The Mapping Museums Team in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore.
(Header image: The Mapping Museums team in an online meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore)
Today marks the official end of the Mapping Museums research project. There were certainly times when I thought that we’d never finish. The process of collecting information on museums open in the UK since 1960 sometimes felt interminable, and I began to regret museums opening almost as much as them closing because it means we had to enter them into the database. Writing the report on data, a statistical analysis of changes within the UK museum sector, seemed to take years, as did my attempts to work out local authority hierarchies across the UK. I could have happily skipped those learning curves. And I think my colleagues felt similarly as they collected and checked museum details, created visualisations of data, discovered and fixed bugs in the system, and coded hundreds of thousands of words of interview transcripts.
It has been a huge and at times trying enterprise. Yet the moments of complaint were utterly outweighed by the pleasures of the research. I’ve learned a lot and seen how quantitative and qualitative research can be mutually informative and how interdisciplinarity can push research in new directions. In developing data and data visualisations, I’ve been forced to think more precisely than before about how museums are defined and classified, and the ethics of doing so. My sense of the UK museum sector has changed. I stopped thinking of it as a relatively bounded and stable territory and started seeing it as a mass of overlapping entities that chopped and churned. I’d never really thought about museums closing before, whereas now they seem to be much more fragile entities. And the interview-based work made me rethink the whole notion of a museum founder: not only the notion of the individual founder beloved of conventional institutional narratives, but the DIY curator that features in popular journalism and grass roots histories.
I am also enormously proud of what we have collectively achieved. If you haven’t already, do please have a look at the website, which provides access to a searchable database of over 4000 museums, the project report, articles, and many other resources including transcripts of interviews at around fifty small museums. The final monograph, provisionally titled ‘The People’s Museums’ is finished pending peer reviews and, fingers crossed, will be published sometime next year.
That work has depended heavily on the interest, input, and forbearance of too many people to name, although I would like to thank three groups and one individual who have been particularly important: the Museum Development Officers who questioned, checked, and contributed to our data; the hundreds of museum volunteers and staff members who explained how and why they set up their own museums; the Advisory Board who helped us negotiate the museum sector; and Phil Gregg made sure the systems were maintained and that we didn’t lose our data. We are very grateful to all of them. And at the risk of lapsing into an Oscars-style speech, I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues in the research team: Andrea Ballatore, Toby Butler, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Nick Larsson, Mark Liebenrood, Jake Watts, and especially the Co-Investigator Alexandra Poulovassilis. It really has been a pleasure to work with such an expert and committed group of people. For me, the project has been more than the sum of its parts: something that only happens when there is genuine collaboration.
Mapping Museums is dead but Mapping Museums lives on. We are working to keep the database up to date for as long as possible. It has been widely used and we want to keep it operational. Doing so depends in part on the ongoing contribution of others, so please carry on sending us updates and edits (contact us here). Several of us are also continuing to work together on the new ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ research project. That will conclude in the summer of 2022 with a report that leads on from the Mapping Museums research. We hope to launch the publication with a seminar and party to make up for the one that we missed in March 2020. You are all invited.
The Museum of North Craven Life covered in scaffolding.
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 challenges concerned their
volunteers.
Brynmawr and District Museum in the South Wales Valleys is a local history museum with a strong focus on furniture made as part of the Brynmawr Experiment, a Quaker scheme aimed at providing employment in the area during the 1920s and 30s. They took the most lo-fi approach to the pandemic of the museums that we visited in that they simply shut the building and remained closed until June 2021. Like other museums in Wales they were automatically awarded a business rates grant and this covered their gas and electricity bills, which were lower than previous years. Volunteers checked the building on a twice-weekly basis and took advantage of closure to repair some faulty lighting, replace the blinds on the windows, and have the carpet deep cleaned. Otherwise they waited for when they could re-open. The museum has a core group of around ninety supporters who pay an annual subscription and meet for coffee every Thursday morning. Vivienne Williams, one of the original founders and the museum secretary said that everyone had missed the museum. ‘It’s a hub, a social hub’, she explained, ‘they just love the place’. Despite being in her eighties, Viv had no concerns about returning to the museum and said that her fellow volunteers felt likewise: when we spoke, Covid rates were low in the area and the group had all been double vaccinated.
Workers at the Brynmawr Factory 1939, People’s Collection Wales
When I asked Viv if they had developed the museums online activity during the pandemic, she replied ‘No, no, no, nothing like that, we’re all too old for that, Fiona’. Paul Cowan, one of the co-founders and chair of the Pewsey Heritage Centre in Wiltshire made exactly the same remark. Like Brynmawr Museum, they had more or less mothballed throughout the pandemic with two Local Restrictions Support grants from Wiltshire council enabling them to cover costs. These grants went to business-rate payers to help alleviate loss of income during the pandemic.
Pewsey Heritage Centre
When we spoke in May 2021, Paul was worried
about having enough volunteers to re-open on a regular basis. The museum, which
is housed in a Victorian foundry and concentrates on the local history of the
area, usually opens six days a week and they need between 35 and 40 people to
keep running. There are two stewards on duty at any time, while other
volunteers clean the building, or organise and run events that help generate an
income. Most of the volunteers are elderly. Four died during the pandemic
(although not from Covid) and many of the others were uneasy about coming back.
However, five new volunteers from a different demographic had joined the team. One
woman had commuted to London on a daily basis and during the pandemic had
started working from home. She suddenly had four extra hours a day at her
disposal. Another new volunteer worked at a nearby laboratory and had felt it
was time to put something back into the community. In Pewsey restrictions on
movement led to residents having greater available time and on focusing their
attention on their immediate area, and this resulted in younger volunteers
coming forwards. Even so, the museum group still needs more help.
