Tag: museum closure

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Museum Closure in the UK

Museum Detectives

Looking across a large and mainly empty room. Empty display cabinets are on the left and right, one covered in a balnket, there is a stack of red plastic chairs on the right and empty cardboard boxes and other items are on the floor.
The former Museum of Leathercraft, 2024. Photograph by Fiona Candlin.

Collecting information on closed museums is a challenge. Museums usually open with a degree of fanfare but often close quietly – and their catalogues, visitor books, and other documentation are not always retained. (Although cowhide hats off to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery for keeping the data from the now-closed Museum of Leathercraft). No-one is specifically charged with keeping records from closed museums and it is hard to find anyone connected to a closed museum, especially after twenty years or more. The staff have relocated, volunteers filter off to other organisations or spend their time in other ways, people die. In this blog I’m going to outline some of the ways that we were able to collect information.

We began by scouring the internet. In some cases, websites or social media accounts lived on after the museum had closed and occasionally the final post explained the circumstances of closure and what was happening to the collections. These pages also provided contact details. Most of the time our emails bounced, and the phone numbers we called were defunct or had been reallocated to someone new, who would be utterly bemused by our enquiries, but in some cases, especially at private museums, the museum owner still lived or worked on the premises. When I called the number for Red Carriage Working Museum in Matlock, Derbyshire, the proprietor told me a moving story about being forced to close when professional burglars stole their entire collection of antique and irreplaceable harnesses, thereby making it impossible for them to show the carriages in action. Although she and her husband sold the yard and the rest of their substantial collection, they had kept the house.

In other cases, online reviews, blogs, or chat forums gave us a lead. A TripAdvisor review for the Longstone café on the Isles of Scilly, noted that it had replaced the Longstone Heritage Centre. Amy Jenkins the proprietor told me that all kinds of things had been left at the site – including two cannonballs which she gave to her father – and gave me the name of the founder who I was then able to contact. Similarly, an online chat forum mentioned that the founders of Harmonium Museum in Shipley, Yorkshire, Phil and Pam Fluke, were continuing to repair instruments. A few clicks later, I found their website and was able to get in touch. Phil also gave me some leads for other closed museums. Alternatively, we called the business at the location where a museum used to be. Jacob Clark, owner of the Animal Avenue Pet Supplies shop at Ringwood, told me that the shop fronts from the Ringwood Town and Country Experience were still outside and a collection of objects in the attic.  And we put out calls for help on social media. Twitter users provided an obituary for Kathleen Mann who had run a Cat Museum at her antiques shop in Harrow-on-the-Hill in London, which enabled us to pinpoint the date of closure.

Phil and Pam Fluke stand in front of a wide range of harmoniums in their museum
Phil and Pam Fluke at the Harmonium Museum in Shipley, 2009. Photo by Mykhaylo Khramov, via Wikimedia.

Sometimes we spent a lot of time investigating one museum to no immediate avail. Finding pictures of the Museum of Cipher Equipment in Cupar on a cipher enthusiasts’ website, I contacted the webmaster in California who emailed a call for information to his network. We also contacted staff at Scotland’s Secret Nuclear Bunker, the Museum of Cupar, and the Museum of Communications, none of whom had heard of the museum but promised to investigate further. I posted on Twitter and word spread. A historian raised it at a museums meeting in nearby Dundee and a member of Museum Association staff persuaded their in-laws who lived in the area to make enquiries on our behalf. Some months later I got an email from the owner. He had visited the Secret Nuclear Bunker and they had passed my email on to him. It turned out that the collection had been destroyed in a fire and that he had moved to Orkney.

Looking through a doorway into a cramped room with metal benches, on top of which sit cipher equipment resembling a large typewriter and assorted other items.
The Museum of Cipher Equipment. Photograph by Ken Earle Mitchell.

Another alternative, especially when we were investigating Local Authority museums, was to contact a neighbouring institution. The staff were often only too aware of closures in the area and in many cases had either inherited the collection or been personally involved in its relocation. Out-of-the-blue telephone calls or emails regularly elicited extremely helpful responses along the lines of ‘The objects all came back into the service. It was before my time, but I can put you in touch with my predecessor if you want more detail. I have his email’ (Wirral Museums Service) or ‘The Lace Museum was never part of the Nottingham Service, although a lot of people thought it was. Some of the collection did come to us. I can send you the relevant section of the catalogue if that’s of interest to you’ (Andrew King, Registrar). Needless to say, it was.

