A museum shop worthy of the museum, at the National Museum, at Anuradhapura, at Galle

A first step

Walk round the shop at the museum nearest you and list what it sells, what it costs and what a visitor would have wanted to take home. Then have 10 sample products made by local makers, each tied to the collection, and ask the museum's director whether you may sell them from a table for one weekend. The weekend's takings are your case for a shop.

Who pays first

A visitor leaving a museum who wanted something worth taking home and found only postcards, now able to buy a well-made object tied to what they saw.

What leaves today

Museum visitors spend their souvenir money on imported trinkets or nothing; a real shop keeps it with local makers and the museum.

The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.

The test

Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?

The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.

In the book

• Ch. FiveThe Most Photographed Rock in the World
  Galle Fort, Venice and what heritage funnels do
• Ch. ThreeWhat We Have Already Built
  Geoffrey Bawa's tropical modernism and the Aman resorts

More from cluster 19

• 381A film-location service: crews, permits, fixers and locations, sold to the studios of India and Europe
• 382Documentary production about the island's own stories, sold to the streaming platforms
• 384Digitisation of the palm-leaf manuscripts and colonial archives as a paid service to the libraries of the world
• 385Architecture tours of Bawa's buildings with the houses opened by their owners
• 386Heritage-building restoration firms with the skills to work on the forts and the villas
• 387Galle Fort as a managed heritage site, run with the residents

All 15 ideas in this cluster