Today we are talking about the ways that immersive experiences can help bring culture to life. Our guest today is Tim Powell, head of the research and development studio at Historic Royal Palaces. Tim's work covers a whole load of different areas, and he delivers really creative and challenging experiences for visitors to some of the UK's best loved heritage sites. Tim has found ways to bring heritage and culture to new audiences in a whole load of new ways, from things like performance art and theater to VR and audio journeys. Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Welcome.

Yeah. Well, it was a series of chance encounters probably. I've been at Historic Royal Palaces now for over 10 years actually, and I've done a series of jobs that didn't exist before I did them. So I first came to do, essentially a piece of research into whether social media is something Historic Royal Palaces should be looking into. The answer was yes, and then from there, it's kind of grown. So the first few years, we're looking at online content and social media and those kind of digital, at the time, innovations. And then the latter kind of five years have been on site stuff. So how we can bring the kind of magic of technology and digital into real life experiences that people experience within the palaces or beyond.

I studied a very strange combination of chemistry and philosophy at university.

This hasn't been a kind of long thought path I have to say. But after I graduated, I actually worked for many years in a training organisation that did welfare to work training for long term unemployed people and refugees and asylum seekers. But for that period, I knew I wanted to work in the kind of cultural museum world, but it's very hard to get into. I used to do a lot of writing for various papers and stuff on a voluntary basis, reviewing arts and culture museums, and I got my first job in the industry working for something called Culture Northwest, which they were called the regional cultural consortiums, and they no longer exist. They were a quango that is now cold, and then from there, I got the job at Historic Royal Palaces. So there we are, work in reverse.

Yeah. Well, that's been up there for quite a while now, actually. That came about from my early work on social media actually, so one of the first things I did that got attention was to put Henry the 8th on Twitter. Fairly commonplace thing to do now, but it was quite new at the time.

2008. I think what was exciting is not only the idea of putting that kind of historic personality on social media, but also playing with the capabilities of the new format, so the kind of real timeness. So what we did is we matched a period of time of three months from his brother dying to him being crowned in real time. So social media allowed you to do that for the first time, because obviously, it's in the way that people share their lives in real time, you were able to share his history in real time. So that was the digital grave-robbery. I suppose really, all of the work we do is about making people think that they are present in the past. So if you flip that around, is digital grave-robbery, there we are.

Yes, we are an independent charity, and we look after six sites, which are the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, Kew palace, Banqueting House on Whitehall and our newest, which is Hillsborough Castle, in Northern Ireland. So we are a charity that is licensed by the DCMS to run these six buildings. They are all kind of ex royal palaces and no longer occupied by the Royal Household and they run as visitor attractions. But we receive no funding from either the state or the crown. So all of our income is self-generated through ticket sales, fundraising, functions and events, retail. So we have an independence that is relatively rare within the sector.

I probably should clarify that we do, for specific projects and things like that, we do receive funding, but there is no kind of core funding on an ongoing basis. We are lucky enough to have the Tower of London, which is, you know, I think one in every 12 visitors to London comes to the Tower of London.

I suppose it makes us more susceptible to the market. So fluctuations in, if you track the visitor figures over the last maybe 20 years of something like the Tower of London, you see how it's very, very influenced by geopolitical events. So things like the London bombings and SARS and bird flu and the economic downturn, all have a really, really big impact. So more closely linked to the economy, because of that, because of the need to generate our funds through ticket sales, and maybe other kinds of funding models.

The R&D studio, the head of the R&D Studio is about 18 months old now. The thinking behind it was that if you look at the projects that have had the biggest impact for us over the last number of years, so we're thinking things like the poppies at the Tower of London and the flames, some smaller scale, but kind of big impact projects, like the Lost Palace that I produced and long live Queen James and things like this, they didn't come about through any traditional development method. It wasn't the organisation commissioning, it wasn't, you know, us knowing what we should do, and then doing it. So the R&D Studio really is to embed the capacity for us to work in new ways within the organisation. We operate really by running a series of residences with artists and creatives, who were invited to do really quite speculative idea generation stuff. So their artists were interested in or they work in areas that we're interested in, but rather than just commission them to do something, we actually invite them in to spend time in the palaces, to spend time with our experts, and to see where those kinds of stimulus plus their creativity take them. What we find is that the freedom to generate the ideas in a site specific way creates visitor experiences, and those kinds of creative ideas that we never would have come up with ourselves, and that really have a power to connect to the audiences.

