Author: Mark Liebenrood

Postdoctoral Researcher

Categories
Lab News

Ten years of Mapping Museums

A birthday cake against a dark background with individual lit candles spelling out 'happy birthday'

It is ten years ago this month that the first Mapping Museums project started. In September 2016, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Jamie Larkin, and I began the process of collecting, modelling, and analysing data on the UK museums sector since 1960. Andrea Ballatore soon joined, bringing expertise in geography and data analysis. Since then, the team has grown, and we’ve completed three major projects. I want to take a moment to think about what we’ve achieved and what is left to do.

The Mapping Museums database showed that the UK museum sector was bigger and more varied than assumed, and it made non-national museums, and especially local authority and independent museums more visible within the sector than had previously been the case. It was also the first time that non-accredited museums had been documented. When the database first launched in 2020, Lisa Ollerhead (Senior policy advisor for museums at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and now director of the Association of Independent Museums) called it ‘a game changer’, because it provided reliable data on the size and composition of the UK museum sector. That information has since been used by numerous governmental and non-governmental agencies in their research for policy and funding bids.

The launch of the database exactly coincided with the start of the Covid pandemic and, concerned that the numbers of museum closures might escalate, we started work on our second project ‘UK Museums in the Pandemic‘. Andrea and Jamie worked with Peter Wood, Valeri Katerinchuk, Ekaterina Mityurova, and Mark Liebenrood, to map patterns of temporary and permanent closures using web-scraping technologies. Perhaps counter-intuitively the number of closures was lower during the pandemic than in previous years.

Our most recent project also took closure as its subject. In ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-25’ we investigated why museums had closed and what happened to the collections. We collected data, George Wright built a software application to analyse and visualise that information, and streamlined the existing Mapping Museums database, and we released the new combined database with an accompanying report in December 2025. Like the first Mapping Museums project, ‘Museum Closure’ breaks new ground. It documents museum closure at a national scale for the first time, drawing attention to the churn (the degree of opening and closing) in the UK sector, the varied reasons for closure, and the subsequent flows of objects.

Throughout the three research projects we have published articles on methods: on devising workable definitions of museums, managing patchy data, developing agile technologies to map changing data, and using large language models to monitor change. We have also published findings with articles concentrating on the changing composition of the museum sector, the geography of the UK museum sector, the pivot to social media during the pandemic, and the movement of collections after museums close, among other subjects. Many of these topics were discussed in even greater detail in the dozens of blogs we published on our work in progress.

The projects have also generated two monographs. Stories From Small Museums, by Fiona Candlin, Toby Butler and Jake Watts, drew on interviews with museum founders to ask why individuals and groups were motivated to start their own museums, and was published to good reviews. Oliver Betts, curator at the National Transport Museum wrote that ‘I can scarcely remember a book that I discussed more frequently with colleagues in the museum, often a group who struggle to find time for reading museum studies. It is an important intervention in the field (and) a reminder for those of us already working in the sector of why we do what we do, and how special it can be for those who participate’. The second book Closed Museums is due out next year. And finally, the projects have resulted in two archival resources. Bishopsgate Institute Library and Archive has published our interviews with founders as the ‘Mapping Museums Oral Histories’ and Mark worked with the British Library to create the ‘Closed Museums’ web archive, which will be publicly available in the coming months.

The three projects completed, we are now looking at ways of securing the future of the database and to ensure that we can continue to provide up-to-date information on the changing shape of the UK museum sector. While we have benefitted from generous academic grants, this funding only covers the creation of the database and not its maintenance. I hope to keep you posted on future developments.

Fiona Candlin

September 2026

Photo by Annie Spratt

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK Research Process

Archiving websites about closed museums

wayback machine logo and search box as seen on the site circa 2001

When we launched our report on museum closure last December, the British Library approached us to ask if we would be interested in using our research as the basis for a website archive.

It seemed a very appropriate project to get involved in. Websites have often proved to be invaluable sources for information about museums – not only for those that are open, of course, but also for those that have closed. Online resources have provided data for all three projects that the Mapping Museums Lab has undertaken, but our most recent project on museum closure highlighted once again a problem that’s well known by those that undertake research online.

