The Mapping Museums research team has been awarded £190,000 to investigate and analyse risk, closure, and resilience in the UK museum sector during the pandemic. Our regular readers will know that we launched the Mapping Museums website and database on 17th March 2020, the first day that museums closed in the UK. We had inadvertently […]
How many people does it take to set up a museum? Conventional histories of museum founders usually concentrate on individuals – the collector whose artefacts provide the basis for a new institution, and heroic directors or curators who single-handedly drive forward their vision of a museum. In our experience, establishing a museum is a collaborative […]
Why would you open a museum? How would you do it? Enjoy an evening of interviews with the founders of small independent museums, hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute. Interviewees will include: Steve Allsop (Ingrow Loco Museum and Workshop), Geoff Burton (RAF Ingham Heritage Centre), and Anne Read (Museum of North Craven Life). This online event […]
What does the Mapping Museums research assistant do all day? I sometimes wonder where all the time goes. Although the vast majority of the four thousand-odd museums listed in the database were added before I really began work on the project, I’ve added well over a hundred new museums and made corrections to the entries […]
I admit it. I did think that it was a bit of a luxury to go and visit all the museums that are being featured in our Mapping Museums book. After all, Toby, one of the researchers on the project had already spent most of a year visiting, taking photographs of the exhibits and conducting […]
Having decided that I needed a campervan for my research trip around the UK’s micromuseums, I faced the problem of buying one. Along with dogs, campervans had become the most wanted purchase of the pandemic and they sold almost as quickly as they were listed. I spent several months watching eBay and prevaricating while the […]
Everyone’s plans have been disrupted by the pandemic and mine are no exception. I’d just started writing a book on why thousands of people set up their own museums and part of the research involved meeting the founders. I was going to visit around forty museums, the furthest north being the Laidhay Croft Museum in […]
Over the last few years the Mapping Museums team has collected information on all the UK museums that had been opened since 1960. You can read a detailed analysis of the data in the linked report or see the key findings on the website, but there are five points that we found particularly interesting. These […]
The rapid spread of coronavirus has forced museums in the UK to close. Although those closures are temporary, some museums face financial difficulties as a result, and have raised the prospect that they might close permanently. But not all museums close in the same way. My own research into museum closure in the UK over […]
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has led to virtually all UK museums being closed. The issue at hand is whether these temporary closures may become permanent, and which museums are likely to be the most resilient, both in the short and long term. Of all the museums that have existed since 1960 (when our […]