Ingrow Loco
There were no such problems with volunteers returning to Ingrow Loco, a railway museum in Keighley, North Yorkshire. The rolling stock is regularly hired out for use by heritage railways or for special events and so it has to meet modern safety standards and is subject to ongoing testing and maintenance. The museum chairman, Keith Whitmore, explained that ‘a lot of our volunteers are of an age, but nevertheless the engineers were very keen to come back and do some workshop tasks’. The volunteers argued that maintaining the rolling stock was essential work and was therefore permitted under pandemic regulations. The trustees did a risk assessment, took advice from one of their trustees who was also a medic, and then agreed that volunteers could return to work if they socially distanced. Keith said ‘you’ve also got to take wellbeing into account: not just the Covid virus but mental health as well’. For the volunteers, working at the museum was sufficiently important that it overrode their other concerns.
Ingrow Loco
Unlike any of the other museums we visited, Ingrow
Loco re-opened in the summer and autumn of 2020. The museum is on the Keighley
and Worth Valley Heritage Railway and in normal circumstances the steam
locomotives stop outside, dropping off potential visitors. However, during the
pandemic, the railway decided to run a non-stopping service as having groups of
people getting on and off made it difficult to manage social distancing. As a
result, potential museum visitors just went steaming past. To make matters
worse, the railway normally subsidised a vintage bus tour that enabled visitors
to take the train one way and then return by road, stopping off at villages
along the way. This had benefits for Ingrow Loco in that it brought more
visitors to the door. Under financial pressure, the railway withdrew those
funds and the bus service ceased, further reducing the number of museum
visitors.
The furlough scheme and business grants helped Ingrow Loco manage its costs when closed. Once they opened they were eligible for a Local Restrictions Support Grant (open) that mitigated reduced income and they successfully applied for National Lottery Heritage Emergency Funds. These helped subsidise the vintage bus tour and thereby increase footfall to both the museum and the railway. It also enabled them to install contactless payment and to promote the 45596 Bahamas locomotive. Careful marketing generated interest in the south of England and for the first time since the 1960s the Bahamas ran on a number of rail tours that departed from London, generating income to help cover the costs of maintaining the engine. This year the museum re-opened in July and had a busy August, with visitors returning in greater numbers, although they are still below the numbers required to break even.
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre was unable to re-open, but used the period of closure to their advantage. Samantha Parker differs from the other volunteer staff we talked to by dint of her youth. Having been a trainee at Norfolk Museums Service, she became a volunteer collections manager and trustee at Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre, and was made vice-chair of trustees this summer. She is also looking for paid employment. She explained that when lockdown started their first concern was for their volunteers. As Sam said ‘we didn’t want them to think they’d been abandoned’ and they duly set up a WhatsApp group and arranged Saturday zoom lunchtimes for when volunteers would usually be on-site. As at Pewsey Heritage Centre, many of the volunteers were vulnerable and were shielding, and others were uneasy about returning. The ensuing lack of stewards meant that the visitor centre was unable to re-open during summer 2020. Others, particularly those involved in maintaining the exhibitions, were keen to come back and in spring 2021, they redecorated the building. The site was originally a World War 2 airbase and the buildings are badly insulated, cold, and expensive to heat, and so are usually kept closed over the winter and for the rest of the year they are open to the public, which makes the timing of any major maintenance work difficult. On this occasion, volunteers could repaint the walls in a socially distanced way and in relative warmth.
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre was
eligible for business grants that covered their basic outgoing, and they got a
North Kesteven District Council restart grant that allowed them to redevelop
the kitchen and run a café. With the centre’s costs in hand, the trustees started
to meet on a weekly basis to plan in the long term. They had been intending to
apply for Community Interest Status, and being closed to the public gave them
the time to do so. It also prompted them to look more closely at the
organisation and they considered each trustee role in detail, how to diversify
their trustees, volunteer recruitment, governance, and their other activities.
These meetings culminated in a ten-year strategic plan and in recruiting a new
trustee who promptly led on a successful bid for Cultural Recovery Funding.
This enabled them to purchase PPE, to employ a freelancer to improve their
digital presence, and to open an online shop. They re-opened over the summer of
2021. The café has been a hit and they are already planning for next year.
Museum of North Craven Life
Ingrow Loco and Metheringham Airfield Visitor centre both successfully fund raised during the pandemic. The Museum of North Craven Life in Settle, North Yorkshire took that to a different level. The museum occupies a seventeenth-century Grade 1 listed historic house that has variously been a farmhouse, a bakery, warehouse, furniture shop, fish and chip shop, bank, and salvage business. In 2019 Anne Read who had co-founded the museum in 1977 stepped down as its Honorary Curator. The new incumbent Heather Lane, who had previously managed the redevelopment of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, took up the post in autumn of that year, intending it to be a project for her semi-retirement. One of Heather’s first moves was to have the building surveyed by Historic England and unfortunately they found that the building was in worse condition than anyone had previously realised. The roof was leaking badly, some of the timbers were rotten, floors were sagging, there was no insulation, and the windows needed replacing. There were also other problems. The museum café was at the opposite end of the building to the kitchen and catering staff had to walk back and forth through the reception area, tea-trays in hand.
The Museum of North Craven Life covered in scaffolding.
