10 things that changed my life: Leonie Bell, V&A Dundee director

I HAD a very happy childhood. I felt completely loved. We had parents that listened to us and always supported our interests. Obviously they controlled my cultural life as a child, and we would be taken to Dundee Rep, the Byre Theatre, The McManus, and the Edinburgh Festival.

I didn’t realise it was sowing the seeds for what I would do with my life. I’m grateful to be have been brought up in a house that liked culture, travel, reading and really liked conversation and arguing about ideas. We were brought up to have opinions.

When my own cultural interests started kicking in, it was very much about Top of the Pops and recording the chart show on Sundays. It was about seeing Boy George, Wham!, Madonna, then Nirvana.

There was a breakthrough of exciting pop culture. What you wore, what was in Smash Hits, Mizz, and Just Seventeen. All that pop stuff had such a massive influence on me, even though I ended up working in the cultural sector. It was so important to analyse what the likes of Madonna and Kurt Cobain were wearing. I still really value pop culture. I’m not one of those people who work in the sector who think that only the established forms of culture are important or valid.

2 Moving to Glasgow

I MOVED to Glasgow to go to university in 1993 and I stayed there until 2020. I think Glasgow drew me in for a few reasons. It was obviously a much bigger city, but at the time it felt so edgy and energetic. I quickly fell in love with the whole city, and not just the architecture and its spaces, pubs and clubs. I wasn’t at the art school but I gravitated towards people who were there. I love the main galleries of course and places like the GFT, but then I started to discover places like Transmission and was inspired by the artist-led spaces.

Of course there was the nightlife. I have a daughter in her first year at university and I’m so struck by the difference between her experience and mine. In a good week, when there wasn’t too much work to do, I could be on the Tuxedo Princess on a Monday night, Club X or Bennetts on a Tuesday night. Then it would be Volcano on the Wednesday night, on to Cheesy Pop at the QM union on a Thursday and The Arches on a Friday. Saturday night was when you would stay in and then it was Sunday night at the Sub Club. All that is without the live gigs. It was such an inspiring time to be part of a city that was so alive.

3 The Lighthouse years

MY first big job in Glasgow was as programme director at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s centre for architecture and design, from 2000 to 2008. It was a young organisation and it was hugely ambitious, extremely rooted in the city, but international in its thinking. We were given huge autonomy and I was promoted to programme director at the age of 27, something which, at the time, I didn’t know was highly unusual. It was an incredible time for all of us who worked there, to give a voice to Scotland’s design and architecture communities.

The founding director Stuart MacDonald really empowered us and he was definitely a feminist leader in that he supported so many young women. I had my first children when I was there, and I think it was the time when I realised that leadership wasn’t about keeping power, but it was all about empowering others and developing people and organisations. That was an absolute game changer for me to realise that leadership is about other people and not about your own self-interest. I can confidently say that ultimately his influence has led to where I am today, as Director of V&A Dundee.

4 Grief and growth

I LOST my younger sister very suddenly when I was 25. It was a terrible, awful loss that has shaped what I have become and how I see the world. Losing my sister has been like a dividing line in my life – I organise my memories between what happened before losing her and what happened after. I don’t know if the space it leaves it shrinks. It changes over time but the space is always there.

What struck me is that although my family and her friends have gone through the same experience, we all reacted very differently. We’ve all found our own way through it.

One of the things that we don’t often talk about when it comes to grief, is that in some ways it can be galvanising. In work, I found a sense of structure and meaning. That, and my family, helped me to make sense of the loss. I think that, after a year of this pandemic, we need to find a better way to talk about loss and the change that it brings.

I think it certainly gives me a heightened understanding of people who are going through loss, and also gives you a clear sight of what is most precious.

Coming back to where she was is not as difficult as I feared it would be. In fact it gives coming back here more meaning.

5 Flexible working

I HAD my first daughter when my partner was still an architecture student. We were relatively young, completely skint, and I was back at work before my daughter was six months. My partner was the main carer and since then we have done our best to commit to equal parenting and domestic labour, which sounds like a radical thing, even though it shouldn’t. We had two more daughters and we both have jobs that we really love.

