Yearbook 2010/11 Celebrating 30 years of London Transport Museum Celebrating 30 years of London Transport Museum Yearbook 2010/11 Incorporating the Annual Report of the Trustees and financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2011 London Transport Museum is an educational and heritage preservation charity. Its purpose is to conserve and explain the history of London’s transport, to offer people an understanding of the Capital’s past development and to engage them in the debate about its future. Contents Message from the 5 Chair of Trustees and Managing Director 6–9 Celebrating 30 years of London Transport Museum The year in summary 10 – 11 12–17 Education and engagement 18 – 25 Access and operations 26–33 Heritage and collections Article 1 Moving in the right direction Peter Hendy 34–51 Feature articles * Article 2 London Rail – current and future plans Ian Brown Article 3 Designing a new bus for London Stuart Wood Article 4 Airport provision in the South East Lord Soley Article 5 Towards a sustainable railway Adrian Shooter Article 6 Keeping Britain moving Alice Woodwark and Julian Mills 52–53 Plans for the future 54–61 Income and support 62–67 Public programme 68 –71 Structure, governance and management Trustees’ statement 72 73 Trustees and advisors 74–75 Independent auditor’s report 76–90 Financial review * Feature articles do not form part of the audited Report of the Trustees 5 Message from the Chair of Trustees and Managing Director Sir David Bell We are pleased to present the London Transport Museum (LTM) Yearbook Chair of Trustees for 2010/11, celebrating thirty years since the Museum first opened in Covent Garden. Over that time LTM has become the world’s premier museum of urban Sam Mullins transport and Covent Garden itself has changed from a run-down, empty Managing Director market quarter to one of London’s must-see destinations. We owe a debt to the late Michael Robbins who recognised the opportunity presented by the GLC’s redevelopment of Covent Garden in the 1970s. He encouraged London Transport to take a lease on the Flower Market and the Museum opened here in 1980. We have welcomed over six million visitors in the last thirty years and LTM’s overall impact on London is even greater when our talks, events, community and schools outreach programmes, and website are considered. This Yearbook includes our Trustees’ report and accounts for 2010/11, demonstrating our achievements in engaging our audiences with the remarkable story of the Capital’s transport. This is complemented by a series of essays by our partners and collaborators, many drawn from our Thought Leadership programme – a partnership with Eversheds that has firmly established the Museum as a forum for debate about transport and London’s future. Plans are well advanced for next year’s London Journeys exhibition – our contribution to the Cultural Olympiad. We are also planning a year-long celebration in 2013 to mark 150 years of the Underground’s contribution to London, since the world’s first underground railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863. A major publication and a touring exhibition of our world-renowned collection of transport posters are planned. We also hope to run steam trains on the Underground for the first time in many years as part of the anniversary programme. We are grateful to all our staff and volunteers, our fellow Trustees, the Friends, Transport for London (TfL) and everyone who has contributed to the Museum. Particular tribute should be paid to the commitment and expertise of Bob Bird, Rob Lansdown and Michael Walton who all joined us in 1979 before the Museum opened and are still key players today. To have achieved our visitor and financial targets in 2010/11 against the background of recession is satisfying. Nevertheless, the future remains challenging as we strive to offset a 25% reduction in TfL support over the next four years. MLA Renaissance funding also ends and both our public and corporate users are experiencing cost inflation and pressures on income. Our creativity and commitment will be needed to deliver on charitable objectives and stakeholder commitments. Our confidence that the Museum will thrive and develop in the future, much as it has done for the last thirty years, is based on our commitment to a winning formula: great collections, engaging exhibitions, wise Trustees and energetic, creative staff. 