They were also short of volunteers. There
were particular conditions at the Museum of North Craven Life that underpinned
this problem. In 2018 a new heritage development officer had introduced a more
professional approach to curating and while this raised standards it also
marginalised some of the volunteers. As Heather explained, the volunteers previously
had total responsibility for exhibitions. Now, feeling that someone else could
do the work they stepped back. The sense that they had to step up or no-one
else would had been a strong motivating force for the group, and that was now
lost. The change in process loosely coincided with Anne stepping down. Recognising
that it was the end of an era several other long-term volunteers decided to do
likewise. Heather wanted to go back to the original model and for the
volunteers to be ‘completely engaged in the research so they feel like there’s
something really worthwhile in coming in and working. There might need to be a
bit of steering, but we’re not there to say this is how you do an exhibition’.
And then the pandemic started. Heather
started applying for funding and was awarded substantial grants from the
National Lottery Heritage Emergency Fund and both rounds of Cultural Recovery
Funding, as well as smaller grants from the East Riding council and the
Victoria and Albert Museum. She also recruited a recently retired chartered
accountant, Richard Greenhalgh as trustee and treasurer. Like Heather he was slightly
taken aback by the magnitude of the task in hand, commenting that ‘I didn’t
expect to be running a small company with hundreds of thousands pounds worth of
grants going through it. I thought it was going to be a “on the back of an
envelope” type of post’.
The accrued funding covered the refurbishment
of the building in line with heritage standards. Window frames and timbers were
replaced, and the building was replastered using traditional techniques that
allow the structure to breathe. The wood ash and horse hair required for lime
mortar and plaster was supplied by local residents who left it in large bins
outside the museum. An old garage immediately next to the café was converted
into a convenient and good-sized kitchen, and the previous kitchen was
transformed into an archive, providing space for a recently acquired collection
of around one thousand glass negatives and numerous prints. The pictures were taken
by the Horners, a local photography firm run by three generations of the same
family between 1860 and 1960 and depict Settle and its residents, often showing
the same people over a number of decades.
The funding also paid for new IT systems and for two heritage development officers to be appointed. Kirsty Mitchell was hired for six months and she overhauled recruitment for the volunteers and trustees, surveyed the volunteers and worked on ways to keep them involved during the pandemic. She set up a Tuesday tea break with mini-lectures on what was happening behind the scenes at the museum. Caitlin Greenwood re-organised the museum shop and commissioned a new website, working closely with the designers to put existing exhibitions online. She also began planning and co-curating new exhibitions with volunteers and a group of local historians. A freelancer was hired to develop online resources for schoolchildren at Key Stages 2 and 3, and a new group of dedicated volunteers are digitising the Horner collection. As Heather said, ‘it’s been really extraordinary to have a pause and to put the museum back on its feet. The museum had to be made sound, we needed to have good infrastructure, to rebuild our relationship with volunteers, and do some business planning. Those were the essentials and with the grant funding we’ve been able to do pretty much all of that’.
The Folly, home to the Museum of North Craven Life, in June 2021
Then, in May 2021, just as the museum was
preparing to re-open to the public, a huge crack appeared in the tower housing
the central staircase. While it is free to go into the downstairs spaces, there
is an admissions charge for the main exhibitions, which are housed upstairs.
The crack meant that the upper floors could not be re-opened, which had serious
implications for their income, as Heather said, ‘We’re looking at a black hole
in our revenue’. Fortunately the café had did extremely well over the summer,
generating just enough income to tide the museum through a few more months, and
Heather is now in the process of applying for further grants, both to have
structural work done on the tower, and to cover the ongoing shortfall in
income.
Benefits and difficulties
During the pandemic, small independent
museums had the advantage of being able to easily close. Their running costs
are generally quite low and the Local Restrictions Support Grant was sufficient
to pay their immediate bills. Ingrow Loco and the Museum of North Craven Life furloughed
their paid cleaning, catering, front of house and project staff, but in both
cases the senior management roles are held by volunteers who were able to carry
on working during lockdown. Thus, the strategic work necessary for re-development
and re-opening could continue without incurring cost, as was also the case at
Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre.
Ingrow Loco struggled the most because they
re-opened and actively worked to attract an audience, which proved difficult
due to circumstances beyond their control. For both Metheringham Airfield
Visitor Centre and the Museum of North Craven Life, the pandemic gave the staff
time to recalibrate, to rethink their organisation, and to apply for grants.
Although it was personally demanding for many of those involved, on a whole
range of levels, the closure of the museums proved an opportunity rather than a
disaster.
Volunteers and trustees
For me, the most consistent theme to emerge across
the five conversations was that of the volunteers. It was clear that the
museums often played a central role in the lives of the volunteers,
particularly at Brynmawr Museum and Ingrow Loco, and that during lockdown they
had felt the loss of the social interaction and practical activity that it usually
offered. It was also noticeable that participation differed considerably
depending on the volunteers’ roles. At Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre,
the people who usually stewarded the exhibitions did not generally participate
in the zoom lunchtimes and were reluctant to return to the museum whereas those
who had a curatorial role were ‘champing at the bit’ to return to work. A
similar situation obtained at Pewsey Heritage Centre. They also struggled to
find enough people to supervise the museum during opening hours, but
simultaneously had new volunteers coming forwards to take on the more
complicated tasks of accessioning the collections. It may be that the more
committed and enthusiastic volunteers are those that have the more complex roles.
Alternatively, having a challenge and responsibility may create and reinforce
commitment. All the people we spoke to are themselves examples of highly
committed volunteers undertaking complex and responsible work, particularly Sam
and Heather.
