What happens to collections after museums close? Over the next two years the Mapping Museums Lab will be looking at that question in more detail, but even in these early stages of the project we’re beginning to get a sense of some of the outcomes and of the objects’ destinations.
We’re concentrating on museum closure in the UK since 2000 and so far, museums’ governance seems to make a significant difference to where objects end up. The collections from local authority museums are generally returned to or absorbed into the county or city service, and often re-appear in other spaces and exhibitions. For example, the Nottingham City Museums service operated multiple sites including The Museum of Costume and Textiles [1976-2003]. After it closed to the public, the collections were stored onsite, then re-located to the historic house Newstead Abbey, with some items later going on exhibition in various other museums within the service. Among other things, two seventeenth-century tapestry maps of Nottinghamshire, which had been on permanent display at Museum of Costume and Textiles, and were stored following its closure in 2003, were prominently displayed in the “Rebellion” themed gallery at Nottingham Castle when it reopened in 2021.
We found similar trends in other local authority museums that closed. Artefacts from St Peter’s Hungate Church Museum [1933-2000] reappeared in the decorative arts galleries at Norwich Castle and in the period rooms at Norwich Museum at Brideswell, museums operated by the same local authority. The Manor House Museum [1993-2006] in Bury St Edmunds had a collection of fine art, costume, and perhaps most notably clocks, which went to their sister institution Moyse Hall. The costume and art are incorporated into social history displays as and when they are required, while the clocks have a permanent space.
In a few instances the local authority mothballs a museum leaving everything in situ. In some cases, this allows for some continuing use. The Museum of Lancashire [1972-2016] in Preston has been closed for several years, but the galleries with recreated spaces – a Victorian classroom and street scene, and a World War 1 trench – and all the associated objects remain untouched and are regularly used for education sessions. When I first spoke to staff in November 2023, hundreds of schoolchildren had been through the otherwise closed museum in the previous weeks. Moray Council took a more drastic approach when it shut the Falconer Museum in Forres [1871-2019]. The collections in the store and displays in the public galleries remain as they were left when the staff left on their last day, and the only people who have access are the conservation officers responsible for checking the building and collections.
So far, we have not found any independent museums that mothball their collections. In some cases, the trust or organisation that ran the independent museum still exists and they retain ownership of the artefacts, loaning them out to other organisations. For instance, the instruments from the Asian Music Circuit Museum [1998-2014] are on long-term loan to the Music department at York University, although it is not clear whether they will ever be returned. In other cases, the collections are transferred in their entirety to another museum. When the independent Bexhill Costume Museum [1972-2004] faced closure early in the millennium, the director negotiated a complete transfer of collections to Bexhill Museum, which was accordingly redeveloped with support from the local authority, re-opening in 2007. Likewise, the contents of Earby Lead Mining Museum [1971-2015] went wholesale to the nearby Dales Countryside Museum, which was local authority run.
The collections from the private museums that we have so far researched are frequently sold, often at auction. Occasionally we know who bought the objects. The Cars of the Stars Museum in Keswick, which included vehicles featured in James Bond films, was purchased in its entirety by Michael Dezer who relocated the collection to his museum in Miami, Florida. When the company museum at the entrance to the Minton factory closed [1950?-2002], the Potteries Museum in Hanley bought a 4ft tall ceramic peacock that had stood at the entrance. More usually, these objects disappear into the anonymity of the private sphere.
Researching closure is a slow and painstaking task and it will be several months more before we begin to have a more rounded picture of what happens to museum collections. It may be that our observations will be revised in the process. They will certainly be developed and refined. Over the next few months, we will be exploring numerous topics related to museum closure: which objects get scrapped, the emotional aspects of closure, and the possible corelations between social deprivation and dispersed collections. Do subscribe to our blogs on this new website for updates on our progress.
Fiona Candlin
Update: this blog was updated on 12 March 2024 to correct the status of Bexhill Museum.
Which museums re-opened after lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, and did it vary by governance? In this blog we present our findings about the three largest groups of museums in our dataset: those run by local authorities, independents run on a not-for-profit basis, and private museums.
As seen in the chart below, museum websites increasingly mentioned that they were open between March and November 2021. That trend reflects the relaxation of lockdown restrictions. In April 2021, outdoor attractions began to reopen and museums in Scotland were able to reopen towards the end of the month. Museums in the rest of the UK were able to reopen in May 2021.
Local authority museum websites (orange line) show the largest increase (from 44% in March 2021 to 56% in November 2021), which suggests that they are more likely to have reopened than the other two groups. The increase can be seen as early as April, which may reflect websites updating in anticipation of full reopening in May 2021. The change in April may also reflect the reopening of outdoor facilities across the UK that month, prior to full reopening in May. Independent not for profit museum websites (green line) show a smaller change (from 41%, to 49% by August 2021), and private museums (blue line) changed by a similar amount (from 36%, to 45% by November 2021).
Over the same period, museum websites decreasingly mentioned that they were closed.
