A Norwich castle will compete with the National Gallery in London for the 2026 edition of the Art Fund\u00a0Museum of the Year, the most prestigious UK prize in the sector. Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery in East England and the 202-year-old institution located in Trafalgar Square have been shortlisted along with The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, The Box in Plymouth and the V&A East Storehouse in London.\u00a0The winning museum, to be announced 25 June at a ceremony at Cutty Sark in London, will receive \u00a3120,000, while the four other finalists will receive \u00a320,000 each. <\/p>\n
\u201cNorwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery comprises a medieval Castle Keep, and a museum. Following a major \u00a327.5m redevelopment, the Keep reopened in August 2025 and is now the most accessible castle in the UK,\u201d says an Art Fund statement. As part of the Royal Palace Reborn\u00a0project, the museum has also created a new Gallery of Medieval Life, developed in partnership with the British Museum. The new spaces are \u201cfilled with the types of furniture, textiles and painted decoration that could have greeted Henry I when he stayed in Norwich in 1121,\u201d says the museum\u2019s guidebook. <\/p>\n
The National Gallery gets the nod for its wide-ranging bicentenary projects which included an \u00a385m project to upgrade its Sainsbury Wing entrance, an ambitious public art piece in Trafalgar Square devised by the artist Jeremy Deller and a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime\u201d rehang called C C Land: The Wonder of Art. The gallery\u2019s latest capital project involves building a \u00a3350m extension on the site of St. Vincent\u2019s House to house modern and contemporary art. <\/p>\n
Another London powerhouse museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, launched the V&A East Storehouse<\/a> in Stratford last May, winning plaudits for offering a new museum experience based on breaking down \u201cphysical barriers and removing glass cases so visitors can get closer than ever before to national collections\u201d.\u00a0The venue has since drawn over 500,000 visitors; its sister institution, the V&A East Museum, launched 18 April. <\/p>\n Meanwhile the Fitzwilliam is \u201creimagining the role of a historic university museum: not as a neutral guardian of objects, but as an active participant in social dialogue, knowledge exchange and collective responsibility,\u201d says Art Fund, which emphasises the innovative programming at the Cambridge museum founded in 1816. Highlights in 2024-25 included All Over the Place, the US artist Glenn Ligon’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, and Rise Up, which brought together historic objects and contemporary art to explore the lives of abolitionists. <\/p>\n The Box in Plymouth marked its fifth birthday in September last year and has drawn more than one million visitors (a 2025 report<\/a> published by the gallery says that it has since boosted the city\u2019s economy by \u00a3244m). \u201cStriving to be \u2018nationally known and locally loved\u2019, The Box preserves the city\u2019s cultural collections of more than two million artworks, objects, specimens, and archival materials,\u201d says Art Fund. A Beryl Cook exhibition<\/a> held at the venue last year was critically acclaimed. <\/p>\n The Art Fund Museum of the Year judges are Tony Butler, the executive director of Derby Museums; the artist Yinka Ilori MBE; the author Alice Loxton and\u00a0the broadcaster June Sarpong. Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, an open-air museum in County Durham that brings 19th and 20th century history to life through \u201cimmersive exhibits\u201d,\u00a0won last year\u2019s\u00a0Art Fund Museum of the Year prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n The eligibility criteria for the prize state that prospective galleries \u201cmust be based in the UK and be either a public museum, gallery, historic house, library or archive which has spaces for the public to visit and experience the visual arts or other object-based collections\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Norwich castle will compete with the National Gallery in London for the 2026 edition of the Art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8233,663,664,8234,5,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-17814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-art-fund-museum-of-the-year","9":"tag-museums-heritage","10":"tag-national-gallery","11":"tag-norwich-castle-museum-and-art-gallery","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116436904331658740","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}