Almost all the museums wanted or needed to
recruit new and younger volunteers. This was particularly urgent in Settle
where a core group of long-standing volunteers had all simultaneously retired. Again
one of the issues here was that they had less responsibility than previously
and were feeling a little disenfranchised. But it was also noticeable that a
combination of strategic recruiting and the effects of the pandemic meant that
museums were able to attract new people and a wider range of people than previously.
And finally, it was clear that the trustees, who are also volunteers, and
especially new trustees with particular specialisms were key to improving the
museums’ capacities and offer during the pandemic.
When the pandemic first broke, commentators forecasted large-scale
closures in the UK museum sector. In
fact, as we discussed in our previous blog, there have
been very few permanent closures.
Emergency funding has had a direct bearing on how museums have weathered the past year. Given that our project ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ examines risk, closure, and resilience in the UK museum sector during the COVID crisis, it is important for us to understand what emergency funding was on offer and to whom. In particular, we wanted to know whether there had been any gaps in the funding – if certain types of museums had been ineligible for funding – and so we duly embarked on compiling a list of the funding streams available to museums. We noted the source of funding, who administered it, the aims of each funding stream, total money allocated, the maximum and minimum amounts on offer to each institution, and the eligibility criteria. The list grew and grew.
In this blog we make our spreadsheet available for general use. Please let us know if you can fill in any of the blanks or if you can add to, clarify, or correct the information we present here.
Download the data (Excel file in xlsx format; last updated 16 July 2021)
Initial Observations
In order to help us make sense of our expanding list we spoke to
people who had been involved in organising or allocating the funding. Here we
make some brief, preliminary observations on funding during the pandemic. This
is work in progress so, again, we welcome any comments.
In total, over fifty new funding streams were open to museums.
Some organisations re-allocated existing funding, and new funds were made
available, principally through the Cultural Recovery Fund.
Large numbers of organisations were involved in allocating and administering funding to museums. These include: Arts Council England; Arts Council Northern Ireland; Art Fund; Business Wales; CADW; Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy; Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; Federation of Museums and Galleries in Wales; Garfield Weston Foundation; HM Revenue and Customs; Historic England; Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government; Museums Archives, Libraries Division Wales; Museums Development Network; Museums Galleries Scotland; National Lottery Heritage Fund; Northern Ireland Museums Council; HM Treasury; Visit Wales; and around 400 local authorities. Some of these organisations administered several funding streams and some organisations collaborated on providing grants. In some cases one organisation provided the funding and another oversaw its allocation, for example National Lottery Heritage Funds provided bulk of the funding for the Emergency Recovery Funds, but it was administered by Arts Council England.
Some funding was available to museums across the UK, other streams
were particular to England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or combinations
thereof. The grants had different criteria including governance, accreditation
status, and the museums’ financial position.
The Emergency and Cultural Recovery Funds were open to museums at
risk. In the first instance, this meant that they had less than three months
operating costs. However, there was a lack of clarity about the status
of financial reserves that had been earmarked for specific projects. Arts
Council England report that they were strict about insisting on the use of
reserves, apart from when they were legally restricted to a designated use, whereas
the National Lottery Heritage Fund took a more lenient view.
Museums were also been eligible for a number of grants and other
support schemes that were aimed at businesses more generally. These included
the job retention scheme, Statutory Sick Pay rebates, VAT deferral, various
government-backed loans, and rate relief. As was the case for the targeted
grants, this business support has been administered by a range of different
bodies.
The number of funding streams and the variety of their remits
makes it extremely difficult to establish whether particular types of museums
fell through the gaps. However, there do seem to have been some pinch points:
Small museums often only required small amounts of funding, for
instance for PPE or to help staff work from home. The first major grant, the Emergency
Response fund had a minimum of £35,000. Thus in the first instance, there was
no available funding for small museums.
England used the same £35,000 threshold for the Cultural Recovery
Fund funding stream. Other national bodies had a much lower threshold for
grants. In Wales there was no minimum. The Treasury discouraged Arts Council
England from offering lower grants because of the amount of administration involved,
and as things stood, they processed more than 6,000 applications in the first six
months of the pandemic.
Accredited museums were directed to apply for funding to ACE, MALD
and Museums Galleries Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Museums Council as
appropriate, with non-accredited museums being directed to the National Lottery
Heritage Fund. As the National Lottery Heritage Fund had a minimum threshold of
£3,000, non-accredited museums could usefully access smaller grants whereas accredited
museums could not. In practice, however, there was a degree of blur between the
two schemes with some accredited museums also gaining funding from the National
Lottery Heritage Fund. Small grants with no minimum threshold were later made
available across the UK by the Museums Development Network and Art Fund.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund specified that applicants had
to already be in receipt of public money. That is, they had already received
funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund or an arms-length body. Museums
that had never received funding were ineligible to apply.
Local Authority museums have to go through internal council
procedures in order to gain permission to apply for external funding. In these
cases, much depended on the responsiveness, capacity and flexibility of the
individual council. Similar conditions apply to many University museums.
Plotting the different funding streams and their remits is a
challenge and in a few cases it has not been clear to us whether museums were
eligible. We were unsurprised to hear that some museums also struggled to
negotiate this complex terrain and that staff from the Museums Development
Network had to act as translators and guides for some of the smaller museums.
Yet, despite the complexity of emergency funding, the lack of closures indicates
that the schemes were collectively successful in helping museums through this
difficult period.
Over the next few months, we will be reporting in more detail on
how the different types of museums have fared during the pandemic, and the
specific challenges they have managed and continue to face.