For our first project, Mapping Museums, we recorded the sources of information for each museum, which frequently included websites. When we checked some of those again for our latest project six years later, many of those sites had gone offline. This phenomenon, known as ‘link rot’, is all too common and services have been developed to deal with the issue by archiving as much of the internet as possible. Probably the best known of these is the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Wayback has proved invaluable for tracking down extinct websites, or single pages removed from a site that’s still online.

The UK Web Archive fulfils a similar purpose for UK websites. It’s a partnership of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries – including the British Library – and aims to collect as much as possible of the UK’s web space. The archive began on a selective basis in 2005 and scaled up from 2013 onwards. The collection contains millions of websites and new ones are being added all the time. Due to the cyber-attack in November 2023, the archive is currently unavailable but the work of collecting websites continues.

With so many websites in existence, how to choose what to archive? The British Library’s archivists rely partly on nominations from the public to make their choices and this is where Mapping Museums comes in. We are contributing a thematic collection of websites that have provided information about museum closure. Some of these belonged to the museums themselves, but more commonly the site fulfils a different purpose.

We’ve used a wide variety of sources. News websites are probably the most common, and those of museums and related bodies like the Museums Association, but we also consulted auction houses, estate agents, listed building records, review websites (e.g. Tripadvisor), Government and local authorities, local history groups and specialist societies, hospitals, universities, heritage organisations such as the National Trust, personal websites, discussion forums, the Historic Ships Register, heritage railways, and more besides.

Work is underway on nominating a long list of websites like these from our previous research. Revisiting them just a few years later, we’re already finding that some have gone offline entirely or individual pages have been removed. Fortunately some sites are already in the UK Web Archive, but this is not true for all of them. As link rot continues, that makes this mini archiving project all the more relevant. We’re very happy to be supporting the long-term preservation of online resources that we’ve often found invaluable when researching the histories of hundreds of museums in the UK.

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Events

Museums and the Promise of Permanence

A street scene with buildings and parked vehicles. In the foreground is a raised wooden planter with the words 'I am temporary' printed on it in large white letters.

Thursday 14th May 2026, 4pm, The Conservatory, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London

The International Council for Museums defines museums as ‘permanent institutions’, as does the UK Museums Association. This seminar critically addresses the aspiration to permanence, its value, and its limits. We ask what would museums be if not permanent?

Speakers:

Bruno Brulon Soares ‘Permanence and Precarity’

Fiona Candlin ‘At Stake in Permanence’

Chair: Bethany Rex

Tickets are free but please a book a place

Bethany Rex, Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural & Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick. Following doctoral work on local government and museum asset transfer, Bethany has researched museum closures, decision-making in local government and how the commercialisation of museums is being experienced by museum staff. She is currently working on a book about museum closures (MUP, 2028).

Bruno Brulon Soares, Reader in Museum and Heritage Studies in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. Between 2020 and 2022, Bruno was co-Chair of the Standing Committee for the Museum Definition (ICOM Define) and coordinated the global participatory project that led to the approval of a new museum definition adopted by the International Council of Museums in August 2022. He is the author of The Anticolonial Museum (Routledge 2024) and co-author of The Museum Definition Handbook (ICOM, 2025) with Lauran Bonilla-Merchav.

Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology. School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. Fiona is Director of the Mapping Museums Lab, a multi-disciplinary research group that has documented and analysed the history and development of the UK museum sector since 1960. Their most recent project addresses closure. She is author of Art, Museums and Touch (MUP 2009); Micromuseology (Bloomsbury 2015); Stories from Small Museums (MUP 2022) and many articles, chapters, and reports. She has almost finished a new book provisionally called Closed Museums and After.

Categories
Lab News

Major Changes to the Mapping Museums Lab Database

We’re delighted to announce that key functions from the original Mapping Museums Lab database have now been fully integrated into our new web application.

We are very grateful to Art Fund for helping fund additional development work, which has enabled us to extend and strengthen the Mapping Museums Lab resource for the benefit of the wider museums and heritage community.

This update brings together, in one place, the rich data from our first major project — a comprehensive database of all museums open in the UK from 1960 to the present — with our second major strand of research: detailed information on museums that have closed, including reasons for closure and the outcomes for their collections. For the first time, users can seamlessly explore all the Mapping Museums Lab data in one site.