Alongside our internet searches we contacted area museum services or the members of staff with responsibility for heritage in local councils. They were often extremely helpful, giving detailed information about why a museum had closed and where the collections had gone. We also met with the Museums Development Network who scanned through lists of closed museums in their regions, trying to dredge up memories of long-gone venues, as did subject specialists. Anthony Coulls, Senior Curator at the National Railway Museum in York, got in touch when he read about the research and checked our information on closed transport museums while Julian Farrance, Regimental Officer at the National Army Museum and Paul Evans, ex-Historical Projects Officer at the Army Museums Ogilby Trust, looked over our lists of closed military museums.

All of the input that we have received has been very useful: thank you to everyone who has given us information, leads, or advice. We really couldn’t do this without you. However, we’re still trying down missing information on some museums so do keep watch on this space for updates and, no doubt, calls for help.

Fiona Candlin

September 2024

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK Events

Afterlives of Objects

The interior of the abandoned Ringwood Town and Country Experience. Artificial shopfronts with assorted detritus are on either side, and an armchair with a missing foot sits in the distance.
Ringwood Town And Country Experience. Photograph by Fiona Candlin, 2024

Thursday 24th October, 6.00 – 8.00pm

Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London, 25-27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

Places are free but limited and must be booked in advance

Book here

In 2009 Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins collaborated on The Object Reader (Routledge). Since then, they have individually pursued diverse research on the histories of objects, curation, design, and disposal.  This conversationbrings Fiona and Raiford together again with their longstanding collaborator, interlocutor, and friend Joanne Morra to discuss their current work in progress on the afterlife of objects: Fiona is currently driving around the UK visiting closed museums for her new book on the subject, while Raiford is on a world tour of video game museums researching his next book, Museum Games: Journeys in Search of Playable Media. Both are investigating the process of collecting, exhibiting, experiencing, caring for, and scrapping objects. They share a mutual fascination with where stuff goes. Jo and Ray were Founding Principal Editors of Journal of Visual Culture (2001-2019), and previously worked together on the journal Parallax. Fiona and Jo read each other’s material.

Joanne Morra is Professor of Art and Culture and Programmes Research Director at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She writes on contemporary art and psychoanalysis. Her publications include Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art (IB Tauris 2018), Intimacy Unguarded (JVAP, co-edited with Emma Talbot, 2017). She is now working on a book provisionally titled Holding Art: Women and Radical Care. 

Raiford Guins is Professor & Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School and Adjunct Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Feeling Leeds: Notes on Loving a Football Club from Afar (Pitch Publications, 2022), Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020), Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT 2014), and Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Minnesota, 2009). Guins also co-edits MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood. His newest book, Changing the Game: How Atari’s Pong Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, is forthcoming with MIT Press in 2026.

Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology and Director of the Mapping Museum Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester University Press 2010), Micromuseology (Bloomsbury 2016), and Stories from Small Museums (Manchester University Press 2022). Her new book is provisionally titled Stories of Closed Museums. 

For more information about this event contact Katy at mappingmuseums@bbk.ac.uk

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
Museum Closure in the UK

Museum closures and deprivation

A road sign partly covered in faded stickers, attached to black metal railings. A road with a double yellow line is visible behind

Are museums more likely to close in areas of higher deprivation? It seems an obvious question. The more deprived an area is, the less capacity the council has for raising revenue from business rates and council tax, and the more likely it is to have to cut non-statutory services, such as museums. Meanwhile independent museums in deprived areas might struggle due to the lack of disposable income. Except that turns out not to be the case.

In the last blog we considered closure according to region, which provided us with an overview of museum geography in the UK. In this blog we take a more granular approach and draw on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. This is the official measure of relative deprivation in the UK and is assessed on a combination of household income, employment, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services, and living environment. Using the index allows us to look at deprivation in relation to small areas with around 1,500 residents apiece, which then enables a more nuanced understanding of where museums are located and the types of places where closure occurs. Deprivation is calculated differently in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, making comparisons difficult, so in this blog we focus only on England.