I mean it is completely commonplace in theater and kind of, you know, a pure arts scene. Well, you know, there is a whole branch of theater called devised theater, which is precisely like this. One of the key benefits I think from working in this way is, is a little bit of matchmaking and chemistry testing, because the interiors heritage environments are not easy to work in, they're the most protected buildings in the country. And also, we have a lot of stakeholders, a lot of factors that need to be considered, artists are not always the easiest to work with, you know, so by allowing people in for this, for these R&D residencies, we just make sure and it's absolutely two ways, because we don't want to be working with an artist who doesn't work with us, and it goes both ways. So it's that ability to kind of, to really work in a powerful way together. I think often people commit to projects that, you know, quite quickly are not going to produce the results you want them to. But if you've gone along a normal commissioning project management structure, then you're stuck with it, aren't you?

Yeah, I think the project I've done that's best known is called The Lost Palace, and it was the response to a particular challenge, which is a banqueting house that we look after, is the only remaining building of a 1500 room palace called Whitehall Palace that burnt down 300 years ago. And within the spaces of that palace, some of the kind of really key moments in British history happened. It's where Henry the 8th met Anne Boleyn and married her, it's where Guy Fawkes was interrogated, where Shakespeare performed for the first time, King Lear and many of those plays. But no one knows because it's hidden now under government, under Downing Street, the Ministry of Defense. And you have millions, literally millions of tourists walking up and down there every year, with no idea of the history beneath their feet. So the challenge was, how do we give people experiences of that history, where it happened in a palace that no longer exists? And we again, rather than pretending that we knew how to do this ourselves, we ran an open call competition with the creative industries. We funded five prototypes, and then the two most successful prototypes, and we brought real audiences in to test those, collaborating to make the end visitor experience. So it was a mixture of site specific audio that was recorded using binaural sound, which is a kind of technology that when you listen back to the recordings, it feels like they are happening spatially around you, they're moving, and you can sense the kind of direction and proximity of the sound, as well as architectural installations in the streets. That kind of references to the bits of architecture that were no longer there, and you had to interact. It was a gesture recognition device, which you had to swordfight. So it was a slightly insane mixture of lots of different approaches and technologies that took people around the modern streets and allowed them to kind of listen in and participate in these bits of history.

It ran for two summers actually. So 2016 and 2017.

So we never intended that version to run on a permanent basis. That was a kind of an experimental project that ran for two summers. The Banqueting house will be having a restoration project and the visitor experience will be kind of greatly improved. There will be a version of the Lost Palace, something like that. As to when that will be I'm afraid I don't know. Can I mention one of the projects?

Something called Long Live Queen James, which was in 2017, and it was the anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in the UK. And like many people, we wanted a programme around that. We took the story of James the first and his male favourites, who were his lovers as the inspiration. I think it's a really good example of R&D, because the thing that ended up being presented to the visitors was not even a twinkle in our eye at the start of this process. So it started with a conversation with the playwright Mark Ravenhill. Mark Ravenhill was really excited about the story, but suggested that we brought in the performance artists activist, Scotty, to direct. Scotty brought in a number of performers from the kind of Queer Arts Cabaret Scene. And it became this kind of, we called it a Jacobean drag show in Polari, that's brought in a lot of inaccurate kind of contemporary queer performance, like lip synching on all of those kind of things, but was absolutely telling the stories of those, of the Jacobean Court. What was so surprising about that was some of the audience feedback we had was that people said, I now know what it would have been like to be in James's Court, which, when we often talk about questions of authenticity, and you know, it brought in lots of references to very, very live contemporary issues, but what it did is create the type of experience that was authentic. So James's Court was flamboyant, it was licentious, it was scandalous. In order to make people experience that in the way that they would have back then, you have to recast. That's what those combinations of artists were able to do for this project.

