (right) and V&A East Storehouse.

Young V&A was awarded the Museum of the Year award in July, beating off competition from the National Portrait Gallery, London; Manchester Museum; Dundee Contemporary Arts; and Craven Museum.

The V&A is a national museum funded through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. V&A South Kensington attracted 3,110,000 visitors in 2023, making it the sixth most popular UK visitor attraction, according to figures from the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.

Founded as the Museum of Manufactures in 1852, the V&A’s mission “is to be recognised as the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance, and to enrich people’s lives by promoting research, knowledge and enjoyment of the designed world to the widest possible audience”.

See also: Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll obituary