One area where Visitor Experience teams are always called to play a leading role is crisis management. In any unexpected incident, you’ll find the knowledge of your team is crucial – as well as their practical experience of visitors, of the site and of what can be relied on to go wrong next! In this chapter, you’ll find out how crisis management practice has developed in museums and heritage sites, how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned that all on its head and, most importantly, what you can do to prepare your teams for the crises of the future.

Crisis management in museums: a history

To understand how to plan for what might happen in the future, we first need to look to the past. This is because all crisis management is based on past experience.

Having grown up in 1990s Scotland, when I took my first London museum job I was fascinated by the stories of my long-established colleagues. In amongst the ghost stories and historic staff scandals were the memories of operating in the years when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) posed a clear and present threat in English cities. My colleagues told me tales of evacuations, bomb scares and coded warnings. These features were the warp and weft of the crises of the time, and we still see their legacy today in museum crisis management plans.

On 11 September 2001 our understanding of terrorism changed. Coded warnings and anonymous phone calls were the luxury of a previous era. Counter-terrorism focused on suicide bombers and mobile phone-detonated devices; and museums did not find themselves exempt from these concerns. On 7 July 2005 bombers carried out an attack on the London transport network. However, at trial, the court heard that before the attack the perpetrators had also carried out hostile reconnaissance at a number of visitor attractions, including the London Eye and the Natural History Museum (Hough, 2008).