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 […]
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 museum founders that we tracked down and interviewed covered a huge range people from all walks of life. They included a miner (Blaenavon Community Museum), teachers (Nidderdale Museum, Little Chester Heritage Centre), managing directors (British Commercial Vehicle Museum), artists (National Waterways Museum), a Colonel (Adjutant General Corps Museum), a security guard (Micro Museum), a […]
Devising a new subject classification system One of the aims of the Mapping Museums research is to examine trends in subject matter. We wanted to know if the rates of opening and closure varied according the subject of the museum, whether each country or region favoured museums devoted to different subjects, and if there were […]
(Header photo: Toby’s car parked on the single track road on the way to Gairloch) I have driven the length and breadth of Britain for Mapping Museums to complete one of the most rewarding tasks on the project – interviewing people who have set up independent museums. I have now recorded more than 60 museum […]
