We are pleased to announce that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1million to the Mapping Museums research team for their project ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025’. The new research will use trans-disciplinary methods to analyse closure and collections dispersal within the UK museums sector. Its aim is to examine the geographic […]
Our researcher Mark Liebenrood recently wrote a letter to The Guardian about museum closures. His letter is below, or you can read it on the Guardian’s site with other letters about the value and plight of museums in Ukraine and Sudan. Charlotte Higgins is right to highlight the straitened circumstances of the UK’s museums (War […]
In the course of the pandemic there were reports of museums boosting their online activity. ArtFund’s 2021 report (download) on the impact of COVID-19 noted most of the respondents felt they had ‘made a significant leap forward’ in relation to digital engagement, and anticipated further development in the future. The Network of Museum Organisations (download […]
The Mapping Museums project is coming to an end. Please join us for the closing lecture: ‘The UK Museums Boom (and what happened next)’ Thursday 17th November 6pm Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, 27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL (Map) Chair: Isabel Wilson, Arts Council England Speaker: Prof Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology, Birkbeck Respondent: Lisa […]
Throughout the pandemic we have been keeping track of museums opening and those closing permanently, or without clear plans for future reopening. We last reported on closures in May 2021, and openings in October 2021. This blog adds to those reports and includes closures and openings that took place between 2020–22. A further ten museums […]
When museums began to reopen after lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, were there any differences between the four nations of the UK? Our data gives slightly different pictures of the situation depending on how it is analysed. In one view, museums in England were more likely to reopen. In another, Scottish museums were […]
As lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, were there any variations in reopening between accredited and unaccredited museums, or between museums of different sizes? Briefly, accredited museums were more likely to reopen after lockdown than unaccredited museums, and larger museums were more likely to reopen than smaller museums. Read on to find out more […]
Which museums re-opened after lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, and did it vary by governance? In this blog we present our findings about the three largest groups of museums in our dataset: those run by local authorities, independents run on a not-for-profit basis, and private museums. As seen in the chart below, museum […]
When we set out to collect data on museums during the pandemic, we were eager to explore how long they remained closed and if they had reopened. The results were not what we expected and finding out why proved a more complicated process than we had anticipated. To recall, we have built a web-scraping tool […]
How have museums fared during the pandemic? What can we learn from their websites? And could we rapidly collect crucial information from museum websites to assess the state of the UK sector? These are the questions that have driven our research since the start of the project in January last year. We are delighted that […]