Responding to input from our sector evaluation sessions, the addition to the web application offers a more flexible and intuitive user experience. You can now:

  • Search for individual museums using free text
  • View detailed information for each museum
  • Generate and search across lists of all museums in the database
  • We’ve also refreshed and expanded our accreditation data. Records have been updated and accreditation numbers added, making it easier to track institutional status and align our data with other resources and sector standards.

Whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, sector professional, or independent scholar, the new platform is designed to make the data more discoverable, usable, and interconnected than ever before. We look forward to seeing how you use it.

The original Mapping Museums database will no longer be updated.

Categories
Lab News Museum Closure in the UK Publications

New article on museum closure data

The Mapping Museums Lab has just published an article in the Journal of Open Humanities Data about our project on museum closure. If you are interested in finding out more about how we collected and managed the data, the article is open access and free for everyone to read: A Dataset of Collections Dispersal Following Museum Closures in the UK During 2000–2025.

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

Museum closures 2024–2025

The exterior of Moretonhampstead motor museum, in a converted art deco garage. A cream car is parked to the left on the forecourt and a blue Jaguar is visible just inside the building.

Sixteen museums have closed since January 2024. In this blog we report on those closures and look at why they have happened.

Some of the closures were due to local authority budget cuts. These affected Llancaiach Fawr Living History Museum in Treharris, as the council sought to save £45 million over the next two years. In Hampshire, Westbury Manor Museum was running at a deficit and seen as financially unviable by Hampshire Cultural Trust who were managing it. The Trust in turn had had its budget cut by £600,000, almost a quarter of the total, by Hampshire County Council.

Llaincaiach Fawr. Photo by Elliot Brown

A similar situation resulted in the closure of Bursledon Windmill, also run by Hampshire Cultural Trust. Eastleigh Borough Council had been contributing funding for the Windmill,  but they terminated the agreement with the Cultural Trust in February 2023.

In Scotland, Alyth Museum was closed after a package of cuts planned by its managing trust, Culture Perth & Kinross, as it reorganised its operations after a 12% cut in its council funding spread over three years.

Independent museums often receive external funding, and cuts resulted in the closure of the independent open-air museum at Auchindrain, the sole example of a Highland farm township. In this case, Historic Environment Scotland ended their funding after providing around 90% of the museum’s costs for three years. The trustees stated that the costs of running the venue, which had been offset by the HES funding, far outweighed the income that they were able to generate. Although the museum is now closed to visitors and, according to the trustees, ‘unlikely to reopen in its present form’, whether the museum will close permanently remains unclear.1

Other independent museums have faced difficulties with costs. Announcing the decision to close Wirksworth Heritage Centre in Derbyshire, its trustees cited ‘the current economic climate, increased running costs and poor trading conditions’. Meanwhile, for Durham Museum the condition of the building was the deciding factor. It needed expensive repairs, including a new roof. The prospect of these costs meant that the Bow Trust who ran the museum felt unable to continue. The Fairground Heritage Trust also found costs to be prohibitive and in late 2024 closed Dingles Fairground Museum in Devon.

Charlestown Shipwreck & Heritage Centre. Photo by Nilfanion

A few private museums, all in Cornwall, also closed for financial reasons. The Flambards attraction in Helston stated that rising costs and a steady decline in visitor numbers had made the park’s operation and further investment unsustainable. The Cornish Heritage Museum was housed at the theme park Dairyland in Newquay, which had been running a deficit since the pandemic and decided to call it a day in 2024. The Charlestown Shipwreck & Heritage Centre, based not far away in St Austell, was one of Tim Smit’s businesses and Smit, the founder of the Eden Project, stated that he had decided to close the museum as part of a process of ‘consolidation’, saying that it raised insufficient revenue.

Other museums closed for reasons related to their premises. The independent Welsh Museum of Fire were concerned that their current premises, an industrial unit, were likely to be unsuitable for younger visitors and they are looking for alternative accommodation. The RAF Signals Museum closed in 2024 as RAF Henlow, where the museum was based, was to be closed down. Redevelopments at University College London in preparation for its bicentenary have prompted the relocation of the university’s art museum this year to smaller premises on the site. Although the museum’s new location will include storage and a study space, it will have no exhibition space. As one of our project’s criteria for a museum is that it should have some of its collection on display, we now consider this museum closed too.