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 being lost. Likewise, the director of Arts Council England was concerned that major arts organisations would be put in real jeopardy by the crisis and that some might not survive, and other commentators similarly forecasted mass closures. In fact, only nine museums in the UK have permanently closed over the past year, significantly less than in previous years (there were 26 permanent closures in 2017 and 16 in 2018), and only one of those closures can be linked to the COVID crisis. In this blog we briefly review the reasons why they closed their doors.
Pembrokeshire Candle Centre
In two cases the museum closed when the owner retired. In September 2020, Inger John, who had run the Pembrokeshire Candle Makers Centre in Wales, announced that she had used up her remaining wax, was stopping production, and that she would be closing the associated museum. The museum exhibits were offered for sale. A military museum at Fort Paull, a Napoleonic fortress in Yorkshire, announced that it was closing in early 2020. At the age of eighty, the owner and director had decided to sell the site and retire. He was keen to find a buyer who would preserve the attraction, and a group of enthusiasts formed a company with a view to bidding for the property, but they were unable to raise sufficient funds. The contents of the museum were sold at auction in early 2021.
Fort Paull
Four museums closed due to the loss of their premises, although why this happened varies. The Commando Museum opened in 1993 at the Spean Bridge Hotel near Fort William. The property later changed hands and with redevelopment pending, the volunteers started looking for alternative accommodation. When that proved unsuccessful, they put the exhibits into storage until such time that a new venue could be found. Staff at the Maritime Museum in Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex found themselves in a similar situation. The museum was housed in a historic lifeboat house owned by Tendring council who in 2015 announced a rent hike, to be introduced in steps. The volunteers were keen to relocate since the building was cold, damp and situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, so footfall was low, but two attempts at relocation fell through, and the museum had to close. The collections are in storage.
The Commando Museum
Walton-on-the-Naze Maritime Museum
The Metropolitan Police Service Museum Heritage Centre also found itself out of a home, in this case, when the building changed use. Run by the police, and part of that service, the building was moved to secure level operational status, making it off limits to the general public, and the Heritage Centre was duly closed. It is being relocated to a new space in Woolwich, which will open later this year, but it does not have a dedicated exhibition area. Although the Heritage Centre will continue to function as an archive and repository, and although it has objects on loan to other museums, it is no longer a museum in its own right. And the Bruntingthorpe Aircraft Museum in Leicestershire closed in the summer of 2020 when the site was sold. According to an enthusiasts’ forum the land was owned by the Walton family and while David Walton had supported the museum over many years, other family members had opted to sell the land for redevelopment as a massive carpark. The owners of the aircraft were given until the October of that year to vacate the site.
Bruntinghthorpe Aircraft Museum
Ashworth Barracks
Elsewhere,
finances were an issue. The Victoria Cross Trust opened the Ashworth Barracks
Museum in Doncaster in 2014 to house their collection of military artefacts. In
2020 they announced its closure, commenting that running a museum had never
been among its core objectives, rather they had been established to maintain
war graves. No reasons for the closure were given but the lease on the premises
was due to expire in June 2020 and the trust had been struggling to generate
enough income to cover the museum’s overheads. Parts of their collection were
loaned to Sheffield with other exhibits going into storage.
All the museums we have mentioned
so far were small, unaccredited, and with the exception of the Metropolitan
Police Heritage Centre, run by private owners or voluntary groups. The Falconer
Museum in Forres on the North East coast of Scotland was an accredited local
authority museum, and indeed the only museum in the Moray area that was funded
by the local council, two others having been closed in the previous six years.
Faced with budget cuts of around £10m, in 2019, the council decided to close
the museum service with estimated savings of around £87,000 per year. The
museum was established in 1871 and exhibited artefacts belonging to the
Victorian geologist and botanist Hugh Falconer and his brother Alexander, as
well as social history, archaeology and world heritage collections of national
and international significance. Attempts to find a third party to run the
museum were unsuccessful, not least because the building is in need of repair,
and the museum remains mothballed.
The Falconer Museum
The closure of these museums was a subject of regret for the volunteers who had run them, and the groups and local residents who campaigned for their survival. The exception is the Jack the Ripper Museum in London, where news of its imminent closure was met with some delight. The museum was controversial because its founder originally applied for and was granted planning permission for a Museum that focused on women’s history, whereas it actually concentrated on the murder of five East End women. In September the feminist historian Dr Louse Raw discovered that the company had declared insolvency. In their blog ‘F Yeah History’, Natasha Tidd and Helen Antrobus pointed out that the museum suffered from a lack of local trust, that it had responded to controversy by closing down communication, which would have an impact on its public profile, and that with poorly executed exhibits there was little enticement for visitors to return, factors that may have had an impact on its closure. Given that it was a commercial venue reliant on ticket sales, and (so far as we know) did not receive any emergency funding, it is also likely that its insolvency was linked to the pandemic and the consequent lack of income. The building failed to sell at auction in May 2021.
It is likely
that the impact of COVID may have been the final nail in the coffin of the Jack
the Ripper Museum. Otherwise, what is striking about these closures is that
they have little relation to the pandemic and instead are due to other more
usual factors such as retirement, the loss of a site, the difficulty of finding
new accommodation or changed accommodation, lack of income, and government cuts
to local authority budgets, often in combination. As we will discuss in our
next blog the availability of emergency funding has made it possible for most
museums to survive the past year, although often with considerable human cost
since there have been significant cuts to the workforce. The question is
whether and how the situation will change over the next year or more. The
research team will be monitoring the UK museum sector until 2022 and so do subscribe
to our blogs if you would like to receive regular updates.
