Category:Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums (RPM)

Brighton's Royal Pavilion & Museums (RPM) is/was the organisation in charge of running a suite of cultural assets owned by the Council, consisting of five main sites:

As of 2020, the council has floated off the running of the RPM "service" to a separate charitable organisation, the RPM Trust. This was expected to happen in April, but had to be delayed until later in the year due to the growth of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Features of the Trust

As a charitable trust, RPMT will be able to apply for a range of heritage grants that RPM would not have been eligible for as part of the Council.

The council still owns the buildings and collections, but RPMT has a 25-year contract to use the sites to provide a service to the public, with the sites being leased from the Council.

Employees' pensions have been transferred to an open local government pensions scheme. The Council board members on the RPMT to give it a continuing voice in how RPMT is run, with some veto powers, and local residents will still get similar concessionary rates on ticketed entry.

Alt.branding

Just to make things more confusing, RPMT's public-facing side seems to have a different name, "Brighton & Hove Museums", whose symbol is a multi-coloured ampersand. Their online shop sells souvenirs similar to those that used to be sold in the shop next to the now-defunct Brighton Visitor Information Centre.

The "Brighton Museums" branding is a little misleading, as it only seems to refer to the RPM/RPMT organisations. Brighton Toy and Model Museum, as an "independent", is a Brighton museum, but is not a "Brighton Museums" Brighton museum.

The rebranding of RPM as ... whatever the abbreviation of the new brand is supposed to be ... came in for a lot of criticism: Ampersands aren't internet-friendly, as the ampersand is not counted as a standard internet character, and is also not directly equivalent to an "and", as its shape is latin for "Et". The black font is suspiciously similar to Gill Sans, and doesn't immediately say "Brighton" either in shape or color, the Ampersand is divided into six differently-coloured sections, but there are only five sites, and while the multi-coloured Ampersand might be taken to represent inclusivity, it's not obvious that it represents a museum group, as opposed to, say, social support services.

Finally, the "fetishised Ampersand" is arguably already "taken", as it's a key part of the V&A branding for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

At this point, one realises just how good a piece of proper design work like the "D" symbol used for the Brighton Dome, really is.