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 Publications

Closed Museums and their Collections

The new Mapping Museums report is now out and available online.

After more than two years of concentrated work we have collected data on all the museums that closed in the UK after 2000, why they closed and what happens to their collections.

The headline findings are straightforward: the sector has expanded in size since 2000, and when museums did close, their collections were commonly transferred to other museums. That picture becomes rather more complex when we look at which museums closed and opened, and at all the other outcomes of collections disposal.

To find out more read the report (bit.ly/4iAnp7Z)

Or use our new web application: (mappingmuseums.shinyapps.io/mappingmuseums)

Categories
Lab News

The Mapping Museums Database: Bad and good news

Do you use the Mapping Museums database? If so, we need your input.

Bad News: The Mapping Museums Database is now almost six years old, which is elderly for prototype software. Redeveloping a database is expensive and our funding has come to an end. Thus, we have made the decision to archive the original Mapping Museums project website and database. It will still be available online, but the data will not be updated and the system will not be supported after December 2025.

Good News: We developed a new web application as part of our most recent research on museum closure and collections disposal. This application allows users to search and visualise the new data.

The new web application will also offer a slimmed down version of the Mapping Museums Database, and the information will continue to be updated.

We will not be able to transfer the complete the Mapping Museums Database to the new web app, so we need to know what functions are essential for you.

Please can you tell us how you use the Database?

For example:

Do you use Browse or Search to look for museums?

Do you use the quick search or the advanced search?

What information do you look for? museums’ postcodes? governance? size?

Do you use the information on social deprivation or the geo-demographic areas?

Do you ever look at notes?

Do you use the Visualise functions, if so, which ones?

What can you not easily do without?

Any information on how you use the Database and what you would like to retain will help us ensure continuity of service. We appreciate you taking the time to respond. Please send any feedback to mappingmuseums@bbk.ac.uk

Categories
Events

Museum Closure in the UK 2000–2025: an invitation

Monday 1 December, 6:00pm, Birkbeck, London WC1E

Chair: Isabel Wilson, Interim Director for Museums, Arts Council England
Speaker: Professor Fiona Candlin, Director of the Mapping Museums Lab, Birkbeck
Respondent: Lord Neil Mendoza, Chairman Historic England

Book your free place here (MuseumClosureUK.eventbrite.com)

Join the Mapping Museums Lab for the launch of new research exploring museum closure and collections disposal in the UK between 2000 and 2025. Professor Fiona Candlin will introduce a web application and the accompanying report, Collections from Closed Museums. There will be a response from Lord Mendoza, and discussion. The event will be followed by a drinks reception, and an opportunity for further discussion.

For information, contact mappingmuseums@bbk.ac.uk

Categories
Events

Museum Closure web application evaluation: an invitation

Can you help us to evaluate the new Mapping Museums Lab web application? Would you like a preview of the new Mapping Museums data on museums closure and collection disposal? Can you be in London on Monday 29th September 2025 from 2-4.30pm?

The Mapping Museums Lab is a multidisciplinary team based at Birkbeck, University of London and King’s College London. For our current project ‘Museum closure in the UK 2000-25’ we have collected data on which museums have closed, why, and what has happened to those collections. We’ve also developed software to help us analyse and visualise that information.

The evaluation session is an important means for us to gain feedback about the usefulness of the software. With your input we can further improve the system before it is made publicly available in November.

We’re particularly keen to have input from people working in museums, museum support organisations, and museum policy.

The trial session will be based on three activities:

A hands-on introduction to the web application.

Using the application to undertake a small number of information searches. This will allow us to gauge how easy the system is to use.

Group discussion about your experience of using the system and the ways that it could be improved and extended.

If you are able to join us for the afternoon or if you need any further information please contact Katy Pettit on k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk letting her know your job title / role and / or interest in the topic. We look forward to seeing you.

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] ↩︎