Yeah, absolutely. And really straightforward, the language is a massive barrier.

Yes. Polari was the kind of secret, pre decriminalization of homosexual acts, it was a kind of secret gay language, basically. I think it came from Gypsy slang originally, from Roma slang and lots of the words we know now are from, a lot of them have kind of entered contemporary vernacular, like... I'm not going to be able to remember a single example now, when I am put on the spot. But what was really interesting was that by casting it as Polari, that was the kind of 1950s gay cultural reference, the Jacobean James and his favourites was a, you know, 1661. Using contemporary performance vernaculars, it was like these three different periods of LGBT plus history all in one.

Yeah, I think the palaces and a lot of heritage sites are fundamentally different types of experience from a museum or an art gallery, where yes, though, the walls are richly lined with paintings, there is kind of this furniture, there's objects in the room, but they weren't brought there. They were the, you know, the paintings were painted for that bit of wall, of the people who lived in this room. So there's a complete site specificity to it. I mean, obviously things change over time, but as a general principle, the spaces themselves were also, they were never ordinary spaces. A lot of the time people ask where is the furniture, but there wasn't any furniture because they were full of people. When Henry the 8th's court was in residence at Hampton Court, there were 600 people, you know, they all wanted to get close to the king, they wanted the king's air to get favors, blah, blah, blah. So the rooms didn't have seats, they were full of people, you know. And in addition, the kind of monarchs of each age, have worked with the greatest artists and musicians and architects, so there are places of pure spectacle that need to be populated by people in order to make sense. So we always describe it as somewhere along the spectrum between a museum and a theater. These are performance spaces, really. So it's not somewhere, you can't just clear the walls and put new stuff up, because everything in that room is part of the story and part of the kind of essence of that place.

I mean, I must say that we obviously have a world leading concern of looking after the collections and all of this stuff. A lot of the art on the walls is owned by the Royal Collection Trust, for example. So there were a lot of collections, but our primary function is the management of the building and conservation of the buildings themselves, rather than those collections. I'd be in deep trouble if I don't know that, if I don't mention that. The problem with spaces is that something has to happen in them. I think it is uncontroversial to say that our approach is kind of radically founded in stories, in the idea of the kind of the interplay between people and spaces and politics and society. So for us, it's a bow, which is an approach which is inherently theatrical actually. This is a set, these are characters and these are scripts, and the only difference is that these things really happened. The nature of the spaces we have, palaces, monarchs, in a time when power was held by those people, means that the events that have happened in those rooms have influenced directly in many cases, the society we live in today, really profoundly shaped it. So not only is there the kind of, like kind of drama of the events that were happening, there is also the contemporary parallel of those events. And the kind of the, you know, the strands of time and influence between those two things that I think when we do what we do best, the past invites visitors to reflect on the present in a different way, with the different insights, I think. The first requirement for that is a human connection to those people in the past. People's brains were different, they believed in magic, they believed in superstition, they're fundamentally different brains, we can't just, we can't just put our own brains back there and have like, almost that point about the authenticity of experience. So it's really important to find that common humanity, you know, the highest status people in society, the kings and queens, people, I think, are interested in the two ends of the spectrum of their lives. This is, like the pure pomp and ceremony, the incredible splendor and spectacle and coronation, and all the rest of it. And then the other end, which is where did they go to the toilet? Where did they sleep? Where did they have sex? And there's no middle.