A table of open museums in England in 2024. Each row shows a different type of governance and each column shows a different level of deprivation, from most deprived to least deprived. Not for profit museums are clustered in the middle columns of the table, while local authority museums tend to be more prominent in more deprived areas.
Table 1. Museums in 2024: deprivation vs governance. Darker blue indicates a larger number of museums (click to enlarge)

Table 1 shows the distribution of open museums across England as of the beginning of 2024. They have been classified according to governance and the deprivation of the ward in which they are located. As you can see, all kinds of museums can be found in almost all areas – irrespective of deprivation. There are no national museums in the least deprived areas and no university museums in the most deprived, although both these types of museums have relatively small numbers. Most notably, private, and independent (not for profit) museums cluster in the middle ground, while local authority museums tend towards the most deprived.

A table showing the change in museum numbers between 2000 and 2024. Each row shows a different type of governance and each column shows a different level of deprivation, from most deprived to least deprived.
Table 2. Changes in museum numbers 2000–24: deprivation vs governance. Blue indicates growth in museum numbers, red indicates decline in museum numbers. Deeper colours indicate a larger percentage change. (click to enlarge)

Table 2 shows change in the number of museums since 2000 and gives the percentage change in each category. As we outlined in our previous blog the number of independent (not for profit) and private museums rose since 2000. Here we can see that the expansion in numbers of not-for-profit and private museum goes across the spectrum of deprivation with large growth in the middle.

The number of Local Authority museums has decreased since 2000 but there has been less decrease in the middle ground. There has been a greater decrease in the number of Local Authority museums at the edges of the spectrum, that is in areas of most and least deprivation.

There are two important caveats to this data. Firstly, the Index of Multiple Deprivation does not equate to average affluence or poverty. Rather it looks at most and least deprived, which is slightly different. So for instance, one area may contain pockets of extreme wealth and considerable deprivation, whereas another may be less affluent but also have little deprivation in the sense that residents are all in employment, there are low rates of crime, and so on. According to the Index the first area is more deprived – there is some deprivation amid the wealth – while the second is less deprived.

The second caveat is that a museum’s location is not synonymous to the visitor catchment area. These small areas represent the immediate geographic context in which a museum is sited and visitors may come from much further afield. The degree to which they do so depends in part on the type of museum in question; whether it is a national, regional, or small local museum. Going forward we will be thinking further about calculating the distribution of museums and change according to the visitor catchment area.

Yet despite the caveats, the data shows that change in the sector does not neatly align with levels of deprivation. We cannot link museum closure to deprivation or indeed growth in numbers to a lack of deprivation.

Fiona Candlin
George Wright
Andrea Ballatore

Photo: Katy Pettit

Categories
Museum Closure in the UK

The afterlife of museum collections

A view of the Nottingham Museum of Costume. Two mannequins stand in the centre-right foreground. Both the man and woman wear Victorian clothes; the woman may be wearing a wedding dress. Another mannequin stands in the background, beside a woman handling a bell jar filled with dried flowers standing on a table.
Nottingham Museum of Costume (photo: Edgar Lloyd)

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.

A tapestry map of part of Nottinghamshire. It is dated 1632 at the top right and a cartouche contains the words 'At Rampton made wee were by Mistress Mary Eyre'
A 17th century tapestry map of Nottinghamshire

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.

A view of the exterior of Earby Lead Mining Museum. A large oxide red metal wheel dominates the foreground and a two storey stone building stands behind.
Earby Lead Mining Museum (photo: Gordon Hatton)

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.

A ceramic peacock made by the Minton firm. The peacock looks up to the left and stands on a tall rock with its tail feathers draped down the right hand side, reaching the ground. Ivy and other plants decorate the exposed rock surface
The Minton Peacock. Image courtesy of The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

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.

Categories
Lab News

Funding success for the Mapping Museums team

Wooden packing cases of different sizes with stencilled text and labels stand in front of a blank wall

We are pleased to announce that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1million to the Mapping Museums research team for their project ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025’.  

The new research will use trans-disciplinary methods to analyse closure and collections dispersal within the UK museums sector. Its aim is to examine the geographic distribution of closure, to better understand types of closure (e.g., whether museums are mothballed or disbanded), and to document the flows of objects and knowledge from museums in the aftermath of closure. We will investigate the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums. A Knowledge Base will be designed to model and store the collected data, and visualisations and analyses of the data will be developed. Above all, we aim at critically reassessing notions of permanence and loss within the museums sector.  

‘Museum Closure’ is based at Birkbeck, University of London and at King’s College London, and will run for two years, beginning in October 2023. It is led by Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology, who will be working with co-investigators, Dr Andrea Ballatore (King’s College London), a specialist in cultural data science, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science, and Peter Wood, Professor in Computer Science. The post-doctoral researcher is Dr Mark Liebenrood (museum history) and we will be recruiting a second post-doctoral researcher in data science.