We would like to thank the Museums Development Network; Museums Galleries Scotland; and Museums and Archives Division, Wales for their help in compiling this information. All our data can be consulted on the Mapping Museums website. Please get in touch if you know of any other museums in the UK that have permanently closed over the past year.
Clockwise from top left: Museum of Transology Object Number: MOT/122. Photo by Katy Davies, courtesy of Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion; Museum of Homelessness street museum installation, London 2020, photograph by Daniela Sbrisny; Matt and Jess Turtle; E-J Scott, photograph courtesy of Sharon Kilgannon @Alonglines Photography.
Please join us for an online event featuring the founders of two new activist museums.
How do museums respond to the changing world around them? Featuring the founders of two of these new museums, the Museum of Transology and the Museum of Homelessness, this panel explores the current flowering of museums which focus on social issues. New museums do not always follow established forms and may instead stage temporary exhibitions or pop-up street displays. Listen to a discussion of these new museums and tell us more about your thoughts and ideas on these innovative practices.
Museum of Homelessness is a social justice museum. They carry out events, exhibitions and research that tackle homelessness and housing inequality. They also campaign and carry out direct practical actions. Jess and Matt Turtle founded Museum of Homelessness in 2015.
The Museum of Transology is the UK’s most significant collection of material culture surrounding trans, non-binary and intersex lives. It aims to halt the erasure of trans lives from history by enabling trans people to curate their own stories. The MoT was awarded an Activist Museum Award for 2020–21.
Image: (clockwise from top left) Museum of Transology Object Number: MOT/122. Photo by Katy Davies, courtesy of Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion; Museum of Homelessness street museum installation, London 2020, photograph by Daniela Sbrisny; Matt and Jess Turtle; E-J Scott, photograph courtesy of Sharon Kilgannon @Alonglines Photography.
The Mapping Museums research team has
been awarded £190,000 to investigate and analyse risk, closure, and resilience
in the UK museum sector during the pandemic.
Our regular readers will know that we launched the Mapping Museums website and database on 17th March 2020, the first day that museums closed in the UK. We had inadvertently produced a database and a report that could easily have been titled ‘Museums Before the Pandemic’. This new project can be thought of as ‘UK Museums During the Pandemic’ and, we hope, ‘After the Pandemic’.
Over the next eighteen months we will be
keeping track of museum closures and entering that information into the
database so that we can see how the shape of the sector changes. Documenting
closure can present a challenge. None of the organisations with responsibility
for museums have kept records of closure and museums often fade away without
fanfare. This means that identifying closure can be slow, partial, and reliant
on local knowledge. Likewise, it can be hard to establish which museums may be
at risk during the pandemic since that relies on museums reporting on their
situation to Arts Council England or the Association of Independent Museums, or
other bodies.
In this project we will try to digitally
capture change within the sector. Political and market research regularly uses
software that scrapes and analyses large swaths of information from websites
and social media, and we are adopting this approach to studying the museum
sector, developing new text analytics and web mining capabilities. This will
enable us to see if museums have recently updated or changed their websites and
Facebook pages or if they remain in hibernation. We will also analyse the
content of that material – whether they are organising outdoor events, digital
exhibitions, or planning for re-opening – and we will be able to slice and analyse
digital traffic according to the information on governance, size, subject
matter and location that we gathered in the Mapping Museums database. For
example, we will be able to assess patterns of response in university museums versus
those among independent museums, or analyse how medium-sized local authority
museums in Scotland differ from those in the South East.
Data always requires interpretation, and
the significance of a response or lack of response may vary depending on the
type of museum in question. Thus, we need to understand how museums are
behaving and what constitutes risk or resilience across the sector. Are risks
of closure different depending on the museums’ location, governance, size or
subject matter? Are risk and resilience
always dictated by financial circumstances or do other factors come into play,
and if so what? Can we identify museums that are resilient to the pandemic and
learn from them? We will attempt to
answer these questions through interview-based research with museum staff, and
other museum professionals, and read the data accordingly.
We will be posting monthly updates on research and findings on our blog. Please subscribe if you would like to have those reports delivered automatically by email. The research is funded by the UKRI AHRC rapid response scheme: Grant Ref: AH/V015028/1.
(Subscribe to email updates using the box at top right on desktop browsers, or below this post on mobile)
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 process.
Eileen Burgess listed the people she worked with in setting up Nidderdale Museum in 1976. There was Jack, her husband, and their son Mark, then a teenager; Muriel Swires, who taught at the same junior school as Eileen; Geoffrey Townley who was headmaster and who brought his sixteen year old son Richard; Richard Jackson, also sixteen, and Richard Townley’s friend; Joan Knightson, a geography teacher; and Joyce Swires a cousin of Muriel’s. She worked as a cashier in a Harrogate department store and negotiated with the managers for the purchase of secondhand display cases and mannequins that were used in the museum; Heather Swires was distantly related to Muriel. She came from a farming family and they gave the museum a collection of redundant agricultural machinery and tools. Eileen said ‘Heather spent most of her time with her sleeves rolled up, very old clothes … rubbing down rusty old equipment and black leading it. Whenever I think of black leading, I think of Heather, who went home with her hands and arms absolutely black’. Heather came with her husband Dayne and they brought their two daughters, Deborah and Helen, who were fourteen and twelve. Like the teenagers they were also given jobs to do. Elsy Moss kept the Shaw Mills post office & shop with her husband and was the museums’ costume expert. She was also knowledgeable about the lower dale. Mary Barley was a housewife with a small part-time job in a local firm distributing books to libraries, and complemented Elsy’s knowledge by specialising in the mid-dale & its industries. Tommy Garth was a labourer who had worked on the construction of Scar Reservoir. He had amassed a huge collection of photographs of the waterworks and the dale in general. Joanna Dawson ‘was a pedigree cattle farmer, at a time when being a woman pedigree farmer was quite rare’ and a Methodist preacher. She gave a collection of Methodist ceramics to the museum and curated its exhibition. I asked Eileen if they all had distinct roles. Not really, she said, everyone just turned their hand to whatever was needed, although we were the only people with an estate car so we did a lot of fetching and carrying.
