Sam Mullins
Managing Director – London Transport Museum
Director of the London Transport Museum since 1994, where he has led the development of the world’s premier museum of urban transport and the place to understand the story of London’s journey.
Highlights have included creating the first publically accessible museum store in the UK at Acton Depot (1999), the £22m redevelopment of the museum in Covent Garden (2007), the transition to charity governance (2008) and the creation of the Tube150 anniversary programme in 2013, the Year of the Bus in 2014 and Transported by Design in 2016. Sam is a historian and co-author of “Underground, how the Tube shaped London”.
The Museum attracts over 400,000 visitors a year and has won a series of awards since 2007. It delivers educational programmes in every London borough, offers access to its whole collection through the Museum depot at Acton, works to inspire young people to work in engineering and transport, and runs the Hidden London tours of disused tube stations.
Trustee of ss Great Britain, the Royal Logistics Corps Museum and Vice President of the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) and judge of Museums and Heritage Show Awards for Excellence.
Session#4, Tuesday 27 September, 14:00
Colour Light & Movement
The public audience for our museums is attracted above all to the scale, power and movement of our vehicle collections. Transport is about mobility and one of our greatest challenges is to convey the colour light and movement of our subject matter in largely static galleries. At London Transport Museum we believe in the high quality research to back the restoration of our collections but we place the operation of restored locomotives and buses at the core of our public events. In my presentation, I will present our rationale for heritage operations, suggest the challenges and opportunities this gives us as a museum and show examples of those operations including Tube150, Year of the Bus and Battle Bus. Experience is the new currency.