(Image modified from original, by elston on Flickr)

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Publications

Letter on Museum Closure

Our researcher Mark Liebenrood recently wrote a letter to The Guardian about museum closures. His letter is below, or you can read it on the Guardian’s site with other letters about the value and plight of museums in Ukraine and Sudan.

Charlotte Higgins is right to highlight the straitened circumstances of the UK’s museums (War has shown Ukrainians – and the rest of us – why museums are so important for telling our stories, 27 May), but there are deeper issues in the sector than a lack of cash to modify working practices and maintain displays.

The Mapping Museums project at Birkbeck, University of London has shown that more than 800 museums have closed in the UK since 1960. There can be many reasons for museums to close: founders retire, land and buildings are lost when leases cannot be renewed and, yes, reductions in income. But lack of funding is often a result of political choices. It is probably not by chance that the rate of closures has accelerated since 2010 – a period that coincides with austerity policies, with all their ramifications.

New museums have continued to open regularly, but 2010 was the first time that closures outstripped openings, and there are now signs that the sector may have begun to shrink. As Higgins says, we need museums. Closures often mean loss of access to collections, and in turn to public history. That too is a crisis that needs attention.

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

More openings and closings in the pandemic

Throughout the pandemic we have been keeping track of museums opening and those closing permanently, or without clear plans for future reopening. We last reported on closures in May 2021, and openings in October 2021. This blog adds to those reports and includes closures and openings that took place between 2020–22. A further ten museums have closed, and we have recorded fifteen new museums opening. 

Closures 

Of the ten closures since our last report, three were local authority museums. The Museum at the Mill in Newtonabbey closed in 2020, having been open since 2010, and enquiries so far have not yielded any information about the circumstances of its closure. Do let us know if you have any information. In 2021, Baysgarth House in Barton-upon-Humber closed. Open since 1981, the museum was shut pending redevelopment after management was returned to the local authority, so this closure may turn out to be temporary. And earlier this year, Eastleigh Museum in Hampshire closed. Management of the museum was devolved in 2014 to Hampshire Cultural Trust and One Community, a local health and wellbeing charity. The museum was staffed by volunteers from One Community and served as an access point for their outreach services. The charity relocated their services and Hampshire Cultural Trust stated that the museum generated insufficient revenue to make it possible for them to keep it open. 

Interior of the Museum of Army Music. Glass cases display uniforms, flags, instruments and other items.
The Museum of Army Music

A further seven independent museums also closed in this period. The Museum of Army Music, formerly in Twickenham, closed in early 2020 and is now in storage in Chatham until a new location can be found. In July 2020, the Hall at Abbey-cwm-Hir in Wales closed due to the financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, with no plans to reopen. The date of two other closures is somewhat uncertain, but it seems likely that the Shire Horse Farm and Carriage Museum in Redruth closed in 2020, and the Mechanical Memories Museum in Brighton closed sometime between 2020 and 2021. Two other independent museums have closed in 2022. Flame Gasworks Museum in Carrickfergus shut due to what the management described as operational and financial constraints, and Hull People’s Memorial Museum cited similar but more specific reasons for their closure. These included increasing costs, reduced donations from visitors, and an increased difficulty for volunteers of parking near the museum. 

Flame Gasworks Museum

These ten closures bring the current total of closures in 2020–22 to nineteen. Just two of those closures are known to be a direct result of the pandemic. 

Openings 

All fifteen new museums recorded here are independent, three of them private and the remainder not-for-profit. The latter group includes Grimsay Boat Haven and Grimsay Archive, which opened in 2020. Based on the Isle of North Uist, it preserves the maritime heritage of the Western Isles including five Stewart boats in a large shelter. Also on a nautical theme is the New Coracle Shed in Coalbrookdale, which is dedicated to the history of coracles in the Severn Gorge and opened in 2021. The same year, Redditch in the West Midlands gained its third museum with the opening of Redditch Local History Museum, which has also initiated an archive as part of its work to record the history of the town. The last not-for-profit museum to open in 2021 was the Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland. The gallery displays a number of paintings from the Spanish Golden Age and is the latest venture in the larger Auckland Project (the project was featured in the recent Radio 4 series The Museums That Make Us). 