The chart above shows the percentage of websites mentioning current closure between March and November 2021. The biggest drop is for local authority museums (from 77%, to 59% by August 2021), which again suggests that they are more likely to have reopened. That decline was slightly less on websites of independent not for profit museums (from 65% to 49% by September 2021). Private museums show the smallest change (from 49% to 44% by September 2021). This could suggest that private museums are least likely of the three groups to have reopened, but the chart of reopening above suggests that they were similar in this respect to not-for-profits.
Whether considering mentions of opening or closure, our summary website data suggests that local authority museums were the most likely to have reopened of these three groups of museums.
That finding is borne out by manually checking samples of the text we found on museum websites. In April 2021 – before lockdown was lifted – we found that 231 local authority museums explicitly stated that they were closed due to Covid, compared to 318 independent not for profit museums and 45 private museums.
By September 2021, four months after restrictions had been relaxed, we found that just 38 local authority museum websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 84% from April. By comparison, 72 not for profit independent museums still stated this, a smaller reduction of 77%. For private museums, 10 websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 78%. So this analysis also suggests that local authority museums were more likely to have reopened, while private museums and not-for-profits show lower rates of reopening.
These figures must be seen as approximate, given that not all museum websites are updated regularly and our search tools are far from perfect. But both types of analysis suggest that local authority museums were more likely to reopen after lockdown than the largest groups of independent museums.
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.
The museums sector generally concentrates on current practice and developments; it does not keep longitudinal data that would enable academics and museum professionals to trace patterns over time.
The result is that commentary on closure is focussed on the very recent past and lacks a broader perspective that could add insight to contemporary analyses of this phenomenon. As part of the Mapping Museums project we have built a dataset charting the development of UK museums since 1960, and we have used this to draw the first substantive picture of museum closures over time.
At the outset there are two important points to address relating to museum closure that we’ve encountered while building the dataset.
The first concerns data collection. Given the historical focus of the project, a great difficulty has been finding information regarding precise years of closure. Recent closures and closure of well-established museums are fairly well documented. The real difficulty has been tracking down information for smaller, grassroots, regional museums – particularly those that closed 15, 20, or 25 years ago.
We have conducted extensive searches via websites, historical guidebooks, and museum directories. When these were exhausted we sent emails or made telephone calls to individuals or groups, including regional museums services, local history societies or town clerks. We sent hundreds of communications in this way. Sometimes our contacts provided definitive information on when a museum closed; sometimes they could not.
For opening and closure years we have been able to generate accurate information for about 90% of museums. This has been an unprecedented undertaking and has drawn together information from a disparate range of sources. For the remaining 10% we’ve employed year ranges or made informed estimates, which we have mitigated with appropriate statistical methods in our analysis¹.
The second point is that, almost counter-intuitively, closure is difficult to define.
For example, if a museum ceases regular public opening hours but remains accessible in some form, should we continue to consider it open? This happened at Leith Hall House in 2009, which is now open for guided tours only. As the property is still accessible and continues to be advertised by its owner, the National Trust for Scotland, we consider it open, but this is, of course, debatable.
Furthermore, is closure is connected to premises? When a museum merges into another site, should we consider it closed or just having changed location? For example, in 2015 the Clockmakers Museum moved from its own premises into the Science Museum. Should we mark the museum closed and the collection a constituent part of the Science Museum? Its website indicates that the Clockmakers Museum retains a distinct identity. As such, we have kept it open.
The most difficult conceptual aspect to closure is that some museums don’t close per se, they gradually cease to exist. This is often the case with farm museums, where exhibitions of rural bygones are supplanted by other visitor offers (e.g. farm shop, petting zoo) so that the museum display doesn’t close with a thud at a specific moment, but gradually slips away without a whimper. In such instances we have contacted owners and discussed how best to record such forms of closure.
Generally, we have looked at closure on a case by case basis and tried to balance continuity versus change. If an effort has been made to keep a museum alive in some form we have tended to respect that, although we would log instances of material change, such as if a local authority museum was taken over by a volunteer group, etc.
Analysis
Turning to the analysis, it should be noted that these are preliminary results that will be refined prior to more formal publication, so some of the numbers presented here may be subject to slight change.
In total, we have recorded nearly 4,000 museums as being open to the public in the UK between 1960 and 2017, of which around 3,250 are currently open. This is a significant increase on the Museum Association’s estimate of 2500. Our larger number is partly due to the fact that we have a more encompassing definition of what a museum is and count unaccredited museums that may not be included in other surveys.
The figure of 3,250 open museums means that since 1960 there have been about 750 closures. This is around 20% of the total.
First let’s begin by considering the rate of closure over time.
This is a simple smoothed line plot showing the number of UK museum closures per year since 1960. There are two types of plot used in this analysis: smoothed line plot (which shows average figures and is best for perceiving general trends) and spiky line plot (which shows precise figures for specific years).