Founders of Nidderdale Museum in 1999, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the museums’ opening. Geoffrey Townley, Muriel Swires, Eileen Burgess, Elsy Moss, Mary Barley.Guide and Brownie costumes on display at Nidderdale Museum
The idea of establishing a new museum, especially local history museums, often arises within an existing group. The possibility of opening a museum in Nidderdale was first mentioned in the tea break at a meeting of the Nidderdale Local History Society. In other cases, the idea of opening a museum was sparked by an event and in Aldbourne, the catalyst was an archaeological dig at the village football field. The ground was about to be refurbished and so local metal detectorists took the opportunity to explore the area. They found all manner of things including a medieval brooch, a small bell, and objects from the American military base that had been in Aldbourne during the Second World War. Terry Gilligan, Alan Heasman, and John Dymond explained that there had been talk in the village of starting a museum for a number of years but finding the objects prompted them to form a heritage group. Over one hundred and twenty people joined. The local council allowed them to use a stone building that had once been a stable, had been converted into public toilets, converted again for use as a youth club, and had since been left empty. Aldbourne Heritage Centre opened in 2016 and they now welcome fans of Dr Who keen to see where the series ‘The Daemons’ was filmed, Americans interested in finding where the Band of Brothers were stationed, and parties of schoolchildren who come to find out about the Great Fire of Aldbourne.
The Cloven Hoof pub sign, Aldbourne
Dr Who display at Aldbourne Heritage Centre
Private museums may involve fewer people and are often the work of a couple. The Micromuseum in Ramsgate that exhibits small computing equipment, the Internal Fire: Museum of Power in West Wales, which is a collection of generators, and Cobbaton Combat Museum in Devon were all set up by husband and wife teams, and in the latter case the couple’s siblings, parents, and later children were also co-opted to help. And even those museums that are ostensibly the work of one or two people usually rely on input from others. Partners, neighbours, friends, and family members may variously help build the museum, make financial loans, pay the mortgage while their spouse devotes their time to the museum, donate objects, hold fund-raising events, take tickets at the door, museum-sit, give guided tours, make cakes for a café and so on.
Setting up a museum almost always depends on the
contributions of many people. The work of inspiring founders is inevitably
underpinned by the labour of others. Their lower key but essential work is
occluded if we concentrate on that of individuals. More significantly, the
model of the brilliant leader is not always appropriate. In our experience many
micromuseums come out of conversations and of other projects; they are the
product of shared ideas and collective effort
This online event also marks the launch of the Micromuseums Archive. The Mapping Museums project has conducted extensive interview-based research to find out how and why people set up their own museums. The recordings, transcripts, and other materials are all available from the Archives at the Bishopsgate Institute, and the evening will include a glimpse into this archive.
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 for hundreds more. But how do we find out about
museums that were not already in the database, and where do all the amendments
come from? Here I offer a peek into a ‘typical’ week.
Monday
A friend of the project reports on Twitter a possible new
museum she’s spotted while on a bike ride. It turns out that it is not new, but
the small private museum has slipped under the Mapping Museums radar, so I add
it to the database. Another contact has suggested we check a directory of
railway preservation sites to make sure we haven’t missed any railway museums
during our searches. I order it from the British Library for my next visit.
Tuesday
I have Google news alerts set up in the hope of spotting
museums closing and opening, and I open my email this morning to find an alert
for a new museum. All too often these alerts don’t produce anything useful, but
on this occasion they have. A new private museum dedicated to the footballer Duncan
Edwards has opened above a shop in Dudley, in the West Midlands, so I make
a note to add it to the database.
The Mapping Museums database is constantly being updated.
When we receive new information for museums currently open, we update our
records accordingly. Today I find that a curator has supplied updated details
for their museum using the form for editing data, and
process the update so that the details are added to the database.
Wednesday
At the British Library for my own PhD research, I also look
at the railway preservation directory. At first sight it looks somewhat
daunting, as it lists hundreds of railway preservation sites in Britain opened
from the 1950s onwards, classified into thirteen types. Each one of these will
potentially need to be checked against the database to see whether museums need
to be added. I copy the pages I need for processing later.
Looking through copies of Museums Journal I see
mention of another museum that I’m not familiar with. It’s in the database, but
the news item gives extra information about the museum’s governance that we
didn’t have, so I make a note for later.
Sometimes we need to contact museums directly to confirm
information, and recently I have been trying to get hold of the administrator of
a small military museum in Scotland (the museum came to our attention as part
of a list supplied by a liaison officer for regimental museums). The
administrator is only on site occasionally, and so far I have missed him each
time I’ve called. I miss a call while sitting in the library’s reading room,
and when I return it later I have just missed him, but his colleague supplies
his email address. By email he confirms the nature of the collection, but does
not know when the museum was first opened – he has been in the post for less
than two years. One thing I’ve discovered doing this research is that it is
quite common for the opening date of museum not to be known by those who run
it. A museum’s foundation date is often tacit knowledge, which can easily be
lost as staff change. The database currently contains almost five hundred
museums for which we do not have a certain opening date, and we record them as
date ranges instead based on the best information available.
