Category: Museums in the Pandemic

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum closure during the pandemic

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

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.

A circular dark green sign for the Pembrokeshire Candle Centre hangs in front a building with mauve flowers below.
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.

Entrance gates at Fort Paull. Brick walls stand either side of black gates hung with heraldic shields. Two lifesize soldiers stand on the walls above, either side of a large Fort Paull sign.
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.

Inside the Commando Museum. In the foreground is a mannequin dressed in commando uniform in a glass case.
The Commando Museum
Walton-on-the-Naze Maritime Museum. A building with a blue-painted lower storey and a brick and tile upper storey with a pitched roof and a white-painted oriel window. A red and white sign reads The Old Lifeboat House..
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.

  • A large aeroplane stands on grass. It is emblazoned with the words Airbus Skylink.
    Bruntinghthorpe Aircraft Museum
  • The forecourt of a military building. Jeeps in camouflage are parked and a Union jack flies from a flagpole in the background.
    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.

General view of the Falconer Museum. Objects can be seen in glass cases on a gallery and the ground floor. Above a staircase is a mounted stags head.
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.

Fiona Candlin May 2021

(Header image by tma)

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museums in the Pandemic: Risk, closure, and resilience

The Museum of the Home in East London viewed through its closed gates. A red and white sign fixed to the gates says 'Reopening early 2021'. The gates are closed with a heavy chain.

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.

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Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Coronavirus and Museum Resilience: Some preliminary observations

A highway splits around a small hill. Mist and mountains visible in the distance.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has led to virtually all UK museums being closed. The issue at hand is whether these temporary closures may become permanent, and which museums are likely to be the most resilient, both in the short and long term.    

Of all the museums that have existed since 1960 (when our data collection begins), 18% have closed. However, rate of closure varies by museum governance. 34% of privately-owned museums and 21% of local authority museums have closed, whereas closure rates among national and not for profit museums are comparatively low at 9.5% and 8.5% respectively. Small museums are also much more likely to close than medium, large or huge museums.

These closures took place under very different circumstances to those we face today. Never before has the entire UK museum sector shutdown in this way, challenging the basic operating model of attracting visitors to physical sites. Here we consider what light our data might shed on the current situation.

Independent museums: private

Private museums tend to be owned and operated by individuals or volunteer groups, or are run as a business or are attached to one: they can span a museum in a living room, a privately-owned historic house, or a museum of a large company. In each instance they usually operate outside of the frameworks of professional museum support. Historically, closure rates are high. This can be because the owner has retired and sold assets, because there has been little succession planning, or because the business runs into financial difficulty, resulting in the sale of a site or collection. COVID-19 is a (relatively) short-term threat that presents an acute danger to museum owners’ health and their finances. But the threat posed will likely be different for private museums based on their size and scope.

Private museums that open on an ad-hoc basis by individuals or volunteer groups might be well placed to weather a shutdown. While they may have bills to cover, without significant outlays (particularly paid staff) they may have flexibility to suspend operations in a way that other museums might not. By contrast, private museums that are visitor attractions in their own right, or whose future is contingent on the success of a business, are threatened by the global economic recession which appears likely to accompany the pandemic. A significant downturn in tourism and domestic spending may significantly reduce the means of owners and their ability to open and maintain their museums.

Independent museums: not for profit

Not for profit museums comprise the biggest group of museums in the UK. They are constituted as charitable trusts and this formal infrastructure and eligibility for a diverse range of funding contributes to their longevity. Not for profit museums also span a range of venues, from small village museums to some of the largest museums in the country. Again, museums at the margins might be more resilient to the current circumstances. Some smaller museums, often with a focus on local history and operated by volunteer groups, might be more adaptive to enforced closure. Equally, small museums with diverse funding sources (such a project grants) may be somewhat shielded from declining visitor income.

However, museums that depend heavily on visitor revenue (including admissions and events) face uncertain times, particularly as many not for profit museums do not have significant reserves. For example, the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth generates 90% of its revenue from visitors and a prolonged shutdown could see it lose its entire annual income. In the long term this crisis might see a significant reduction in not for profit museums’ operational capacity – the tourist economy will likely take years to fully recover; there may be a decline in donations (given the effect on private finances); and grant-giving bodies are pivoting resources to an emergency footing. The Arts Council is reallocating £160m funding – expending nearly all its reserves – to support cultural organizations and cultural workers during the crisis. This support is likely to last for a significant time following the end of the crisis, and revenue for capital and programme development may be significantly curtailed as a result.

Local Authority museums

Local authority museums are owned and operated by, or on behalf of, local authorities and are largely tied to their economic health. These museums have a closure rate of 21%, and this tends to occur when the authority takes drastic measures to cut expenditure, resulting in the rationalization of museum services. 59 local authority museums closed between 2009 and 2017, following the global financial crisis. Accompanying budgets cuts saw museum roles hollowing out and expertise lost, further undermining institutional resilience. With core operational funding, the threat to local authority museums is not so much in the immediate term but the years ahead as the UK likely faces a more severe recession than 2008. While the government stimulus package (announced 11 March 2020) provides a £500m ‘hardship’ fund for local authorities, the long-term effects of the crisis will likely place a heavy financial burden on local government resources, which will increase the likelihood of further local authority museum closures or asset transfers.

National museums

National museums receive core funding from central government. They have a closure rate of 9.5%, although this is inflated as it includes branch museum closures (e.g. the British Theatre Museum, a branch of the V&A, closed in 2007). Historically, the resilience of national museums is because government grant-in-aid supplied the majority of their operating costs. However, over the past 30 years national museums have been geared towards privatization, significantly increasing self-generated revenue as a proportion of their annual income. This now presents serious implications for national museums. For example, 61% the V&A’s annual income is self-generated and 39% grant-in-aid. The museum’s director, Tristram Hunt, has estimated the museum will lose £1,000,000 per month during closure, while the Museum’s annual report notes its reserves can cover operational costs for between 3 to 6 months. While it is unlikely that national museums will see permanent closures, it is likely that the government will have to bolster their funds and this may be at the cost of jobs, rationalization of core functions, or have implications for capital expansion and exhibition programmes.

Conclusions

The outlook for the museum sector is uncertain because the trajectory of the virus and its impacts are unclear. In China, South Korea and Japan, museums that were instructed to close in January have now begun to reopen to the public, albeit with restrictions. However, these countries mobilized quickly to track the disease and lock down cities in a way that seems unrealizable in the West. The UK government indicates that a shutdown of normal life could last from 3 to 12 months.

The government response and its support for the museum sector has been opaque. It is anticipated that some museums might benefit from small business loans and Business Relief Rates, while calls have been made to utilize the £120m ringfenced for the 2021 post-Brexit ‘Festival of Britain’. However, it is unclear how emergency funds would be deployed and which parts of the sector would most benefit from them. Beyond a blanket bailout, detailed work needs to be done to understand vulnerable museum communities that should be eligible for support.

The magnitude of this crisis will undoubtedly cause museums to close permanently. Already some museums, such as Creswell Crags, have launched their own fundraising appeals to help secure their finances. In the short term, it appears that the most vulnerable will be established independent museums (private and non-profit) that are significantly dependent on visitor revenue and business revenues. By contrast, the repercussions of a massive economic bailout, will likely lead to difficult decisions for local authority support for museums in the coming years.

The Mapping Museums research team will continue to update the database to track museum closure and establish how the museum sector changes as a result of this crisis. The database can be used to find local museums (and prospectively offer support) and can be edited – please inform us if you know of museums that close permanently. Documenting the sector will create valuable data to support decisions taken by government and sector bodies in the challenging times ahead.  

Jamie Larkin