Moretonhampstead Motor Museum. Photo by Steve Knight

Lastly, we know from looking back at closures since 2000 that private museums commonly close because their owners wish to retire. This was the case at Marshland Maritime Museum near Kings Lynn, and the Moretonhampstead Motor Museum, both closed in 2024.

We’d like to thank staff at the various Museums Development Networks, Museums and Galleries Scotland, the Welsh Government, and the Northern Ireland Museums Council, all of whom have helped us to keep our data up to date.

We will continue to monitor closures for the remainder of 2025 so if you become aware of any museums closing, do let us know.

Mark Liebenrood

Images: Elliot Brown on Flickr; Nilfanion on Wikimedia; Steve Knight on Flickr; all Creative Commons.

  1. Since this blog was published, Auchindrain has announced that it will reopen on 20th July 2025 [updated 30 June 2025] ↩︎
Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

Picturing Museum Data

A dendrogram with a circle showing all museums at the centre and the types of institutions to which they disperse collections

We are currently developing visualisations of our data on the whereabouts of collections from closed museums. This is proving complex because graphs, figures, or flow diagrams are never just a simple representation of information. And that problem is compounded when the data itself is patchy and sometimes imprecise. In this post we want to discuss some of the choices we made about modelling that information.  

To recap, around 525 museums in the UK have closed since 2000 and we have been investigating what happened to their collections. That information has been entered onto a spreadsheet with almost two thousand lines of information. It is nearly impossible to get a grasp on the data by simply reading it through, so we create visualisations to capture and summarise different aspects of that information. We want to better understand where objects moved from and where they have gone; the issue was how best to visually represent that information.

A dendrogram with a circle showing all museums at the centre and the types of institutions to which they disperse collections
Figure 1. Dendrogram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: pathways starting from all closed museums.

The first figure we used is known as a dendrogram (dendron means ‘tree’). The circle in the middle stands for all closed museums and the others stand for the recipients. This gave us a quick and striking indication of the sheer variety of destinations – objects moved from museums to heritage organisations, railway preservation societies, schools, mining companies, private individuals, and even airports. It was colour coded to help us differentiate between different kinds of entities: those in the public or private spheres, the third sector, and universities (which are not a neat fit with the others). We also labelled the lines or ‘edges’ with the number of transactions made, so we can see that there were sixteen transactions from closed museums to dock management companies and twenty-seven to auction houses and the lines are thicker where there were more transactions. (Please note that the data collection is not yet finished so the numbers are not yet final. Our focus here is on modelling, not the data contained within the visualisations). 

This dendrogram was very general, so we filtered the data by museum characteristics, including governance, museum size, and subject matter. Figures 2 and 3 show the distribution of objects from closed local authority and independent museums, respectively. These figures also showed instances where objects had made more than one ‘jump’, for example moving from a closed museum a local authority and thence to a library or historic house.

A dendrogram showing local authority museums at the centre and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects around the edge
Figure 2. Dendrogram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: pathways starting from closed Local Authority museums
A dendrogram showing all independent museums at the centre and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects at the edges
Figure 3. Dendrogram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: pathways starting from closed independent museums

These figures were useful because they showed the differences in the patterns of closure according to governance. We could quickly see that objects from independent museums went to a much wider range of destinations than those from local authority museums. However, we wanted to be able to make more direct comparisons: to see the museums of different types and their destinations alongside each other.

Our next step was to create alluvial diagrams, which are used to show flow and change over time. In Figure 4 the bar on the left represents the different types of closed museums, the columns on the right represent recipients, and the ribbons between them indicate the flow of objects from one to the other. The lines are coloured by source, and the actors are grouped by governance and economic sector.

A flow diagram with types of museums in the left column, and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects in the centre and much smaller right hand columns
Figure 4. Alluvial diagram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: Size of block calculated by number of transactions

So far, so good. The problem now lay in how to better represent the quantities of objects flowing out of the closed museums, and that was a much more difficult issue because it concerned the precision and detail of the available data. In some cases, we knew that a museum’s entire collection was transferred to another institution. In the spreadsheet this is logged as a single transaction: when museum X closed, all the collection went to Y.  In other cases – often transport museums – we had extremely detailed information about the individual items in a collection and where they went. We wanted to capture all the information we possibly could, so each itemised transaction is included in the spreadsheet. For instance, Clarke Hall Educational Museum made transfers to sixteen recipient organisations whereas the collection from Manor House Museum was moved wholesale to the Moyse Hall Museum in Suffolk. In Figure 4 the size of the coloured blocks in the bars and the width of the ribbons relate to the number of transactions, so the sixteen transactions from Clarke Hall occupy more visual space than the single transfer from the Manor House Museum, irrespective of the size of the collections. This was an unsatisfactory solution.

