'Roger Mann co-founded Casson Mann in 1984 with Dinah Casson, who retired in 2017.

From the V&A and the Science Museum to the Imperial War Museum, the London-based agency has consistently picked up some of the highest-profile exhibition design jobs over the last four decades.

Mann explains how the Heritage lottery funding and Brexit opened and closed doors.

Why did you and co-founder Dinah Casson start working together?

We met when I was studying interior design at Kingston University, and Dinah – who had a furniture design background and was 13 years my senior – was a part-time tutor. We got on and stayed in touch.

About a year-and-a-half after I graduated, I was freelancing, but nothing very much. She said, “I’ve got this client who wants to do an ice cream shop in Knightsbridge. Do you want to do it with me?”

That was the beginning – there was no real plan.

We went from project to project – commercial interiors, some domestic interiors, some tiny little temporary exhibitions.

The high point was the interiors of the Chartered Society of Designers offices in 1987.

Our first proper exhibition was in 1989: British Design, New Traditions at Rotterdam’s art museum Boijmans Depot. We did the graphics with Malcolm Garrett and it was a lot of fun.

From then on, we enjoyed doing interiors that had that storytelling dimension to them.

Was exhibition design as a discipline on your radar back then?

Not really, I didn’t know too much about it and we were enjoying doing a whole mix of interior design. I think Dinah was a bit more interested in it. It didn’t feel like a very exciting field to me – I was more interested in doing bars and clubs.

There were other exhibition design agencies, but I can’t say they were my heroes.

The big shift was 1993, when Tim Molloy became head of design at the Science Museum Group. He wanted to bring new people into the sector. He was redoing the whole basement, and got Ben Kelly in, who we bid against, and lost.

But then we won The Garden, the interactive play area for kids that was part of that basement redevelopment. That opened in 1995 and was our first ever permanent museum space – I wouldn’t call it a gallery, because there are no objects in showcases. But it’s still there, which is quite something. It was only intended to be there for seven or eight years.

It suddenly felt like exhibitions were something we could do in the way we wanted to do them, with a storytelling element.

What was happening in the museum sector at the time?

The sector hadn’t had a whole lot of financial support, but in the mid-1990s the National Heritage Lottery Fund got going, matching cultural institutions’ own funding efforts.

Up till then, we’d done this rag bag of things, mostly what knocked on the door.

Dinah and I talked about how much we’d enjoyed doing the Rotterdam project, and we really enjoyed doing the exhibition bids, and finally winning the Science Museum job.

It wasn’t a wholesale – we’re not going to do interiors anymore. We still occasionally do interiors, and I would like to do more.

It was just a gradual shift. And as we started to get a bit more of a name for that, more of those opportunities presented themselves.

(Since it was set up in 1994, the Heritage Fund has awarded £9.5billion of National Lottery and other funding to 53,000 projects across the UK.)

As exhibition work became the focus, how did the studio evolve?

In the mid-1990s we moved the studio from Dinah’s house into an office off Grays Inn Road, and we became a limited company.

The refurbishment of the V&A’s 15 British galleries opened in 2001, which we had won in 1996. That was our big move into the museum world, so we expanded and took on permanent staff. One or two of them are still with us.

We were also doing the bigger projects at the Science Museum’s Welcome Wing, which opened in 2000.

I was probably slightly better at technical drawing and model making, and Dinah was slightly better at visuals. But we both met the clients, and it was very much a partnership.

As the business took off, Dinah and I shifted into slightly more defined roles, as new business client person and creative director respectively.

At that time, we were about 10-strong, which was pretty standard for agencies in this sector.

Nowadays, Casson Mann is 27-strong. It’s quite a young team, and very international, which is great.

In the years preceding her retirement, four people who had been with us a long time had become associates: Kirsty Kelso, John Pickford, Gary Shelley and Jon Williams. When Dinah went, we reshaped it so that I would be the principal creative director at the top, and the associates became directors.

What’s changed in your sector?

The process of getting exhibition jobs is so different to other design sectors. It’s publicly funded, so it involves an expression of interest and tendering and so on. That dominates our lives.

We have to do a lot of free pitching because that’s just the way it is.

It’s also become much more professional, and we need to work a lot harder in a bid situation. For the V&A’s British Galleries in the mid-1990s, they asked us to write a 1000-word paper on what these new galleries could be. Our presentation was very loose and kind of inspirational, and it got us the job.

These days, you have to do a whole scheme, and have a whole team with you. You have to do a methodology statement, and explain what the whole structure of your team will be for the next five years, and you have to produce a 100-page document just to get in the running. It’s very, very onerous.

How has Casson Mann’s business developed?

We started working in France. The first win there was a wine centre, the La Cité du Vin in Bordeaux, which opened in 2016.

Within a few months, we won the visitor attraction at the World Heritage Site of Lascaux, which opened the same year.

It features a state-of-the-art facsimile of the famous Paleolithic painted cave in the Dordogne, which closed to the public in the 1960s.

For that job, we employed a project manager in France and now have four project managers there.

At the moment, the design happens in London, but we’re onto our eighth or ninth French project now, and we’re thinking about having designers based there.

Another big change is that in 2012 or 2013 we started doing content.

We’re going to be responsible for developing the content on the Lascaux project, as the client didn’t have in-house content capabilities.

So we employed a writer, and we now have a team of three people who do content development, strategy and research.

Why is so much of your work outside the UK these days?

Since Brexit, most of our work is outside the UK, that’s been a big shift. We’ve been actively pushing for overseas work.

On the back of those two projects in France, and with Lascaux winning lots of awards, we’ve been invited to enter lots of bids there, many of which we’ve won.

France has been the biggest market, but the US has also been a target and we’ve done quite a few projects there now, including Miami’s Museum of Science and the Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. We also work in Scandinavia, and Saudi Arabia when opportunities come along.

The lottery had kept the industry buoyant for years, matching the funding that museums raised for their projects.

But after Brexit, the pound crashed against the dollar and the euro, and I think the confidence went out of the arts sponsorship and match-funding.

Corporate donors and private individuals became much less keen to hand over their millions to do these projects.

I don’t know for sure if that’s the reason, but there was a very noticeable downturn.

But in recent months, we’ve noticed an upturn, and we really hope it signals a renewed confidence in the funding of UK cultural projects. We’d like to think it’s to do with better connections with Europe and a more optimistic national attitude or renewed interest in culture.

And where do you go from here?

I’m beginning to think about succession planning, but I don’t quite have the answer to that yet. I mean, at 65, obviously I’m not so young myself anymore.

We’re working on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, which has four years to go. It’s an enormously challenging but rewarding project.

Occasionally people want to buy us. But I value my independence.

And I’ve got some good people coming up through the ranks. I’d like it to carry on going, it would be a shame to hang up the name and stop. I’m still enjoying it.

How have you stayed in business so long?

We’ve managed to weather the ups and downs, including COVID and all those recessions. It’s been a bit hairy at times. We’ve got very close to running out of money once or twice, so luck has played a part.

It’s not a lucrative business, it’s hard to do quickly and cost effectively. But we’ve outlasted some of the opposition!

Also, I like to think that we don’t have a style, that with everything we do, we try to come up with something original.

I think the portfolio looks good and very varied. It’s a nice mix of intelligence and creativity and trying new things, but we’ve also become a safe pair of hands. We know what we’re doing.'

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