One object, one iPhone, one afternoon: How London Museum went viral

Helen Maher and Xuxa Kidd told the Museums & Social Media Summit how a muddy knitted cap pulled from the Thames became their most successful piece of social content.

There is a particular kind of dread that settles over a museum when a public claim turns out to be wrong. Something has been announced. Research moves on. The announcement no longer holds. The instinct, almost always, is to say nothing further and hope the record quietly corrects itself.

London Museum did the opposite, and got 1.1 million views for it.

The object at the centre of the story is a knitted cap, pulled from the Thames foreshore by a mudlark named Alessio and reported through the proper channels. Mudlarking, as Helen Maher, the museum’s social media community manager, explained to delegates, sits somewhere between archaeology, history and treasure hunting: when the tide goes out, the river gives up fragments of the city, and permit-holders go looking for them.

The cap arrived caked in mud, turned inside out, and mostly intact. The initial assessment was that it was Tudor — 16th or early 17th century. The evidence pointed that way. The close-fitting style matched Tudor fashion. The museum already holds a large group of comparable caps. Other finds from the same stretch of river suggested the same period. And knitting, crucially, is a technique that has barely changed in five hundred years.

That last point is what makes knitted objects so difficult, and what eventually unpicked the dating. A curator involved in the research described the moment things shifted: as the conservation team worked and the cap dried out, a second colour emerged in a chequered pattern around the brim. The museum has somewhere between 70 and 80 Tudor knitted caps, and as far as anyone can tell, every one of them is a single colour. The cap was not Tudor.

By that point, the museum had already said publicly that it was.

Making the case for honesty

Xuxa Kidd, London Museum’s social media producer, framed the choice bluntly for the audience: brush it under the carpet, pretend it never happened, or bring the audience along for the ride.

For her, there was only one real option, though she was candid that it took some convincing internally. Maher was one of the people who needed convincing, and her reservations were not about vanity. The social team’s working relationships with curatorial and conservation colleagues are, she said, the backbone of content like this. Publicly admitting a mistake risked those relationships as much as it risked public trust.

What settled it was reframing what the video would actually be about. It would be honest about the research process without undermining confidence in the museum’s expertise. It would present the change as a discovery rather than a failure. The argument that changing your mind in the face of evidence is a strength is not a defensive line — it is the actual claim museums make about how knowledge works, and here was a chance to demonstrate it.

That reframing also solved the creative problem. Kidd was clear-eyed that the cap has no visual appeal to speak of: it doesn’t move, it doesn’t sparkle, and for much of the footage you can’t tell it’s a hat at all. She compared it to something you’d find in a garden shed. What it had instead was narrative tension, and a structure that wrote itself: here’s what we thought, here’s what we found, here’s why we were wrong, here’s what it actually is.

One afternoon, one iPhone

The production values match the budget, which was essentially nil. Kidd’s equipment list was her iPhone. The whole thing was shot in a single afternoon, in the conservation lab where the work on the cap was actually happening — partly for authenticity, partly because there was no time for anything more elaborate, and partly because internal confidence in the project was still not total.

She filmed multiple angles across the full arc of the object’s journey: the foreshore discovery, the cleaning, the mounting of the treated cap for display. Seeing museum staff handling the object directly, she argued, is what creates the sense of being let in on something.

The craft decisions were deliberate and quickly listed:

• The first three seconds carry the video. It opens on the photograph of the cap as found on the foreshore, posing the question of what on earth you’re looking at.
• No clip runs longer than three seconds. This keeps the eye moving even though the subject never changes.
• A trending sound, chosen to give the video a better chance with the algorithm.
• Captions in small text at the bottom, because a large share of the audience scrolls with the sound off.
• The curator narrates. The team decided the research was too central to the story to hand to anyone else, and the curator’s enthusiasm for the object carries the piece.

Curatorial and conservation colleagues signed off on the video. The press team was warned. It went out.

What happened next

The first few hours were unremarkable — a couple of hundred views, roughly normal for the channel at the time. Then it spiked. By 9pm the same evening it had passed 60,000 views. Two weeks later it was around 200,000. At three and a half weeks it crossed a million.

Growth was not linear. Each wave of sharing and commenting pushed it back out again, and it escaped the platform entirely, resurfacing on Twitter and Reddit where conversations continued without the museum in the room. Final figures: 1.1 million views, more than 50,000 likes, over 200 comments, thousands of shares and saves.

Kidd’s point to the summit was that the numbers were the least interesting part. What struck her was the character of the engagement — people asking questions, volunteering their own experiences of research and revision, and, memorably, arguing about whether the cap looked more like a portobello mushroom or a squished cat. The video also lifted the museum’s back catalogue, pulling new viewers through older posts, and accelerated follower growth.

The deeper effect was on how the team works. They had been trying, Kidd said, to be too perfect and too polished. The cap video suggested that the imperfection was the thing doing the work.

Four lessons the team took away

1. Choose objects for story, not spectacle. Look for a clear human connection, a surprising backstory or a twist, emotional resonance, or visual intrigue. A plain object with an amazing story will beat a spectacular object with no narrative every time. Someone made this cap, someone wore it, it was lost, it was found — and then the twist.

2. Start with why anyone would care, then work out how to film it. Maher argued that constraints have made the team more creative, not less: with minimal equipment, you are forced back onto story, authenticity and connection. She also cautioned against treating platforms as interchangeable — what lands on TikTok, where the audience skews young, will not necessarily land on Facebook, where it skews older.

3. Judge success beyond vanity metrics. Views and likes are pleasant. The team also watches comment quality, saves and shares, cross-platform spread, and long-term channel growth. TikTok’s reputation as a home for quick, unserious content doesn’t preclude serious historical storytelling.

4. Get the governance right. The experience prompted clearer internal guidelines. Standard collections content sits with the social team. Anything involving research changes, institutional corrections or potentially controversial subjects goes through review with key stakeholders before posting. The team also adopted two editorial principles: be educational, not condescending; be accessible, not trivialising. Trust, Maher noted, is built by demonstrating results — each success makes the next approval easier.

Living with a viral hit

The hardest part of a million-view video, Kidd suggested, is what comes after: the temptation to chase it, and the burnout that follows. Virality can’t be manufactured and lightning won’t strike twice on demand, so the answer has to be a sustainable strategy rather than a repeat attempt.

For London Museum that means consistency over perfection — posting regularly but not daily, because daily isn’t sustainable for the team — and variety across content types, from object spotlights to behind-the-scenes footage, conservation work, trends and memes. It also means leaning into being a museum rather than trying to be something else.

Her advice for cultural organisations starting out was to begin small and authentic, post something real that shows what you actually do, and learn from the response. Pick one platform and do it properly rather than spreading thin. Give the team permission to experiment, accepting that some of it won’t work. And be patient, because audiences take time to build.

Maher closed on the familiar tension between entertainment and education, and rejected the premise: the best content, she argued, is both. The museum’s approach from here is unchanged in principle — be authentic, be honest, be human. Start with one object, tell its story honestly, and see what happens.

They started with one small knitted cap that turned out not to be what anyone thought. It changed everything.

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Helen Maher and Xuxa Kidd spoke at the Museums & Social Media Summit 2025.