6 7 Celebrating 30 years of London Transport Museum Thirty years is not a long time in the history of many of London’s institutions, but it is a lifetime for London Transport Museum (LTM), which has only been operating in Covent Garden since 1980. In that short time the Museum has moved from displaying a small but important selection of buses, trams and trains to being a multi-faceted modern museum, strong on education, engagement and enterprise with a collection of over 400,000 objects. The Museum’s prehistory can be traced to the formation by the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) of a small collection of early buses at Chiswick Works in the 1920s and 1930s. Starting with the B-type bus when it was withdrawn from service in 1925, the LGOC soon added an exquisite replica of George Shillibeer’s original horse-drawn omnibus, built to celebrate the centenary of London’s first ‘hail and ride’ public bus service. Visitors will still find the Shillibeer bus, the B-type and other vehicles from this early collection proudly displayed in the Covent Garden galleries today. In 1933 the London Passenger Transport Board was formed and set a policy to preserve significant vehicles as they were withdrawn from service. The collection at Chiswick grew and in 1951 the British Transport Commission officially recommended the preservation of the nation’s transport heritage collections. London Transport (and its successors) were given a statutory duty to preserve the material collected up to that date. The Museum of British Transport was set up in a former bus garage at Clapham to house the national transport collection. The first curator was appointed and a small exhibits section opened in 1961, followed by the main hall in 1963. When the mainline railway material was set aside for the new National Railway Museum at York, which opened in 1975, the remaining material was retained at Syon Park in west London, opening there as the London Transport Collection in 1973. There the story might have ended had not the Greater London Council recognised the regenerative potential of the former market at Covent Garden. London Transport seized the opportunity to move the collection to the West End and work began to create the new museum in 1979. A year later, on 28 March 1980, the Princess Royal opened the London Transport Museum in the former Flower Market building at Covent Garden and since then the Museum has blossomed into the world’s leading museum of urban transport. Over the years, LTM has added photographic and film archives, posters, plans and drawings, signs and architectural features to its collection, which was designated of national importance in 1997, alongside a growing number of buses, trains and trams. Over six million visitors have passed through the doors of the Museum’s two sites at Covent Garden and Acton. Opened in 1999 as the first publicly accessible museum store in the UK, the Museum Depot in Acton has been a considerable asset for LTM. There the collections are conserved, stored and made available for study visits, school groups, guided tours and open weekends. 8 9 Celebrating 30 years of London Transport Museum continued Since 1980, the Covent Garden building has been significantly refurbished twice. It now boasts extensive conference and visitor facilities and more exhibition space than ever before. Visitor numbers have risen by almost 40% since the last reopening in 2007, from an average of 209,000 per year in the decade to 2005, to a total of 291,344 in 2010/11. In April 2008 the Museum became a registered charity with a clear responsibility to deliver public benefit through its operations. The Board of Trustees has helped to invigorate the Museum and the redefined relationships with TfL have never been stronger. While the public sector funding landscape has meant an inevitable reduction in TfL financial support, the underlying commitment to the Museum remains. Recent research has concluded that the Museum delivers an annual economic benefit to London estimated at £25 million, meaning that for every £1 TfL invests in the Museum, a further £4 is generated. For the future, the Museum aims to continue its delivery of imaginative programming, exciting exhibitions and innovative learning projects. The exhibition programme is mapped out for the next three years and further investment in visitor facilities and a skills centre for learning will be complete in 2011/12. As one of the world’s greatest cities, London demands a world- class showcase to record, interpret and explore the close relationship between the city and its transport. That showcase is London Transport Museum, past, present and future. The Museum was opened by HRH Princess Anne on 28 March 1980 10 11 The year in summary The Museum established four priority areas for 2010/11: (1) to develop an exciting programme of exhibitions and engagement; (2) to maintain visitor numbers and satisfaction ratings; (3) to target acquisitions more strategically and incorporate user-generated content; and (4) to anticipate a tighter financial settlement by becoming more socially enterprising. During the year, the Museum made significant achievements in each of these areas. LTM presented four exhibitions alongside a full programme of well- attended events, and undertook considerable research and preparation to deliver its forthcoming exhibitions over the next three years.