Tag: collections

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Museum Closure in the UK

Is it closed?

Fig.1. The Barbara Cartland room in Collectors World, Downham Market, Norfolk.
Photo: Andi Sapey

Is it closed?

When is a museum closed? It seems like there would be a fairly obvious answer to this question, which would be a matter of public record and quite easy to track down. But working on this project, Museum Closure in the UK 2000–2025, we have not always found this to be the case.

Back in August 2024, Maria Golovteeva and I were drafted in to undertake research on a list of museums where information about their closure (or even if they had closed) had been especially hard to track down. Over the last seven months, we’ve used every research skill at our disposal to try and find out what happened to the museums on this list.

For some, like the Abriachan Museum (aka the Croft Museum) in the Scottish Highlands or the Baird Museum of TV (aka the Radio Rentals Museum) in Swindon, we discovered that the museum had closed prior to 2000 and so was outside of the scope of this project.

And for others, like the Brookeborough Vintage Cycles Museum in Northern Ireland or the Naseby Battle and Farm Museum in Northamptonshire, we finally tracked down information about the closure and the dispersal of those museums’ collections. Or, as with Collectors World in Norfolk (fig.1), we had to draw inferences about the reasons for closure from a range of sources.

But we also came across other museums that complicated our ideas around closure.

These are museums, like Haulfre Stables in Llangoed in Wales, where it is not at all clear whether the museum has closed or not. To some people I spoke to, Haulfre Stables was definitely still open because the collection is still in situ. But there are no public opening hours and it was not clear how someone would actually go about arranging to view the collection. So, in this case, we made the call that Haulfre Stables had in fact closed in 2012–13 when local authority funding cuts meant that responsibility was devolved to volunteers and the site could no longer open regularly. So, despite the collection still being in situ and potentially being open if someone really wanted to see it, we are labelling this as a closed museum.

Another example are penny arcade museums where the collection is owned by an individual who may move it to different locations. With one such museum, The Olde Tyme Penny Arcade or Museum of Amusements (fig.2) that had been based at Cheshire Workshops in the 2000s, the owner still retained his collection and it was now just based at other locations. So is this a closed museum, or is it just a relocation? As the newer sites had less of a public presence as a ‘museum’ and the collection was also more dispersed amongst different sites, we again made the call that this was a closed museum, although perhaps it could be argued that it isn’t closed at all.

Sometimes we found that sections of a museum closed but other parts remained, as with Fort Perch Rock Museum on the Wirral where the building had to close for some years because of a water problem. Because of this, part of the collection, the Marine Radio Museum, closed and was removed and dispersed to other museums and collections by the Marine Radio Museum Society, but other collections focused on warplane wrecks, a local submarine loss, and the Titanic remain and are intended to reopen soon. So rather than saying that Fort Perch Rock Museum is permanently closed, it might instead be more accurate to say that the Marine Radio Museum at Fort Perch Rock has closed.

At other times, the process of closure and collection removal appeared to be drawn out and exact dates were harder to pin down. With the Doughty Museum in Grimsby, which was later renamed the Welholme Galleries and then Welholme Galleries Community Museum, the public-facing aspect of the museum seemed to end around 2004, but a freedom of information response from the council stated that the building was used as a museum store until 2009.  

And then there has been the occasional museum on our list where we found that it never opened in the first place, as with Challenge at Aldershot (Military & Aerospace Museums), which was intended to open in 1995 on the army base at Aldershot but because of local authority cuts, amongst other reasons, never actually opened. So the museum can’t be said to have closed because it never actually opened.

These are just some examples of museums that have complicated our ideas around closure with it not always being as clear as one might expect about whether a museum is closed.

Helena Bonett

March 2025

Brightly coloured brochure owith vintage clown puppet, map, and images of people in the arcade
Fig 2, Museum of Amusements brochure, courtesy chestertourist.com

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

Trains, planes, and automobiles – how much do we know about where collections go?

Multiple electric locomotives and rolling stock. A shed is visible on the right hand side.
The Electric Railway Museum in 2012. Photo: Fairfaithfull on Wikimedia Commons

The Mapping Museums Lab have been collecting data on over 450 closed museums, including what happens to their collections and buildings. As we gather information about collections, we’re learning that the data available varies widely from one museum to another. In some cases we’ve obtained a list of where every exhibit went, with the type of destination (such as a museum or private storage facility), and sometimes the state of repair of individual objects. In other cases, we have gathered little more than that the collection was sold, often at auction, and dispersed into private hands.