When Tony Blair brought in flexible working as employment law in the early 2000s, we both started working that way and have done that ever since. We need to shape organisations that have a real humanity to them but it also has to be backed up in law.

6 Family

I MET Ewan my partner in 1999. I think he’s always been a feminist but in a family of four women and one man, there are a lot of conversations about it at home. I thought I knew what was feminism, but through the experiences of my two older daughters, who are 18 and 15, my idea of feminism has deepened and extended. It makes it a much more plural thing.

I’m in awe of young people today. I think this year has been horrendous for them in a way that we won’t understand for a very long time. They are also way more conscious of the world around them, and their responsibilities to it, than I ever was at their age.

7 Architecture and design

EVERY single person engages with architecture and design every single day. They’re the most accessible form of creativity in that regard.

We’re too often surrounded by careless design, whether that’s excess packaging or poor housing and my role at the V&A is around advocating that everyone deserves good design. Also showing that it’s something that Scotland is actually very good at.

I’ve been thinking about my love of architecture and design and where that journey begins. I do wonder if it starts with Newport Primary School. It was a brilliantly designed 1970s open-plan building. Also the old Olympia swimming pool that used to sit on the banks of the Tay. People sometimes laugh when I say that I love it, because it was hated so much around Dundee. I loved the high-level pedestrian walkways punched into it and the coloured plastic flumes that came out.

I’m so happy that V&A Dundee now stands on the site of the Olympia, and although it’s still quite a brutalist building, it’s in a much softer way. It’s a much gentler building.

And of course, Ewan’s an architect so that influences everything we do on holiday. We do normal things like lie on beaches and museums, we but also do things like visit Europe’s biggest 1960s housing estate.

Architecture and design is such a large part of both our lives – professionally and personally.

8 Female friendship

BEING locked down and in my 40s has made me realise just how fundamental my female friendships are to me. With the stream of Whatsapps, phone calls, Zooms, precious walks with friends, and meet-ups in the garden when it’s been allowed I’ve seen these female friendships as beacons of hope and support.

It’s been amazing to witness how they have dealt with the kind of complex challenges that the past year has thrown at them. My sister-in-law is an A&E consultant for example, and friends have been trying to manage businesses – with the added challenges of children and dealing with their needs at this difficult time.

I’ve obviously had to leave the friends I had in Glasgow, but having friends here that I’ve known since childhood is incredible – and there has also been the joy of making new friends.

9 Gardens

I’M from a family of amateur but talented women gardeners. My mum has a garden in Newport that’s she so creative in, I associate her strongly with it now. It’s the same with both my grandmas and my aunts – they’ve all gardened in their own particular way. Throughout their lives they’ve turned to their gardens for nourishment.

When I was younger I was absolutely aghast at my mum and my aunt sitting talking about gardening and then my mum watching Gardeners World on TV.

Now I do exactly the same thing. I love my garden and I love Monty Don. When we were in Glasgow we had an allotment in Riddrie. We learned a lot about gardening from real hardcore East End guys who had looked after their allotments for years. They taught us how to grow vegetables and plants.

I think we moved about 100 pots of plants from Glasgow to Dundee and we still have to plant some of them out. I have plants from cuttings from so many family members and friends and although it’s a real connection with the past and the people, it’s also about regeneration and growth.

10 V&A Dundee

The Christopher Kane installation at the V&A Dundee

THE job at the V&A is the pinnacle for me – my absolute dream. I really hope that I can bring the experience from all the different roles I’ve had, along with what I can offer personally to bear, for not only the good of the organisation but for the people of the city. Also taking that message nationally and internationally.

Even though at the moment I’m really only meeting people from the desk at home, I’m still feeling the energy that has been created around the V&A and the city. The sense of what the V&A can be, and the city of Dundee, is incredibly galvanising.

The ambition and the beauty of the building never fails to amaze me.

Night Fever: Designing Club Culture is the next exhibition at V&A Dundee opening on Saturday 1 May. More details from www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/nightfever