Museum Closure in the UK (2000-2025)
We are pleased to announce that the Mapping Museums Lab has been awarded £1M Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for their project ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025’.
Museums are defined as permanent institutions and are intended to preserve collections for posterity. Yet their closure is common. Our previous AHRC-funded research, ‘Mapping Museums’, showed that some 480 museums have closed in the UK since 2000. These closures have varied in type. Local councils have amalgamated several museums to form one consolidated organization, and replaced outdated institutions with landmark buildings and in such instances, services have often been improved. Alternatively, museums have been mothballed or the collection disbanded with some objects being returned to original donors, some scrapped, and others sold. Their closure is usually understood in terms of failure and loss.
The issue is that, to date, there has been no research on how closure differs across institutions or on which collections have stayed in public circulation and which have disappeared. This project will examine different types of closure, the flows of objects and knowledge from museums in the aftermath of closure, and the afterlife of collections. In doing so, we will critically reassess notions of permanence and loss within the museum 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.
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 