How have small, independent museums coped during the pandemic? To find out more I talked to the staff at five museums, all of which are led by volunteers. Their experiences were very varied but it was striking that none of them had struggled financially, indeed one had flourished beyond all expectation, and that the main […]
When the pandemic first broke, commentators forecasted large-scale closures in the UK museum sector. In fact, as we discussed in our previous blog, there have been very few permanent closures. Emergency funding has had a direct bearing on how museums have weathered the past year. Given that our project ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ examines risk, […]
When museums first closed to visitors in March 2020 as a result of the national lockdown, their prospects seemed poor. Andrew Lovett, Chair of the Association of Independent Museums thought that the impact of the pandemic made it inevitable some museums would ‘just run out of cash and go to the wall’, with collections potentially […]
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 […]