Interior of the boat shed at Grimsay Boat Haven. From front to back, a weathered dark green wooden dinghy, a much newer boat painted in dark blue and red, and a third boat with a rubber buoy resting on top.
Grimsay Boat Haven

A further eight not-for-profit museums opened in 2022. These included Glasgow Royal Infirmary Museum, which illustrates the hospital’s contribution to medicine. Kent Mining Museum is concerned with the history of the Kent coalfield and is built on the site of the former Betteshanger colliery. The UK’s first museum dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, Queer Britain, opened in London’s Kings Cross in May and was the culmination of four years of events and pop-up exhibitions. A short walk away is Somers Town Museum, which focusses on the history of its local area near Euston station and also serves as a community space. In Scotland, The Battle of Prestonpans Museum and Jacobite Heritage Centre commemorates the eponymous battle that took place in 1745. In the West Midlands, Stourbridge Glass Museum celebrates the town’s glassmaking heritage. The Barn Theatre and Museum near Hastings is home to a collection of toys, puppets, and theatre sets dating from the eighteenth century to the present. And in August 2022, the Yorkshire Natural History Museum opened in Sheffield.

The front of Stourbridge Glass Museum, a modern building with white walls, glass frontage to the left. To the right an older brick building with a conical brick kiln rising above it.
Stourbridge Glass Museum
The logo of Yorkshre Natural History Museum. Illustrations of a dolphin swimming above a plesiosaur with water bubbles, a red plant and a starfish.

The three private museums include another on a nautical theme, Margate’s Crab Museum, which opened in 2021. The same year another local history museum opened, in Harwich, Essex. Displays include memorabilia from the popular 1980s TV show Hi-de-Hi!, which was filmed at a holiday camp nearby. On a more literary theme is Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein in Bath. The author lived in the city for a time and the museum is dedicated to Shelley and her famous creation.

These fifteen new museums join the fourteen openings in 2020–21 recorded in our previous blog on new museums in the pandemic. As mentioned in that blog, we did not anticipate so many new museums and expected instead to be recording more closures. With nineteen closures recorded altogether so far and twenty-nine openings, the sector has grown slightly during the pandemic. Could this be a sign of resilience, or might we record more closures before the end of 2022? 

Mark Liebenrood 

[All images courtesy of the museums. Header image by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash.] 

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Long closures after lockdown

A rusted padlock hangs from a hasp that secures a wooden door. Cracking and dirt in the woodgrain are clearly visible.

When we set out to collect data on museums during the pandemic, we were eager to explore how long they remained closed and if they had reopened. The results were not what we expected and finding out why proved a more complicated process than we had anticipated.  

To recall, we have built a web-scraping tool to identify words that indicate open/closed on museum websites. Monthly website snapshots allowed us to see how these indicators changed over time and the graph below plots the period between March and November 2021. As you can see, and as we might expect, the references to closure (the blue line) drop and the references to opening increase (the red line).  

A graph showing indicators of museum website language during 2021. The vertical axis shows the number of museums. The horizontal axis shows the date the websites were accessed. There are six lines on the graph. From top to bottom, a green line shows online engagement; a purple line shows intent to reopen; a blue line shows closed currently; a red line shows open currently; a brown line shows staff working; a yellow line shows funding. The lines are explained in more detail in the text of this blog post.

Thus, the data confirmed our general sense of what happened in this period, namely that museums re-opened after lockdown restrictions eased. However, we were surprised that these indicators stabilized from September onwards. Around half of UK museums websites continued to use language that indicated ‘closed’. Conversations with museum sector staff confirmed that many museums had decided to remain closed in 2021, but we still felt our findings were somewhat high.  

We needed to know if the data was correct or if our software was malfunctioning, so we began to check results from individual websites. The result was reassuring in that our web-scraper had correctly identified ‘open’ and ‘closed’ terms. The problem was that the same language was used to describe a wide range of events or instances. For instance, websites announced that they were ‘closed for Christmas’ or that certain part of the museum complex, such as the café or galleries were closed. ‘Open’ was used in a similar way, such as in the case of online exhibitions.  

We needed to distinguish between usages of ‘closed’, and so Andrea Ballatore, our resident software expert, designed a new piece of kit. This allowed us to search and analyze specific terms in their linguistic context. We looked at a sample of 1200 museum websites as they stood in September 2021, and in 167 instances the term indicated the site was closed specifically due to the pandemic (‘The museum remains closed due to Covid-19’) and in a further 212 instances, the museum was closed for an unspecified reason although the majority of these are also likely to be due to the pandemic (‘The museum continues to be closed’; ‘We have taken the decision to remain closed during 2021’). There were 42 museums closed for refurbishment and a further 12 references to seasonal closure.  

