Janet Miller, ceo at Museum of London Archaeology
British Archaeology talked to Janet Miller, CEO of Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), in May, just after the prime minister had urged construction to recommence
The overwhelming view of those who’ve started on site again is they are just so chuffed to be out of the house and out in the open air. Archaeological work needs to get done for the construction sector to move. It provides all our funding, but without a shadow of a doubt we need to make sure that our people are safe and comfortable. Outside London it’s very easy to keep a good social distance. We can make sure that people get transported safely, that we operate rotas for teabreaks and so on. Going back to work in London is different, public transport is still quite a conundrum.
We also have lots of specialists, researchers and report writers. It’s been a surprise to find that people are feeling that this working at home lark actually isn’t such a bad idea. I’m pleased about that. The straightforward 9 to 5, be at your desk and be seen to be at your desk, is very old fashioned. People can be efficient working at home.
This is clearly the trend in the workplace anyway. Last year we reorganised our head office at Mortimer Wheeler House. We look out of a beautiful wall of window onto Regent’s Canal. It had been clogged up with desks. We’ve made it into a communal breakout space. There’s an open lab there, and you can lay out a whole site assemblage. We have researchers working with us who are not part of mola. We are collaborating more with other organisations, and we need more seminar space.
My career is ridiculously backwards. I was what you called a truant in those days, I hardly went to school from the age of 15. I started digging in Cambridge in my early 20s. By some extraordinary miracle I got into the university, doing arch and anth as a mature student and a single parent. It was the time of Ian Hodder, post-processualism and all that kind of stuff, that’s the stable that I come out of. Then I started digging with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Chris Evans, the director, is one of the best field archaeologists in the country, he’s a great thinker as well as doer. That set me on the right path.
I was becoming as interested in development as the actual archaeology. So I moved to Gifford’s, a civil engineering company which at the time had a small archaeological team. I led a masterplan for Mount Wise in Plymouth, dealing with one of the most economically deprived areas in the country and its heritage.
In 1997 I moved to Atkins in Epsom. We gradually developed the heritage team, doing not only archaeological consultancy for major infrastructure schemes, but also World Heritage Site management plans, and research and policy. I worked in the Middles East and China, which I absolutely loved. It caused me to challenge my own quite western-centric orthodoxies about how heritage is managed and created, my notions of authenticity.
I went up the organisational ladder. We took part in the Change & Creation programme led by English Heritage, looking at the contemporary world through an archaeological lens. That was a real turning point. I started leading the environmental team, getting bigger responsibilities in the organisation itself, and ended up as director of cities: what are cities? Are they liveable? Can we make them more sustainable? By the time I left most of my work was about urban development. It’s just part of archaeologists’ day to day work, bringing together a multitude of different perspectives and disciplines. And probably one of the reasons I ended up doing that is that, you know, archaeologists are pretty good at writing things!
Being part of one of the foremost world cities has shaped mola. When I first arrived I got a series of external speakers in. One of them was this artist who’d been out to the Jungle camp in Calais. At the end of his talk, he says my exhibition is closing in two days’ time, and I’ve no idea what to do with all this stuff. And so immediately – I’d only been there about three weeks – I said we’ll have it! We’ll do something with it! The poor old person in charge of the finds looked crestfallen: they knew they’d have this massive logistical problem, bags and bags of material.
His exhibition was about the experience of migration. We excavated a great cache of Roman leather shoes at the Bloomberg site, really important stuff. And now we had some trainers recovered from the Jungle camp. We put them together. Those Roman shoes came from all over the world, by people coming into London and making it a place for them to live. The juxtaposition of archaeological material and the selfsame kind of modern object, caused you to consider how our world cities came to be the way they are. I felt it was such an important thing to do.
The drive for me is to help mola achieve its potential. Dealing with any emergency is challenging, but the real test for any chief exec is doing their bit to take an organisation through its next stage of development, and see that it continues to be ever more excellent. That’s the reason why I am here. That’s the long, hard slog. I want archaeology to achieve its absolute full potential. It’s a force for good in the world.