As you can see in Figure 1, peaks in closure begin around the mid 1980s (with an average 13 closures per year) with another in the late 1990s (with an average 20 closures). Following the economic crisis in 2008, the closure rate accelerates, peaking in the last few years with closures averaging 30 per year.
Figure 2 shows closure information for specific years; the highest annual number of closures we recorded was 39 museums in 2015.
A particularly significant finding from this data is that it demonstrates that around 200 museums have closed since 2010. This provided an interesting contrast to the Museum Association’s figure of ‘at least 64′ closures over the same period, cited in their Museums in the UK 2017 report.
It is clear from these graphs that closures are rising more steeply in the current period than at any point since 1960.
However, if we look at these figures in the wider context of museum opening we get a different perspective.
This smoothed line plot shows the annual number of UK museum openings (in green) and closures (in red) since 1960. It demonstrates that while closure rates are increasing, they are doing so in the context of a sector that until very recently has been consistently expanding.
This data substantiates the rapid expansion of museums during the 1970s and 1980s, which is often termed the ‘heritage boom’. Since the early 1990s the rate of openings has declined but they have still outpaced closures in every year except four.
This spiky line plot shows more clearly that for every year between 1960 and 2014 (with an exception in 2010), more museums opened than closed, meaning the sector expanded. The result is that the sector peaked in terms of total number of museums in 2014.
However, in 2015, 2016, and 2017 this trend was reversed by marginal net losses. What is particularly striking is that 2017 saw the lowest number of museum openings in the UK since 1960. This figure is 16 museums per year.
Generally speaking, this would appear to indicate a picture of robust growth over the longer term. From approximately 900 museums in 1960, the sector has seen a 260% net gain to the current situation in which numbers have begun to plateau.
However, drilling down into the data reveals some divergent trends.
For example, while the sector has grown substantially in this period, its composition has markedly changed.
Figure 5 shows number of closures by decade based on museum governance. (Note: Here we are using a simplified governance measure: ‘independent’ includes private museums or those run by trusts or foundations, while ‘state’ comprises national and local authority museums).
If we consider closure by governance, we can see that greater numbers of independent museums are closing than state run museums.
This may be expected, particularly given that smaller, private museums are often financially shaky ventures. For example, between 2010 and 2017, our data shows that over 150 independent museums closed compared to roughly 60 state run museums.
However, a more significant observation is that in proportionate terms, the closure of state run museums is higher than that of independents.
This plot shows museum closure as a proportion of governance type.
As we can see, proportionate closure of state run museums begins to outpace closure of independents around 1995. Since 2000, the average proportionate rate of closure of state run museums has been 1.1% per year compared to around 0.7% for independents.
If we examine the data further we can see significant spikes in 2011 (when 1.8% of state run museums closed), 2015 (with 1.5%) and 2016 (with 2.4%).
When we factor in openings over this period, we also see that fewer state run museums have opened than closed since 2000. The result of this is that the state run museums sector has seen a net decline of around 14% in this period
Around 5% of this decline is accounted for by museums lost to closure while 9% is museums transferred by local authorities into trust status (which we have termed ‘hybrid’ status). We are still calibrating this aspect of our data and this figure could be higher.
In contrast, since 2000, the independent museums sector has seen a net growth of 9%.
We can see how these trends have changed the composition of the sector over the longer term.
According to our data, in 1960 there were around 900 museums, of which 40% were state run and 50% were independent. In 2017, of the 3,250 museums we recorded, roughly 22% are state run whereas 70% are independent. As a result, we can see that the State’s direct contribution regarding the provision or management of museums is shrinking while the sector is becoming dominated numerically by independents.
Conclusions
These are some of the preliminary findings from our research.
They indicate that from 1960 onwards the museum sector expanded continually until 2010, with a slight decline in that year, but then saw further growth until it peaked in 2014. This represents 54 years of museum growth.
However, around 200 museums have closed since 2010 and for the last 3 years closures have outpaced openings. Significantly, 2017 saw the lowest rate of museum opening since 1960.
It is important, however, not to conflate the overall growth of the sector with what is happening within it. It is clear that museum growth has been principally driven by the independents and that they now ensure that the overall number of museums in the sector remains relatively static.
It is also clear that the decline in the number of state run museums – through closure or change in status – has been considerable.
This raises significant questions about the type of skills, facilities, and experiences, that are being lost with the contraction of State run museums. This issue is not just one of closure but the loss of public sector institutions.
Hopefully these initial findings provide insight into the development of the sector over the longer term and help inform the conversation about the impact of the current age of austerity on the museums sector writ large.
We will be releasing further results as we continue our analysis, so please subscribe for updates or follow us on twitter: @museumsmapping
¹ The results on which this analysis is based have been weighted to account for the uncertainty in the data. When more accurate data is not available, we use a date range for the opening and closing years of museums. For example, if we know a museum was opened between 1965 and 1975 but are unable to specify a particular year, the range of possible years (in this case 10) will be divided equally and the probability (0.1 in this case) will be added to the results for the years in the date range. This avoids over-representing individual museums, and provides a more realistic quantification than a simple count.