Guest post: Lottie Muir describes the Brunel Museum’s Midnight Apothecary pop-up cocktail bar

Our latest guest post comes from Lottie Muir, gardener and mixologist at London’s Brunel Museum, who shares how her team devised and promoted their Museums at Night event involving “the hottest pop up cocktail bar in London”.

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It is amazing to think that this time last year, the garden in which we hold our pop-up rooftop garden cocktail bar Midnight Apothecary had not even been built.  Twelve months on we are the proud hosts of “the hottest pop up cocktail bar in London” (Evening Standard, August 2012) with plans well under way for Midnight Apothecary events throughout the rest of 2013.

Deckchairs set up in preparation for a night-time event (c) Marianne Majerus

 Our enchanted secret rooftop garden sits above Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, part of the Brunel Museum, in Rotherhithe, south east London. 

It had previously been a rather neglected fifty foot diameter circular roof space planted with low maintenance “park plants”.  We transformed it last April with the help of local volunteers into a community potager teeming with vegetables, herbs and flowers.  While it was designed for the enjoyment of museum visitors and local volunteers, including school groups, who share the harvest, the concept of a cocktail bar had never entered our minds.

Last May, the museum director, Robert Hulse, asked me to come up with an activity to bring in a new audience on the Saturday evening of Museums at Night.  With less than a month to plan I thought, flowers and alcohol: you can’t go wrong!  Luckily the museum and gardens are licensed premises where we can serve alcohol.

Floral cocktails (c) Marianne Majerus

The Midnight Apothecary was born, initially as a one-off casual garden cocktail bar, using herbs and flowers to infuse and garnish the cocktails.  The name ‘Midnight Apothecary’ had a night time gardening feel to it which seemed appropriate for the occasion.  We tucked brightly coloured fake birds and flares in amongst the flowers, stoked up a firepit, put out some deckchairs on the “beach” and with less than 24 hours to go, built a cocktail bar that resembles a potting bench.  A couple of local musicians completed the picture.

Visitors enjoying drinks as night falls at the Midnight Apothecary event (c) Eleanor Salter Thorn

Initially we posted some information to Time Out, the Evening Standard and Metro.  Our Events Manager is a fantastic Twitter user and we also handed out fliers at the local tube stations and put posters up in local shops, pubs and libraries.

We knew we might be on to a winner when Time Out made it their “Pick of the Night”.   Over 120 people came to our first event and imbibed honey and basil dacquiris, whisky with chocolate mint and gin and lavender fizz.  These were washed down with soup, sausages, elderflower fritters and toasted marshmallows.

Midnight Apothecary has grown, as has the garden.  Following our hugely successful first night we decided to run it as a weekly event throughout the summer and autumn of last year. We have held monthly special events throughout the winter.  Our guests are mixed but predominantly young (21-45), style conscious lovers of pop-up events, cocktails and gardens.  This is a new audience for the museum and they are becoming repeat visitors – not just for Midnight Apothecary, but for our concerts and other events.  We regularly get 250 guests on a Saturday night and 400 guests at special events such as Bonfire Night or Halloween.

The Midnight Apothecary bar up and running (c) Eleanor Salter Thorn

A major factor in our success was a number of favourable online reviews at the start.  These soon seem to snowball once an event sounds ‘hot’.  It required concerted effort at first by approaching event reviewers with enticing copy and images.  But it paid off with great articles in the Evening Standard, the Independent on Sunday and The Telegraph.  A lot of our guests are avid users of social media and thereby do a lot of PR for us with their own reviews and photos from the night.

A happy group of visitors in the Brunel Museum garden at night (c) Eleanor Salter Thorn

We are hard at work preparing for our 2013 season which starts weekly on Saturdays from Easter.  And we’re going to be heavily involved in the Chelsea Fringe Show this year, designing the Chelsea Fringe Cocktail!

Our major lesson from last year is to ticket events – not only can you be sure that you know exactly how many guests are coming but you can maintain a relaxed and well managed operation as opposed to managing a scrum when it gets too popular.  Quite a nice problem to have!

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Lottie Muir is the gardener at the Brunel Museum and creator of Midnight Apothecary. Details of this project and other events can be found at her website www.thecocktailgardener.co.uk.  For details of other events at the Brunel Museum visit http://www.brunel-museum.org.uk

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Thanks Lottie!

If you’re reading this and you have an interesting story to tell or case study to share about planning or marketing after-hours events at your arts or heritage venue, I’d love to publish your guest posts as well. Please get in touch at rosie@culture24.org.uk.

Order your free BBC History Magazine Guides to Museums at Night by Wednesday 3rd April!

BBC History Magazine’s Guide to Museums at Night is nearly ready, and it’s going to be very special: this year’s cover design is by top artist Fred Deakin!

The Guide is an A5 glossy brochure with 16 pages of themed editorial roundups and photos celebrating and promoting the festival, giving a flavour of the diverse and exciting events taking place. It’s not a dry series of listings, but is designed to encourage people who pick it up to head to the Museums at Night website to find out more about festival events taking place near them.

Families looking for after-hours inspiration (c) John Rylands Library, Manchester

All the 70,000 readers of BBC History Magazine will receive the Guide, but we’re also having 75,000 extras printed to distribute through Tourist Information Centres and to send out to your venues. For the last couple of years, this has been a key part of the Museums at Night festival marketing at a local level.

Last year, the venues who requested brochures had great success in raising awareness about the festival placing them in foyers and cafes, local libraries, bookshops, theatres, cafes, bars, and supermarkets: you know better than we do the places that people are likely to pick up brochures in your town.

Order your free brochures here now!

If your venue is running a Museums at Night event and you don’t fill in the form, we’ll automatically send you a box of 100 brochures. However, if you can take more than this please use the form to let us know by Wednesday 3^rd April, as you won’t be able to ask for more later. You can request as many large boxes (500 brochures) or small boxes (100 brochures) as you want and we will send them to you completely free of charge.

Alternatively, if for some reason you can’t put any brochures out, please fill in the form to let us know so we don’t send you unnecessary copies.

Last year it was incredibly heartening to see many venues who weren’t able to run events supporting the Museums at Night festival, and other local venues by asking for brochures to put out. It would be wonderful to have your support during this campaign.

Could you do this? Please click here to request your Guides!