Recently, a very clever tactic was employed by the historic and magnificent Victoria and Albert Museum in London to bring thousands of new people through their doors. The V&A museum is iconic in its own right and is one of London’s largest museums. It contains hundreds of stunning items in its collection and is a must-do for anyone in London.

Unfortunately, times are changing and the people of today are not so engaged with static displays of items. Our attention spans are short. A museum full of historic items can become a domain of older people, quiet, stuffy and full of items that seem insignificant without understanding their back-story.

So following on from my other two posts about how the silent disco is a positive evolution of nightclubbing and how the theatre is evolving to attract a new, younger demographic, how must a museum evolve to keep up and draw in the youth of today?

Recently, the juggernaut of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour came to London. There was an estimated number of 700,000 people attending her concerts at Wembley Stadium. Acknowledging that the vast majority of Swifties are younger women, many of these concert-goers from all over the country and internationally would have brought additional people with them to London. The concerts were expected to boost the London economy by £300 million. [Ref] When the concerts were happening, the influx of Swifties was unmissable in London, with their sparkly outfits, their friendship bracelets and their Taylor Swift merchandise.

In a stroke of brilliance, the V&A museum jumped on this Taylor Swift bandwagon and curated the Songbird Trail. They had about 15 different Taylor Swift items such as costumes and accessories and they scattered these strategically around the museum. Signposts and ushers in bright pink vests were placed to guide people along the trail.

I went to the museum on a weekday, a number of days after the concert series was over. I chose this off-peak time to skip the crowds. Despite that, I found the V&A surprisingly buzzy and busy. There were loads of people there to see the Songbird Trail. I could hear plenty of North American accents in the crowd as well as chatter in a number of various languages. Other visitors were English but they were not local Londoners. There was an unusually large number of teenagers in the museum.

To see the various Taylor Swift items, one had to walk through so much of the museum to get from one item to another. The items were also cleverly placed in locations in the museum to maximise the “WOW!” factor, both of the item and of the museum. Despite having been to this museum many times before, I found myself walking through areas and rooms that I had never before. As usual, new items catch the eye and interest.

Seeing all these young people traipsing through the museum was really heartening. As an indication of how busy it was, there were even queues to get to some of the Taylor Swift displays. These queues were well down on the hordes that would have visited on the concert days. It seemed for each young lady who was a Swiftie, she would often be bringing along a father, a mother and usually one or two other siblings. It seemed a moody, teenage brother, looking diabolically bored and dragging his feet through the museum was the norm!

While it seems that a lot of these people were focused on the Taylor Swift items only, surely some of the other items in the museum and the stately building itself must have caught their interest at times. Also encouraging were the numbers of people who were clearly not the usual museum-going types.

By employing this clever tactic of jumping on the Taylor Swift bandwagon, the V&A brought thousands of new people through their doors. Hopefully some have been broadened by the experience, had a new interest sparked or just seen a part of London they may have otherwise overlooked. (And, it was free!!!!)

Other museums in London also employ various tactics to draw in the younger crowd. The Science Museum often opens later in the evenings for adult-only events with a bar, DJ, lectures and a silent disco. The Natural History Museum conducts sleepovers, silent discos and yoga events. The British Museum allows their visitors to get hands-on with specially selected historical artifacts. Museum displays are being redesigned to incorporate modern technology to make them more immersive or interactive, thereby engaging new audiences.

These strategies and more will hopefully engage and educate so that as we move into the future, we can grow from an understanding of where we came from.

For those reading this who aren’t Taylor Swift fans, allow me to explain about the friendship bracelets. These are beaded bracelets, often with beads that spell our various words. You will see many of the young fans with armfuls of them. The idea for making them comes from a Taylor Swift lyric, “So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it.” What a gorgeous sentiment!

The young fans who converge in one location for an event or concert swap them with each other, creating connections, sharing joy, and excitement, making sweet memories. I saw ushers and security personnel sporting these colourful friendship bracelets clearly given to them by some young fan. In this ever more solitary, phone obsessed world, these moments of face to face connection is a precious and beautiful thing, especially for the young!