Trustees & Staff

Chair

Sarah Flannigan

Sarah Flannigan is an accomplished Chair, non-executive director, and board adviser with a diverse portfolio of expertise in the heritage sector and non-executive roles, including as Chair of Yeo Valley, Riverford Organic, Bionic, and Sawday’s. Whilst Chief Information Officer for the National Trust, she led a significant digital transformation programme. In 2017, she was awarded European CIO of the Year.  Sarah has held Trustee roles at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Holburne Museum, and National Lottery Heritage Fund.  Alongside her non-executive roles, Sarah is a Senior Advisor at OMERS Private Equity and a Board advisor on strategy, leadership, and digital transformation.  

Trustee

Dr Helen Charman FRSA

Dr Helen Charman FRSA, MA, Dip is Director of Learning, National Programmes and Young V&A at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London where she has worked since 2018. A creative and cultural learning professional for 30 years, her specialist field is design-led museum education.  Helen’s professional portfolio encompasses schools, universities, galleries, museums, festival organizations, local authorities and charities. She was a founder member of the education team at Tate Modern in 1999 and on the directorate that mobilized the new Design Museum, London where she worked from 2007 – 2018.  She gained her Doctorate in Education and MA History of Art from the University College London: the Institute of Education and Birkbeck College.  Alongside roles in the cultural sector in the UK, US and Australia, she has a keen interest in Development Education and has volunteered overseas in this capacity.  She is a parent-governor of Forest Hill Community School in south-east London, on the Advisory Education Board for the Arts Council of England’s Durham Commission on Creativity in Education and a Trustee of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Her remit at the V&A Museum includes leadership of the £13.5 M transformation of the former V&A Museum of Childhood into Young V&A in London’s Bethnal Green, which will be the nation’s premier national museum and creative powerhouse designed with and for the young, due to re-open in 2023.  The broader scope of her role includes overall responsibility for Learning, Interpretation, V&A Academy and National Programmes.

Trustee

Will Kenney

Will Kenney is a global equities fund manager and founder at Life Cycle Investment Partners. He started his career at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and continued working with team members from that entity at Spencer House Capital Management, Waverton Investment Management, Royal London Asset Management and now Life Cycle Investment Partners. Will is a Chartered Financial Analyst. He was previously Co-Chair of governors at Westminster Cathedral Catholic Primary School and is a member of the Investment Committee at the University of Bath.

Trustee

Tony Kirkham MBE, VMH, FArbA, FICFor (Hon)

Following an apprenticeship in the forestry industry and 2 years as an arborist, in 1978 Tony started at The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew on the 3-year Diploma course, graduating in 1981 with honours.

He was the Head of the Arboretum, Gardens and Horticultural Services, responsible for the management and curation of over 14,000 trees in the collections and curated and managed the hardy shrub collections as well until July 2021 when he retired after 43 years’ service.

Since the great storm that depleted the tree collections in 1987, he has participated and led several plant collecting expeditions to Chile and the Far East of Asia, including China, Taiwan, Japan, S. Korea and the Russia Far East. he has co-authored several books on his travels including: “Plants From the Edge of the World” for Timber Press and “Wilson’s China: A Century On”, which follows the travels of Ernest Wilson in Western China.

In 2004 he completed the revision of the “Pruning of Trees Shrubs and Conifers” with Timber Press and more recently has written “Essential Pruning Techniques” and in 2019 the Haynes Workshop Manual of Trees and “Remarkable Trees” for Thames Hudson. His latest book is called “Growing Trees” and is a general guide to growing trees in the garden. Tony has also worked with Francis Lincoln on a series of games featuring trees, Match a Leaf, Tree Vision and Tree families.

He has featured on several tree related TV programmes, including “A Year at Kew”, “Kew in Bloom” and presented two series of “The Trees That made Britain” for the BBC. More recently he featured with Dame Judi Dench in “My Passion for Trees”. He represents Kew as chairman of the RHS woody plant committee and sits on the RHS awards committee, the scientific and education committee of the International Dendrology Society, Action Oak, the Queen’s Green Canopy” and is a trustee and chairman of the advisory board at the Chelsea Physic Garden and TROBI, (Tree Register of the British Isles) He was made the Vice President of the Arboricultural Society and awarded the AA Lifetime achievement award in 2019. He lectures internationally and regularly writes many popular articles and papers.

In 2009 he was awarded the Associate of Honour by the RHS for distinguished service to horticulture, the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour in 2019 and an MBE in 2019 for services to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Arboriculture and made an Honorary Lifetime fellow of the Arboricultural Association in 2015.

Trustee

Simon Major

Simon is Chair of the Nominations Committee and sits of the Finance & Operations Committee. He serves on the Executive Leadership Team at The King’s Trust as the General Counsel and Director of the Safeguarding, Legal and Assurance Functions. Previously Simon held senior roles at WWF and Save the Children and served six years as Deputy Chair of YoungMinds, the UK’s leading charity championing the wellbeing and mental health of young people. Simon started his legal career specialising in international finance law with a particular focus on infrastructure projects in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. He has a MA in International Peace and Security and the role of the UN Security Council.

Trustee

Dr Phillipa Simpson

Trustee

Anna Valle

Anna Valle is a global business leader who has lived in six countries working for FMCG and startups across emerging and developed markets, different sectors, and diverse cultures. After developing marketing strategies for iconic brands like Johnnie Walker, Durex and Liz Earle, Anna has recently co-founded Seeds of Colour, a green biotech beauty company that developed a cutting-edge extraction technology to recover colour pigment from fruits and vegetables to create 100% plant-based makeup. Anna completed an Executive Programme in Corporate Strategy from the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Leadership Programme at IMD and the Financial Times Non-Executive Director Programme. Channelling her passion for arts and the will to give back to society, Anna joined a trustee position at Visiting Arts, a London based arts organisation, and in 2017 she moved on to the Liverpool Biennial Board, where she currently is a member of the board of trustees.

Deputy Chair

Andrew Woodward

Andrew Woodward became a trustee of the Garden in July 2021, following a long career in marketing and commercial development roles across retail, financial services, ecommerce and digital businesses.   He was Marketing Director at Austin Reed Group, John Lewis and Selfridges, SVP at MasterCard and CMO at Hush.   A keen gardener, Andrew is also a trustee of the Fashion & Textile Children’s Trust, a non-executive director of Digital Boost and a Board Advisor to consumer-focused scale-ups.