Cultural Peeps Podcast

Cultural Peeps Podcast is a series of career conversations from across the cultural sector, led by Iain Wheeldon, a senior lecturer in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University. The guest list is the first surprise. Gallery and museum directors turn up, but so do a National Trust head gardener, a professor of colonialism and heritage, the founder of a community using psychology to bridge divides, and a stand-up comic best known for a Ken Loach film. The talk keeps coming back to one practical question: how did this person end up doing this job? With Bridget McKenzie, founding director of Climate Museum UK and co-founder of Culture Declares Emergency, that means roles at Tate and the British Library, then a values-driven decision to leave a senior institutional post and help set up Flow Associates in 2006. She also talks about consultancy life, where a team from a cultural learning background competes with bigger, more technically driven agencies. Alex Evans, founder of Larger Us, describes himself as a policy wonk until about 2011, someone who wanted to be Josh Lyman from The West Wing. He argues that ethical consumers alone will not bring overall emissions down without a policy response, and counts a change of mind about his own theory of change among the pivot moments of his career. Wheeldon mentions having used Evans's book, The Myth Gap, with his own students. Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester, directed Colonial Countryside, a child-led history and writing project with the National Trust, and co-authored a 2020 Trust report on the colonial connections of properties in its care. That conversation reaches into family history, including the contrast between plantation-owning families who know theirs closely and people who do not know their own. Simon Thompson's episode leaves the office behind. It is built around a walk through the woodland and walled gardens of the Wallington estate on a September morning, before the site opened to the public. Thompson, who has worked for the National Trust for more than 25 years, explains that as heritage gardens grow, the light shifts, so shaded planting has to be rethought: prune more, take out the plant casting the shade, or redesign the bed. Dave Johns talks about his early life as a bricklayer, his love of improvisational comedy and his breakthrough role in I, Daniel Blake. He also tells how an approach at the bar of the Kilkenny Comedy Festival led to an offer to produce the stage adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption he was co-writing, and jokes that his BAFTA invitation is his 'pointless trophy'. Episode 13, with Judith Carlton of Southwark Park Galleries, begins with a plain note on method. Recordings were often grabbed in busy offices between meetings, with the working day audible underneath, and edited down from longer conversations. Taken together, the conversations add up less to a set of job descriptions than to a record of turning points. For a first listen, the Wallington walk has the strongest sense of place, and the Bridget McKenzie episode shows most clearly how values can redirect a career.