We’re in the relatively early stages of a two-year project, but some patterns are already starting to emerge. For instance, legal processes can have the effect of producing better public documentation for collection dispersals. Liquidators managing company insolvencies produce annual reports, which detail the disposal of assets, and a set of those reports were produced when the parent charity of the Yorkshire Waterways Museum went into liquidation. A more controversial example is the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, where accusations of impropriety led to numerous news reports that documented the complex trajectories of some of the exhibits. Although Bristol Museums now look after the bulk of the collection, the whereabouts of some items formerly held by the BECM are still unknown.

The type of object displayed can make a big difference to the amount of information available. Museums of aviation and railways, which in the cases we’re looking at often display a fairly small number of large objects, are particularly well documented. One example is the Electric Railway Museum, which was a collection of locomotives, electric multiple units and related items, sited near Coventry. The museum’s founder kindly supplied us with a detailed list of the whereabouts of the collection, and the ownership status of each object.

Multiple electric locomotives and rolling stock. A shed is visible on the right hand side.
The Electric Railway Museum in 2012. Photo: Fairfaithfull on Wikimedia Commons

The collections of closed aviation museums can also be fairly straightforward to track. Each plane, in addition to having a manufacturer and model, also has a unique identification number that enables its whereabouts to be found. I have never needed to visit the Demobbed website before starting this project, but that database of former military aircraft has proved invaluable in tracking down some of the planes that were held by now-closed museums. Demobbed features extensive lists of aircraft locations maintained by the Wolverhampton Aviation Group, who are evidently a dedicated community of enthusiasts. Each plane’s history is detailed, including whether parts of it, such as nose cones, were removed and dispersed.

Museums featuring ships and boats have also been relatively easy to track. The small collection of five ships and submarines once held by the Warship Preservation Trust in Birkenhead has been exhaustively documented. This is partly due to a museum and a heritage organisation acquiring two of the vessels. But thanks to enthusiasts keeping an eye on the others, documenting them online and sometimes campaigning for their preservation, we know that a submarine and the frigate HMS Plymouth were scrapped, while the last known destination of the minesweeper HMS Bronington was a dock in Birkenhead, where it had partially sunk at its moorings.

But for another maritime collection there is more uncertainty about destinations. The large collection of boats at the Eyemouth Maritime Centre was sold at auction in 2017. The sale attracted a fair amount of attention from boating enthusiasts, which means that we have been able to track the destinations of quite a few of the boats. However, around 100 boats were reportedly purchased by a collector and cut up to enable transportation to China. This shipment was apparently intended for a new maritime museum but we don’t know whether it ever opened, leaving the whereabouts of a substantial part of the Eyemouth collection unknown.

Warships and a U-boat moored in Birkenhead Dock.
Warships Preservation Trust. Photo: Chowells on WikiMedia Commons.

Although planes, trains, and ships have been easy enough to track down in many cases, car and motorcycle museums are another matter. So far, we’ve found that many of these collections go to auction and are subsequently dispersed to private buyers. Occasionally it’s possible to discover that some items have gone to museums, but not always which ones. The auctioneers of the London Motorcycle Museum told us that three of the bikes had been purchased by museums, but our enquiries have not revealed precisely where they went. The case of the Cars of the Stars museum, mentioned in a previous blog, where the collection went to just one buyer who also runs a museum, appears to be quite unusual. As the destinations of auctioned items are rarely reported, that type of museum dispersal is often the end of the trail for us.

A tug painted in bright blue and yellow moored at the dockside.
Wheldale at Yorkshire Waterways Museum in 2005. Photo by George Robinson on WikiMedia Commons.

As our research continues, it’s becoming apparent that although some collections are very well documented, sometimes down to the level of individual items, in many cases we are simply recording groups of items as moving from a closed museum. And it’s unfortunately quite likely that we will never know what has happened to many others, with the destinations of items and even whole collections left unrecorded. Those differences in what we can find out have implications for how we analyse our data. We don’t want to over-represent some collections in our analyses simply because we have more details about them, or under-represent others that are less well documented. As a team we’re continuing to discuss how best to grapple with that problem.