Well, more and more, we are trying to start it with a period of R&D really, so inviting in people from a range of creative industries to solve those problems with us, rather than us thinking that we can do it ourselves. But really, everything starts with a challenge with a problem or a question. It's like, what can we do here, or how should we mark that, or something like that, and it's really, artists are really, really good at answering questions. So I think that's the, the kind of initial R&D should really should be a kind of, you know, us and the artists and the organisation working together to answer the question that has been raised by this historic anniversary, or opening up a new part of the palace or responding to a new emerging technology or a new emerging audience group or whatever the question is. And then I think it's probably worth explaining what we mean by R&D, I think. This is a term that maybe means something different in lots of different industries. So whereas ordinarily, you would start a project with a kind of speculative design stage, then a detailed design stage and an implementation stage, that's the kind of standard design process, this is before that. So this is something that informs the basic brief of the project as a whole. Whereas previously, organisations would have sat around with their own people and decided, you know, we are going to do this thing, and then they ask other people how should we do it? This is a step before that, where we are actually asking, a much bigger question is what could we do? We are asking artists and creatives to work with us to answer that question, that then becomes the brief that is a normal kind of project delivery. So the question I always ask myself is, how will we know if this new approach is worthwhile. There have just been a number of times, one is Long Live Queen James with where that ended up via committing to a different process, never would have come up with that ourselves. Similarly, in the Lost Palace, when we had some prototype pictures that came back from Chomko and Rosier, the interaction designers who ended up designing the whole project, so their idea was a wooden heart like object that beat using haptics or you felt a heartbeat. And if you turn the heart around, it beats strongest in one direction. If you walked along that direction, it took you on the routes that Charles the first walked to his execution. And then when you arrived at the place of the execution, it stopped beating. I think just hands down, we all went, that's a profoundly new way to do this, and we never would have come up with that ourselves. So that open call, that invitation to the creative industries to respond to a challenge, just ended up producing something that was totally unique.

They were in this case. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be like that. There are some kind of creators we work with who aren't massively interested in the end. They like the idea generation stage, they like that kind of concept development. It's a very different set of skills actually, and interestingly actually, that's a real challenge for organisations, maybe, to be able to manage the different phases of those projects. You have to go, you're essentially moving from imagination to practicality, and very different.

I think there are two different ways of looking at it. Some of the work we do is more immersive techniques. Some of it is part of the core visitor offer. So for example, at Hampton Court Palace, we've done a lot of spatial sound and touch sensitive projection mapping stuff. But that's part of the visit for every visitor. And then there's a whole range really of different kinds of visitor numbers. The Lost Palace was just over summers, and off the top of my head, around 10,000 people experience that, which is, you know, just small numbers, compared to the 5 million we welcome every year over all of our sites. The projects we are working on, the kind of large scale, immersive experience at the Tower of London, hopefully opening autumn 2020 will be a much bigger scale, we're working with the commercial partner for that. And that would, the capacity of that will be kind of over its lifespan many hundreds of thousands of visitors. So there's a huge, huge range of scales. One of the things about Long Live Queen James I loved was that it was able to go on a kind of mini tour. So we actually went to Latitude last year, so that was a really interesting way of taking it to an audience who weren't even expecting it.

I think there are two different ways of looking at it. Some of the work we do is more immersive techniques. Some of it is part of the core visitor offer. So for example, at Hampton Court Palace, we've done a lot of spatial sound and touch sensitive projection mapping stuff. But that's part of the visit for every visitor. And then there's a whole range really of different kinds of visitor numbers. The Lost Palace was just over summers, and off the top of my head, around 10,000 people experience that, which is, you know, just small numbers, compared to the 5 million we welcome every year over all of our sites. The projects we are working on, the kind of large scale, immersive experience at the Tower of London, hopefully opening autumn 2020 will be a much bigger scale, we're working with the commercial partner for that. And that would, the capacity of that will be kind of over its lifespan many hundreds of thousands of visitors. So there's a huge, huge range of scales. One of the things about Long Live Queen James I loved was that it was able to go on a kind of mini tour. So we actually went to Latitude last year, so that was a really interesting way of taking it to an audience who weren't even expecting it.

Yes.

Yes, the Lost Palace cost £250,000, the one in the Vaults will be a lot more than that.

