Wooden packing cases of different sizes with stencilled text and labels stand in front of a blank wall

Funding success for the Mapping Museums team

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 […]

Letter on Museum Closure

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 […]

A display case of numerous old light bulbs with four circled and highlighted in red.

Opening a Museum

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 […]

Illustration of a man sitting in an attic room at a desk. The desk is piled high with books and he is reading one of them. A window is open behind him.

A week in the life

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 […]

Laidhay Croft Museum, a single storey white building with a thatched roof, seen through a light mist.

Being there

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 […]

Black glazed doors with a closed sign hanging from the wooden handle

Types of museum closure

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 […]