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Research Process

Galleries without collection: in or out of the surveys?

Surveys of museums and galleries have always excluded galleries that do not have permanent collections. In 1963 the Standing Commission for Museums and Galleries conducted a review of the UK museums sector. Its authors stated that they would exclude national institutions, but otherwise they would try ‘to cover all museums and galleries with a permanent collection which are open to the public, regardless of their importance’. As they went on to observe, their definition excluded ‘exhibition galleries which have no permanent collection, like the Whitechapel Art Gallery or the Arts Council Gallery at Cambridge’. This particular boundary line has remained more or less consistent throughout the last sixty years of data collection. The Whitechapel Gallery did not feature in the major DOMUS survey of the 1990s and does not appear on the Arts Council list. Likewise, the Baltic gallery in Newcastle which has no permanent collection is similarly absent, as are numerous small organisations that hold changing exhibitions.

At stake here is the importance of collections in the characterisation of museums within the UK. Their centrality is most evident in definitions of museums. When the Museums Association first formulated a definition in 1971, they stated that they were institutions ‘where objects relating to the arts, sciences or human history are collected, adequately recorded, displayed, stored and conserved’, and they kept the emphasis on collections in the 1984 definition, which read that ‘a museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit’. This was superseded in 1998 by the current dictum, which states that ‘a museum collects, safeguards, researches, develops, makes accessible and interprets collections and associated information’. Yet despite the changes in terms, all three definitions maintain that a museum had to actively collect and to care for objects, and thereby establish the centrality of collections to the constitution and identity of a museum. Most surveys conducted in the UK from the 1970s onwards have observed the relevant definition, and so galleries without collections have been routinely omitted from data collection.

This exclusion raises a question for our research, which is: should we include or exclude galleries without collections from our research? In the 1960s and 70s collections were the defining feature of a museum, and so the exclusion of galleries without permanent collections did make sense. Since then, that orientation has come into question. In his notable article ‘From Being about Something to be Being for Somebody’, the American curator and commentator Stephen Weil observed that a combination of economic imperatives and a growing sense of professionalism has prompted museums to become outward facing and to actively foster their audiences. This changed orientation has led to more exhibitions that are organised around a topic or theme, rather than around the institutions’ holdings, and to the greater use of explanatory texts, photography, audio-visual material, and interactive opportunities. Noting these curatorial trends, Stephen Conn asked ‘do museums need objects?’ and it has become increasingly clear that some venues did not, or else they only needed a few. Many museums present immersive and theatrical experiences, or use architecture to create an emotional response in the viewer, and while they may also exhibit artefacts, they are not necessarily centre-stage.

The primacy of collections has also been questioned in relation to intangible heritage. In the 1970s and 80s heritage practitioners became increasingly aware that song, dance, food, theatre, and ritual practices were important cultural manifestations that may also require a degree of protection. In Japan people with a high degree of expertise in specific crafts and practices had been designated Living National Treasures and provided with degree of financial and practical support. Western commentators began to recommend a similar approach was taken to other cultures and the issues were extensively debated at a series of UNESCO general conferences. In 2003 the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was published, which emphasised that cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. Rather includes ‘traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts’. It is within this context that heritage and to some degree museums became much less object-focused.

In many respects, venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery and the Baltic more closely resemble traditional museums than the newer venues that prioritise experience or those that focus on cultural practices more generally. Even if galleries do not own a collection, or hold it in public trust, they do focus upon, show and interpret objects. Given these shifts in museum practice, excluding galleries without holdings may be anomalous.

On the other hand, galleries without collections do function differently in that they do not care for objects in the long-term. The staff do not focus on keeping things for posterity but on short-term exhibitions, and this gives those venues a very different orientation. The institutions are different in kind. Moreover, including galleries without collections has the practical implication of massively increasing the number of venues that need to be listed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of art centres and exhibition spaces that would qualify for inclusion and the scope of the project would massively increase.

What do you think? Should art galleries without collection be in or out of the Mapping Museums dataset?

 

Copyright of Fiona Candlin January 2018