It is a huge, huge issue, absolutely, it really is. As we are moving into different kinds of areas of entertainment, working with different types of partners, the expectations in copyright and ownership are challenging, because they are the ones we're not used to. If we're asking artists to work with us, to develop ideas at the start of projects, which is the essence of an R&D residency, then we have to be able to relax the organisation default state position, which is we own all of everything. You know, that's just not how artists work. The reason you've invited them in is because you love their previous work, they're bringing all of that unique kind of IP into the project. So we've had to work with our kind of contracts team to develop a set of principles that are mutually exclusive. So I mean, in technical terms, it's the kind of granting of mutual licenses to IP, and with the exclusivities and time bands and all the rest of it. But I think we've just about kind of settled on a kind of position that allows artists to be able to work with us. But you have to get that right at the start, because if it's not set up right at the start, then it's very, very difficult to reclaim that at the end. And it becomes really fractious and can actually kind of sour the relationships quite severely.

Yes, we have brilliant experts who run all of our education programmes and learning programmes and outreach programmes, so I don't want to speak on their behalf. I think if you're talking about a core visitor, who is not kind of on an explicitly learning or educational base visit, I think if you if you went back 30 years, or whatever, institutions, museums, whatever, would have regarded themselves as the kind of gatekeepers of knowledge, and the gatekeepers of, you know, stuff. The digital age is completely blown now, those kinds of, the authority of ownership of information is gone, people don't come to a place to find that historical fact, they go to Wikipedia, or worse. So why do they still come to these places? I think this is the real shift to cultural institutions being part of the experience economy, they come for a load of different reasons, which are social, very often, but they are looking for experiences that are kind of memorable, that are meaningful, that are kind of, that have some kind of resonance with them. It's a real shift to being able to kind of, well, what we're allowing and encouraging and enabling is for people to create their own meaning in our spaces actually, rather than meaning and truth or whatever being something that the institution broadcasts. But if we are acknowledging that we're part of the experience economy, we need to be aware of who our competitors now are. So if we're saying we're theatrical space, as if we're gamified space, you know, if you're going to make a kind of digital game for kids, it's got to be as good as Angry Birds, it's got to be as good as the rest of the stuff out there.

Yeah. What are we doing here, because the idea that we are going to impress people through the use of light devices is nonsense, frankly. It's got to be heads up experiences, you know, the device, there has got to be a way to deepen the engagement with the place itself.

How do we be more Game of Thrones is the question.

Well, basically, just grasp every possible opportunity that comes your way, you know, there were very few linear paths through this stuff. It's not like being a doctor or a lawyer where there's an absolute clear progression path or whatever. You are going to be employed because of the totality of your experiences and your abilities kind of bring in experiences from lots of different areas and industries and all the rest of it. So grasp all of that, and just be open to the fact that we're not actually nearly as in control as we think we are of what happens next to us, you know, we can only respond to opportunities that come to us. So I think you can put yourself in a position where you are open to opportunities, but you can't actually make them happen, unfortunately so. And also network, just speak to people, ask questions, go and see, put yourself in, you know, go out of your comfort zone and see stuff that you would never normally see and speak to people who've made it. That would be my suggestion.

I don't think I'd build one. Buildings are, you know, are wonderful, but also a challenge. And they present and create their own set of barriers for lots of people, I think. If you speak to lots of people who work in cultural organisations, there is a vast majority who are kind of liberal, and think what they're doing is progressive, and, you know, for society's good, and that was all about change, and impact, and all of those kinds of things. But actually, for the people we are hoping to engage, these places are really seen as institutions, you know, if you look at like, when you're learning French at school, and you are like what was the buildings in the time, it was like the police station, the town hall, the museum, right? So I think the building makes you institutional. And I don't know if you'd build a building again, I think you spend the money on taking what you wanted and taking what you wanted to do to people, rather than expecting them to come to you.

I'd say at the center of everything you do, put how you want people to feel, because when you've got an emotional reaction from people and emotional engagement, it's so much easier to kind of engage them in all the other ways we want to do, but it's that visceral emotional connection that starts, that's the most powerful start point to everything else. So really start to design stuff for how you want people to feel at that moment.

That's a bit creepy.

Yeah, I'm on Twitter as TCP1990. And I don't blog or anything like that I am afraid.

Twitter is probably the best to be honest.

Well the web address is hrp.org.uk. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's a little tab for the R&D Studio there.

Thank you very much.