Moira Gemmill

Designer who played a key role in the transformation of the V&A and was working on a new project at Buckingham Palace
Moira Gemmill, the design director who was hand-picked by the Queen to mastermind a transformation of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, has been killed in a road traffic accident. She was 55.

A visionary with a genius for bringing new life to old public buildings and a penchant for commissioning up-and-coming young architects and encouraging women in the world of design, she had only started her new role as director of programmes for the Royal Collection Trust in January. For 13 years before that she had guided the Victoria & Albert Museum through its £100m recasting as director of design. Sir Mark Jones, who as director of the V&A appointed Gemmill in 2002, described her death as a terrible loss. “She was one of the brightest and best people in the world of art and design, much liked and respected by all the many architects and designers she worked with and loved by her colleagues and friends in the V&A and elsewhere.”

Born in Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland, Moira Gemmill studied graphic design at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1981. She then went to Aberdeen to work as an illustrator on an oil industry magazine, but found the work unfulfilling and instead founded her own magazine aimed at working women. It was not a success, and in 1988 she switched careers to become, first, head of programme support and then head of exhibitions at Aberdeen Gallery and Museum.

Ten years later she moved south to the Museum of London as head of design and exhibitions at a time when the museum was expanding its exhibitions programme under the then director, Simon Thurley. His intention was to increase the public attraction by paring down to the essentials of what the visitors would be interested in and what the museum was able to provide, and together they worked on the 1998 exhibition London Bodies which used the museum’s all but forgotten large store of archaeologically retrieved skeletons to examine the changing appearance of Londoners. Together they also established the publicly accessible archaeological store at Eagle Wharf Road, Shoreditch, devised to not only care for the found objects but give pragmatic information for interested visitors.

Gemmill’s instinctive touch with public perceptions combined with a deep love of buildings caught the eye of the V&A’s director when he was looking for a leader for his £150m “FuturePlan” programme.

The scheme involved not only the compete rethinking of the Renaissance and Medieval displays in the V&A but the refurbishing of the unique Cast Courts, and the new displays that opened in 2009 are credited with bringing an increase in visitor numbers from 900,000 to almost three million. She also developed a new graphic style for the museum and created a new in-house design team. The major exhibitions she brought to fruition included Art Deco 2003 and Vivienne Westwood in 2004.

But the very thorny problem of what to do at the Exhibition Road entrance to the V&A where a previous plan included Daniel Libeskind’s highly controversial “Spiral” building (which led to the resignation of Jones’s predecessor, Alan Borg, as director) also fell to her to solve. She did it with the daring sunken hall scheme of the architect Amanda Levete whom Gemmill had commissioned. “Her commitment to architecture and design excellence, her knowledge, her empathy and ambition to push the boundaries was matched by her rightly tenacious hold over the public purse,” Levete said.

Gemmill was also responsible for plans to build the V&A’s £80m design museum in Dundee with a futuristic scheme by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and her remarks on that project (on which construction work began last month) are indicative of her entire approach. “It’s always our intention to engage with the widest possible audiences and to make sure our collections and our interpretation of those collections reaches the widest possible audience,” she said in 2012. “Another very important issue, I believe, is the power of design to change people’s lives and to change their perceptions of a place. Establishing this project in Dundee will be a focal point for the wider regeneration of Dundee’s waterfront, proving that design can make an enormous difference.”

Moira Gemmill was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She died when she was struck by a lorry on the north side of Lambeth Bridge as she was cycling to work at St James’s Palace from her home in Kennington, south London, where she lived alone. She was unmarried.

Moira Gemmill, design director, was born September 18, 1959. She died on April 9, 2015, aged 55.