To complicate matters further, some of the information we received was far less specific. It was common for stakeholders to say things like ‘some of’ the collection went to a local museum, ‘a few things’ to the town hall and ‘everything else’ went to the school. These are clearly relative measures and depend on how big the collection was in the first place. ‘Most of’ one collection may be roughly equivalent to ‘a bit’ of another. And it is rare to be able to establish the size of a collection, even when the museum is open. How then were we to model the data we had received?

The project team devised a work-around. We estimated the relative size of transactions using the formula: (museum size x collection size), with museum size being the midpoint of the categories used in the original Mapping Museums research (small = 5,000; medium = 30,000, and large = 500,000 visitors per year) and collection size being quantified as (few = 5%; some = 25%; half = 50%; most = 80%; all = 100%). National and local authority museums tend to be larger and as you can see in Figure 5, transactions of collections starting in national or local authority museums tend to have thicker ribbons than those starting in independent museums.

A flow diagram with types of museums in the left column, and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects in the centre and much smaller right hand columns
Figure 5. Alluvial diagram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: size of block determined by relative size of transaction

Figure 5 was an improvement, but there were still problems. Firstly, the figure gave no indication of how many museums were involved in these transactions and second, there was no way to visually convey the uncertainty of the data. Third, the alluvial diagram created visual continuity between very different entities: national museums, private museums, and airports all occupied the same neatly bounded space, implying connections or similarities which did not necessarily exist. 

A network diagram with types of museums in the left column, and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects in the centre and much smaller right hand columns
Figure 6. Network diagram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24 (pathways move from left to right)

It was time to try a different tack, so we started experimenting with network diagrams. The lines represent flows of objects between actors and move from left to right. Closed museums are represented by circles on the left, recipient organisations in the middle, and any further destinations on the right. Using a network diagram helped solve the problem of visual continuity. It also enabled us to plot the number of museums involved and the size of the transactions and to register a degree of uncertainty: the size of the circles indicates the number of museums or recipients, while the line between is both labelled with actual numbers and uses an additional band to show the estimated sizes of those transactions. Using the network diagram, it became possible to make statements such as:

‘We know of 55 local authority museums which closed during this time. We know that there were 45 transfers of ownership from closed local authority museums to other local authority museums. We think that these transfers involved a relatively large quantity of objects’.

So far this seems to provide the best solution to modelling our data, but it is still work in progress and we welcome any comments.

Fiona Candlin and George Wright

November 2024

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK Research Process

Getting stuck with museum closure research

A brick wall
Photo by Joakim Honkasalo

We’ve been working on our project about museum closure for just over a year. We set out to collect information about the collections of around 500 closed museums, and our stated ambition was to cover at least 70% of them. Some of our team had prior experience of researching closed museums and knew that details were often hard to come by, so that target seemed realistic. A year on, we’ve done much better than expected. Of our initial list we have found information on over 90%.

What remains is a list of what we’re calling the stuck museums. In these cases we think we’ve exhausted our avenues of enquiry, and still don’t have information on what happened to the collections.

What have we tried? An incomplete list: Googling; meeting members of the Museums Development Network; contacting local history societies, who often had leads but sometimes knew no more than we did; asking nearby museums; consulting local authority planning documents that indicate the change of use of premises; examining auction catalogues; searching newspaper archives; for one case visiting the National Archives and for another two, the archives of British Telecom; searching social media; picking the brains of the Arts Council’s Accreditation team; using the Wayback Machine; when no contact details existed bar a postal address for directors of the small company that ran the museum, writing letters – an unusual activity in 2024; making Freedom of Information requests to local authorities when informal enquiries went unanswered; joining specialist groups on Facebook for collectors of paperweights, Matchbox cars, and antique dolls, to name just three.