Extrapolating from our sample, we can conservatively estimate that some 550 museums remained completely closed as of September 2021 for reasons connected to the pandemic, although it is likely that the number is likely to be higher. Beyond this, the other usages of closure we found referred to specific parts of a site (e.g. café, galleries), provided general information on opening and closing times, or less often, references to a museum’s history. That information is itself significant because it indicates that in addition to those museums that were entirely closed, many more museums were still experiencing some degree of closure. Large numbers of museums did not resume ordinary service.

In our future blogs we will be examining how those patterns of closure and re-opening varied according to museum governance and size, and presenting current data.  

Jamie Larkin and Fiona Candlin 

[Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash]

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum websites: What can they tell us?

How have museums fared during the pandemic? What can we learn from their websites? And could we rapidly collect crucial information from museum websites to assess the state of the UK sector? These are the questions that have driven our research since the start of the project in January last year. We are delighted that we now have some answers to share.

Over the past few months we have been studying museum websites to find phrases that might indicate whether museums are at risk of closure. We collected these phrases together and created 6 key indicators. These are whether a museum is open currently or closed currently, has applied for or received funding, pursues online engagement, has staff working, or intends to reopen.

Our computer science team developed a tool to scan museum websites for references to these key phrases. We were able to scan websites for 3,300 museums of the 3,345 in our database. The graph below shows how these indicators changed from March to November 2021.

Each line in the graph shows a different indicator, and the higher a line is, the more museums were found with that indicator. The points on each line refer to a date when we collected data from websites.

So what does the data tell us?

The data suggests that a large proportion of UK museums made efforts to engage with audiences online, and their engagement remained relatively consistent across the period for which we have collected data. At this point in the pandemic, it is likely that museums who want  to engage audiences in this way have developed the means and resources to do so. This tells us that over 80% of UK museums continued to function in some form in this period.

Another key point is that the indicator for closed currently begins to decline and open currently begins to increase from April 2021. These are generalized trends, but they appear to reflect a gradual reopening of museums. This is earlier than the 17th May reopening date for indoor museums. This early move of indicators is perhaps due to museums modifying their websites to indicate forthcoming reopening and also that museums in Scotland and museums with outdoor attractions were able to reopen earlier, such as English Heritage and National Trust properties. Similarly, the indicator for reopening intent peaks between April and May 2021, as museum websites likely reflected their forthcoming reopening plans.

Following the May reopening, an unexpected trend is that reopening intent doesn’t decrease significantly. This may be explained by the fact that although museums could reopen from 17th May, a number chose to remain closed beyond this point for a range of different reasons.

A final point of interest relates to funding. The graph indicates that less than a third of museum websites made any reference to funding, and this decreases after May 2021. As we noted in a previous blog, the emergency funding situation for museums was complex. A preliminary reading of this data may be that it shows a segment of museums appealing for funding or announcing successful applications. We may speculate that these are most likely independent not for profit museums, given that government museums may have been likely to furlough staff and not as reliant on covering additional outgoings. This will be explored further as we examine the data in greater detail in the forthcoming weeks.

Looking ahead

This graph is a snapshot of what the data can tell us. The six indicators can be analyzed across a range of museum characteristics (e.g. size, governance, location) allowing us to understand variance across the sector. In future blogs, we will present more detailed analyses of this data from museum websites. We continue to collect data, and this will enable us to present longer trends as we incorporate new data into our analysis.

As with any exercise that involves automated data collection from a large number of websites, the data is not perfect as we cannot be fully confident that we have accurately identified every museum website. Also, the six indicators are broad categories that span a very varied use of language on websites. Nonetheless we believe that this analysis shows a broadly representative picture of what is going on in the sector. 

We have also designed new software that allows us to drill down into individual websites, which will allow us to fine tune our account, and we have gathered data from museum social media accounts (on Facebook and Twitter). We were able to collect that data over a much longer period, from 2019 until 2021, and that will likely reveal a more nuanced picture of the rush to online engagement at the outset of the pandemic and the first lockdown in March 2020. As 2022 progresses, we will present our findings in further blogs.

Jamie Larkin & Mark Liebenrood