Thursday
I resume work on a list of museums that another contact has
provided us with. They are all in North East England. Not all of them qualify
as museums in the way that the project defines them but many do, and for
whatever reason some have been overlooked. Small private museums are easily
missed, and it would not be possible for the project to have compiled as
comprehensive a list as it has without the benefit of local knowledge. One
example is the Ferryman’s
Hut Museum in Alnmouth, which I add to the database.
Friday
The opening date of a museum is proving elusive. My enquiry
to the owners remains unanswered, so I resume searching online. Eventually I
track it down in the Gloucestershire volumes of the Victoria
County History, an incredibly valuable local history resource.
It’s fortunate that that museum was recorded, but what do
you do when a museum has long closed and there are no references to be found
online, no matter how hard you search? Well, you might descend the archive.org rabbit hole. As anyone who has
followed references in Wikipedia may have noticed, website links stop working all
the time – a phenomenon colloquially known as ‘link rot’. The Wayback Machine preserves websites for
posterity, keeping copies of those still online as well as many that have long
since vanished. In this case we knew that the museum had closed thanks to an
estate agent’s website, but when did it open? The website for the tower in the
Scottish Borders had fortunately been captured by the wayback machine, and
while there was no definitive information about the museum, there was enough to
allow a range of dates for the museum’s opening to be recorded.
It’s the end of another week of data collection and checking. That list of hundreds of railway preservation sites will have to wait until another time …
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 detailed interviews with the
founders, and I’d read or looked at all the material he’d gathered. In principle,
I rely on his research as the basis for the book and in doing so save myself
time and the project money. I’m now very glad I made the effort. Not just
because it was fun, interesting and a bit of an adventure, but because it
changed the way that I understood the museums, and the founders, and what they
were doing. I had temporarily forgotten that it matters if a museum is on the
side of a hill or the valley floor, is in a pretty village or an empty high
street.
In his interviews Toby asked people why they had wanted to open and run museums. Elizabeth Cameron, who was one of the founders of the Laidhay Croft Museum (above) had answered that she liked meeting people. Taken in abstract this comment seemed quite bland (Surely most of us like meeting new people?) and it was certainly repeated elsewhere. For me, her reply only took on weight and meaning when I went to the area, visited the croft, and met her.
Elizabeth Cameron
Laidhay is a
mile or so north of the village of Dunbeath, which has a population of 129, and
is about thirty miles south of Thurso, the most northerly town on mainland
Britain. It is remote by any standards. Before setting off I had attempted to
book a place in the local campsite. When it turned out to be full, I had asked
the owner if there was anywhere else close by. ‘This is Caithness’ she
responded, ‘there is nothing close by’. I stayed in a farmer’s field, looking
out over the North Sea. At night I could hear the seals singing. Elizabeth grew
up in a nearby village and was 30 years old when she and her husband bought the
thirty-acre croft at Laidhay. They built a house on the site and Elizabeth
worked with a local trust to open the original eighteenth-century longhouse as
a museum. She is now 82 and has spent her adult life on the side of the hill,
bringing up her sons, looking after sheep and cattle, and managing the museum.
The croft was closed on the day that I visited but other motorists spotted my campervan in the carpark and stopped to see if they could come in. It quickly became clear that Elizabeth is a natural host and tour guide – welcoming, interested, engaging, kind, and very sociable. Within a minute or two she had discovered that one man was a carpenter and so showed him the barn which has arched beams made from ship’s timbers washed up on the beach. A woman visitor was tracing her family who came from the next village. Elizabeth said, ‘you may have cousins there still’, and told her stories about her relatives, the Macbeths. A third group were also welcomed in. Later she said ‘I love meeting people you see, all the strangers. If you’re left at home with two bairns, you’re quite happy to meet people. I liked the company. Making conversation’. Living high on the side of a hill, in a sparsely populated area, it is easy to see how weeks or months could have gone by with no or little social interaction. The museum stopped passing motorists and brought people with different life experiences to Elizabeth’s door. It was a way of connecting herself to the wider world. There was absolutely nothing bland about it.
Aldbourne village greenBlue Town Heritage Centre
Elsewhere, the founders of local history museums made comments about being proud of the area they lived in and of wanting to inculcate pride in younger residents. The implications of those comments varied depending on where the museum was located. Before visiting Aldbourne Heritage Centre, I had never been to Wiltshire, and I was taken aback by how beautiful and how affluent the county was. Aldbourne itself is exquisite: a twelfth century church sits on a rise above a large village green surrounded by cottages with deep thatched roofs. Ducks paddle across a small pond. When I met the founders of the museum, it was clear that their pride was tied to their pleasure in the village itself, to a sense of its deep past and continuing inhabitation, and to its lively community spirit. Two days later, I visited the Criterion Heritage Centre in Blue town on the Isle of Sheppey. On one side of the high street is a huge Victorian brick wall that circles the docks and cuts off any view of the sea. On the other side of the road are some run-down pubs, a fish and chip shop, and a few houses. Behind them are empty lots where buildings have been demolished and not replaced, empty car parks, and a few light industrial buildings. There are very few people in sight. Having read Toby’s interview with Jenny Hurkett, who opened the heritage centre in 2009, I knew that she had insisted on her pride in the area, and on the importance of understanding its role in maritime, wartime, and industrial history. It was only when I walked along the empty high street that I grasped the extent of her resolve and dedication.