That’s not all. We’ve also tried: asking members of the Subject Specialist networks; emailing the foremost writer in English on the work of a Japanese novelist; contacting organisations that used to run the museums or who now occupy the site; having obtained snippets of information, more precisely targeted Googling; interviewing specialists in regimental and transport museums; emailing local politicians, drinks manufacturers, race courses; attempting to contact a retired magician; using a website that lists the destinations of former military aircraft; seeking help from the unofficial historian of a major football club; interviewing the biographer of a man who ran two shipwreck museums; asking local libraries; reading council reports and collection development policies; asking the police (about police museums); meeting an expert on recent local authority museum closures; emailing hospitals; writing to the BBC; asking former curators, a local board of education, the National Trust, auction houses; interviewing outgoing curators.

This may sound exhaustive (and exhausting). We’ve been as thorough as we can, yet for some museums we remain stuck, with little or no information on what happened to the museums or their collections.

Can you help us with any of them? We’re looking for information on why the museums closed, what happened to their collections, and what their buildings are now used for, if they still exist.

View the list of stuck museums.

If you have any information, please contact Mark Liebenrood at m.liebenrood@bbk.ac.uk.

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

Museum Detectives

Looking across a large and mainly empty room. Empty display cabinets are on the left and right, one covered in a balnket, there is a stack of red plastic chairs on the right and empty cardboard boxes and other items are on the floor.
The former Museum of Leathercraft, 2024. Photograph by Fiona Candlin.

Collecting information on closed museums is a challenge. Museums usually open with a degree of fanfare but often close quietly – and their catalogues, visitor books, and other documentation are not always retained. (Although cowhide hats off to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery for keeping the data from the now-closed Museum of Leathercraft). No-one is specifically charged with keeping records from closed museums and it is hard to find anyone connected to a closed museum, especially after twenty years or more. The staff have relocated, volunteers filter off to other organisations or spend their time in other ways, people die. In this blog I’m going to outline some of the ways that we were able to collect information.

We began by scouring the internet. In some cases, websites or social media accounts lived on after the museum had closed and occasionally the final post explained the circumstances of closure and what was happening to the collections. These pages also provided contact details. Most of the time our emails bounced, and the phone numbers we called were defunct or had been reallocated to someone new, who would be utterly bemused by our enquiries, but in some cases, especially at private museums, the museum owner still lived or worked on the premises. When I called the number for Red Carriage Working Museum in Matlock, Derbyshire, the proprietor told me a moving story about being forced to close when professional burglars stole their entire collection of antique and irreplaceable harnesses, thereby making it impossible for them to show the carriages in action. Although she and her husband sold the yard and the rest of their substantial collection, they had kept the house.

In other cases, online reviews, blogs, or chat forums gave us a lead. A TripAdvisor review for the Longstone café on the Isles of Scilly, noted that it had replaced the Longstone Heritage Centre. Amy Jenkins the proprietor told me that all kinds of things had been left at the site – including two cannonballs which she gave to her father – and gave me the name of the founder who I was then able to contact. Similarly, an online chat forum mentioned that the founders of Harmonium Museum in Shipley, Yorkshire, Phil and Pam Fluke, were continuing to repair instruments. A few clicks later, I found their website and was able to get in touch. Phil also gave me some leads for other closed museums. Alternatively, we called the business at the location where a museum used to be. Jacob Clark, owner of the Animal Avenue Pet Supplies shop at Ringwood, told me that the shop fronts from the Ringwood Town and Country Experience were still outside and a collection of objects in the attic.  And we put out calls for help on social media. Twitter users provided an obituary for Kathleen Mann who had run a Cat Museum at her antiques shop in Harrow-on-the-Hill in London, which enabled us to pinpoint the date of closure.

Phil and Pam Fluke stand in front of a wide range of harmoniums in their museum
Phil and Pam Fluke at the Harmonium Museum in Shipley, 2009. Photo by Mykhaylo Khramov, via Wikimedia.

Sometimes we spent a lot of time investigating one museum to no immediate avail. Finding pictures of the Museum of Cipher Equipment in Cupar on a cipher enthusiasts’ website, I contacted the webmaster in California who emailed a call for information to his network. We also contacted staff at Scotland’s Secret Nuclear Bunker, the Museum of Cupar, and the Museum of Communications, none of whom had heard of the museum but promised to investigate further. I posted on Twitter and word spread. A historian raised it at a museums meeting in nearby Dundee and a member of Museum Association staff persuaded their in-laws who lived in the area to make enquiries on our behalf. Some months later I got an email from the owner. He had visited the Secret Nuclear Bunker and they had passed my email on to him. It turned out that the collection had been destroyed in a fire and that he had moved to Orkney.

