Skip to content

Mapping Museums Blog

The history and geography of the UK Museum Sector 1960-2022

  • About
  • Mapping Museums Database
  • Museums in the Pandemic
  • Mapping Museums
    • Mapping Museums is Dead. Long Live Mapping Museums
    • Opening a Museum
    • A week in the life
    • Being there
    • The Mapping Museums Campervan tour: a catalogue of mechanical collapse
    • Visiting micromuseums in a pandemic
    • Why did so many ordinary people set up their own museums?
    • Types of museum closure
    • Coronavirus and Museum Resilience: Some preliminary observations
    • The Mapping Museums Website and Database is Now Live
    • New publications
    • Finding museum founders
    • Subjects that Matter
    • On the road with the Mapping Museums Project
    • An Arts Scholar Learns about Administrative Geography and Datasets
    • Mapping Museums Database: New Developments
    • How big is that museum?
    • Missing, massaged, and just wrong: Problems with visitor numbers
    • Two Years On: An Update
    • Modelling Patchy Data
    • Historic Buildings: In or Out of the Surveys?
    • Unknown Opening Dates – Museums
    • Unknown Opening Dates – Historic Houses
    • Mapping Museums: Preliminary results on UK museum closure, 1960-2017
    • The Bakelite Museum on film
    • Football Museums
    • Upload!
    • Galleries without collection: in or out of the surveys?
    • Surveying museums: What’s in and what’s out?
    • Defining Museums
    • Picking the Brains of the Museum Development Network
    • One Year On: The Principal Investigator’s View
    • Mapping Museums: Why bother?
    • Building the Database
    • The Smallest Museum in the UK?
    • Interdisciplinarity
    • Getting Started: Compiling the Data
    • Problems with the Data
    • Not Knowing About Museums
  • Museum Snapshots
    • The Museum of Rail Travel, Keighley
    • King Edward Mine, Cornwall
    • On the road with the Mapping Museums Project
    • Nidderdale Museum, Yorkshire
    • Horwich Heritage Centre, Lancashire
    • Aldbourne Heritage Centre
    • Blue Town Heritage Centre, Sheerness
    • The Rifles Museum, Winchester
    • Kent and Sharpshooters Yeomanry Museum, Hever
    • The Micro Museum, Ramsgate
    • The Flower Makers Museum, Hastings
    • The Camera Museum
    • Bournemouth Transport Museum
    • Gloucester Folk Museum
    • Big Four Railway Museum
    • Datchworth Museum
    • Basket Museum
    • David Mellor Design Museum
    • Freddie Fox Museum
    • National Fencing Museum
    • Hopewell Colliery
    • Buxton Transport Museum
    • The Douglas Museum
    • Edinburgh Wax Museum
    • The Spalding Bird Museum
    • Grange Cavern Military Museum
    • Haxted Water Mill Museum
    • Guernsey Tomato Museum
    • Dinting Railway Centre
    • The Teddy Bear Museum
    • The Micro Museum
    • Framework Knitters Museum
    • Cheltenham College Museum
    • Armstrong’s Household and Farming Museum
    • National Butterfly Museum
    • Torbay Aircraft Museum
    • Bear Gardens Museum
    • Sandwich Doll Museum
    • Send and Ripley Museum
    • Telecom Technology Showcase
    • Dufftown Whisky Museum
    • The Ark Museum
    • Museum of British Transport
    • House of Wax
    • Adamston Agricultural Museum
    • Birmingham Nature Centre
    • Plummer Tower Museum
    • Fraserburgh Heritage Centre
  • Events
    • AIM! I’m going to map forever…
    • Workshop: Museums Futures in a Time of Austerity
    • Participate in our web application evaluation sessions!
    • Mapping Museums Website Evaluation 2019
    • Small museums in a global context
    • Going Public
    • Meet the founders and archive launch
    • New Activist Museums

Tag: pandemic

Museum reopening after lockdown in the UK nations

21st June 202214th June 2022 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic

Accreditation, size, and museum reopening after lockdown

14th June 2022 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic

Museum governance and reopening after lockdown

19th May 202219th May 2022 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic
A rusted padlock hangs from a hasp that secures a wooden door. Cracking and dirt in the woodgrain are clearly visible.

Long closures after lockdown

5th May 20225th May 2022 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic

Museum websites: What can they tell us?

4th January 202212th January 2022 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic
The words Museum Open formed from letterpress type

New museums opening during the pandemic

14th October 202114th October 2021 ubmlie001

When we began the Museums in the Pandemic project, we anticipated that some museums might be forced to close permanently as a result of pandemic restrictions. What we didn’t anticipate is that so many new museums would open during this period. As far as we know, fourteen museums have opened between March 2020 and September […]

 Museums in the Pandemic
A large building covered in scaffolding, the uuper part of which is wrapped in plastic sheeting that reflects the sunlight. A sign for the Heritage Lottery Fund is affixed to the bottom left of the scaffold. A road runs past, leading off to the right.

Micromuseums in the pandemic

15th September 202120th September 2021 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic
black and white photo of a metal gate. A chain is wrapped several times around the bars and locked with a padlock.

Museum closure during the pandemic

25th May 202125th May 2021 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Museums in the Pandemic
A colourful fabric facemask and a leaflet for Nidderdale Museum

Visiting micromuseums in a pandemic

16th September 202016th September 2020 ubmlie001

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 […]

 Research

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 221 other subscribers.

Recent posts

  • Museum reopening after lockdown in the UK nations 21st June 2022
  • Accreditation, size, and museum reopening after lockdown 14th June 2022
  • Museum governance and reopening after lockdown 19th May 2022
  • Long closures after lockdown 5th May 2022
  • Museum websites: What can they tell us? 4th January 2022
  • New museums opening during the pandemic 14th October 2021
  • Mapping Museums is Dead. Long Live Mapping Museums 30th September 2021
  • Micromuseums in the pandemic 15th September 2021
  • Funding for UK museums during the pandemic 1st July 2021
  • Museum closure during the pandemic 25th May 2021

Categories

Tags

1970s 1980s accreditation ACE AIM archives campervan classification COVID-19 data database data collection domus governance history independent museums industrial heritage interdisciplinary interview-based research local authority museums local history lockdown lost museums MALD mapping museums methodology MGS micromuseums military museum closure museum definitions museum founders museum history museums association museum signs museum snapshots natural history pandemic publicity railways research size small museums surveys transport
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: FlyMag by Themeisle.
Bitnami