Category: Lab News

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}

(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.

Fiona Candlin