Looking through a doorway into a cramped room with metal benches, on top of which sit cipher equipment resembling a large typewriter and assorted other items.
The Museum of Cipher Equipment. Photograph by Ken Earle Mitchell.

Another alternative, especially when we were investigating Local Authority museums, was to contact a neighbouring institution. The staff were often only too aware of closures in the area and in many cases had either inherited the collection or been personally involved in its relocation. Out-of-the-blue telephone calls or emails regularly elicited extremely helpful responses along the lines of ‘The objects all came back into the service. It was before my time, but I can put you in touch with my predecessor if you want more detail. I have his email’ (Wirral Museums Service) or ‘The Lace Museum was never part of the Nottingham Service, although a lot of people thought it was. Some of the collection did come to us. I can send you the relevant section of the catalogue if that’s of interest to you’ (Andrew King, Registrar). Needless to say, it was.

Alongside our internet searches we contacted area museum services or the members of staff with responsibility for heritage in local councils. They were often extremely helpful, giving detailed information about why a museum had closed and where the collections had gone. We also met with the Museums Development Network who scanned through lists of closed museums in their regions, trying to dredge up memories of long-gone venues, as did subject specialists. Anthony Coulls, Senior Curator at the National Railway Museum in York, got in touch when he read about the research and checked our information on closed transport museums while Julian Farrance, Regimental Officer at the National Army Museum and Paul Evans, ex-Historical Projects Officer at the Army Museums Ogilby Trust, looked over our lists of closed military museums.

All of the input that we have received has been very useful: thank you to everyone who has given us information, leads, or advice. We really couldn’t do this without you. However, we’re still trying down missing information on some museums so do keep watch on this space for updates and, no doubt, calls for help.

Fiona Candlin

September 2024

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK Events

Afterlives of Objects

The interior of the abandoned Ringwood Town and Country Experience. Artificial shopfronts with assorted detritus are on either side, and an armchair with a missing foot sits in the distance.
Ringwood Town And Country Experience. Photograph by Fiona Candlin, 2024

Thursday 24th October, 6.00 – 8.00pm

Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London, 25-27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

Places are free but limited and must be booked in advance

Book here

In 2009 Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins collaborated on The Object Reader (Routledge). Since then, they have individually pursued diverse research on the histories of objects, curation, design, and disposal.  This conversationbrings Fiona and Raiford together again with their longstanding collaborator, interlocutor, and friend Joanne Morra to discuss their current work in progress on the afterlife of objects: Fiona is currently driving around the UK visiting closed museums for her new book on the subject, while Raiford is on a world tour of video game museums researching his next book, Museum Games: Journeys in Search of Playable Media. Both are investigating the process of collecting, exhibiting, experiencing, caring for, and scrapping objects. They share a mutual fascination with where stuff goes. Jo and Ray were Founding Principal Editors of Journal of Visual Culture (2001-2019), and previously worked together on the journal Parallax. Fiona and Jo read each other’s material.

Joanne Morra is Professor of Art and Culture and Programmes Research Director at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She writes on contemporary art and psychoanalysis. Her publications include Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art (IB Tauris 2018), Intimacy Unguarded (JVAP, co-edited with Emma Talbot, 2017). She is now working on a book provisionally titled Holding Art: Women and Radical Care. 

Raiford Guins is Professor & Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School and Adjunct Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Feeling Leeds: Notes on Loving a Football Club from Afar (Pitch Publications, 2022), Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020), Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT 2014), and Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Minnesota, 2009). Guins also co-edits MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood. His newest book, Changing the Game: How Atari’s Pong Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, is forthcoming with MIT Press in 2026.

Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology and Director of the Mapping Museum Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester University Press 2010), Micromuseology (Bloomsbury 2016), and Stories from Small Museums (Manchester University Press 2022). Her new book is provisionally titled Stories of Closed Museums. 

For more information about this event contact Katy at mappingmuseums@bbk.ac.uk