The research shows that, while there are now more small museums than 25 years ago, it is that same bracket that has seen the highest closure rate. Conversely, more medium-sized museums closed than opened in that time, and over 50% of those that closed were council-run.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
The museum is currently closed due to financial woes \u00a9 Ditchling Museum of Art<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was depressing how hard hit the local authority museums are,\u201d says the director of Mapping Museums Lab Fiona Candlin, because those places were serving an audience. When asked to what degree museum attendance and local affection is taken into consideration in wider discussions over strategic funding, she says: \u201cI think \u2018not at all\u2019 would be the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Closure is not necessarily a bad thing. Manchester\u2019s decision in 2017 to shutter its Gallery of Costume was a solid strategic move, driven by the need to better cater to the local community around Platt Hall, its home for 70 years, and better steward the 25,000-strong collection by placing it in the more central Manchester Art Gallery. Fewer items are on display, but more people now see them.<\/p>\n
In most cases, however, the museums were closed for financial reasons\u2014or some political calculation around funding choices. This is despite the fact that closing an institution is, in itself, a costly business.<\/p>\n
Candlin notes that, on the whole, collections from closed museums have been dealt with responsibly. \u201cHonestly, I expected to find more horror stories,\u201d she says. Where the council owns the building, local authority-funded museums\u2019 collections tend to be left in situ because it is cheaper than paying for storage. In other cases, items are sent to bigger, national museums. For example, colour charts from the erstwhile Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in North London and badges from York Racing Museum were dispatched to Tate Britain and the British Museum respectively.<\/p>\n
The communities whose museums have been shut, however, have not only lost access to collections they valued, they are without a crucial part of the civic infrastructure. The degree to which the expert staff who lost their jobs have suffered, meanwhile, is clear in how few people will agree to talk about it. As Candlin puts it, \u201cI\u2019ve never had research that\u2019s ghosted in the way that this research has been ghosted.\u201d<\/p>\n
The culture secretary Lisa Nandy announced in January, while under the previous Keir Starmer government, the investment of \u00a31.5bn to save over 1,000 cherished arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage buildings across England from closure.<\/p>\n
In that first raft of funding to 130 institutions, the DCMS made an effort to distribute this aid throughout England. The Museum Estate and Development Fund portion of the funding includes \u00a32.4m for Hartlepool Borough Council to upgrade the Museum of Hartlepool; \u00a33.5m for urgent repairs to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; and \u00a32m for York Museums Trust to repair and upgrade the Grade I-listed Yorkshire Museum.<\/p>\n
Entrenched regional inequalities<\/p>\n
However, Bethany Rex, a museologist at the University of Warwick, points out that these are short-term, one-off funding pots, which do not address years of underfunding and entrenched regional inequalities. \u201cWhat remains unaddressed\u2014and a football that no one seems to want to take up\u2014is the ongoing revenue funding that enables museums to have confidence that they will still exist in five years, and the impact that has on employment practices, creativity, innovation etc,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft is a case in point. As a small independent charity, the museum receives no public revenue funding. It was shortlisted for Museum of the Year in 2014, after a \u00a32.3m refurbishment, funded mostly from the Heritage Lottery Fund. But \u201cthe fine line that we have been balancing since reopening was reliant on visitor numbers and philanthropic donations both being strong\u201d, the spokesperson for the board of trustees says. \u201cEven a slight falter in either is enough to create real challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n
In April it was reported that DCMS had started work on the development of a new strategic framework for museums in England, as recommended in the Labour peer Margaret Hodge\u2019s review of Arts Council England (ACE).<\/p>\n
Rex says such a framework needs to include the question of how funding is balanced between national and local museums, and, crucially, \u201cthe question of revenue funding now that local governments have been so stripped down\u201d. A further issue is how to balance what is free and what is paid for in terms of museum ticketing: \u201cAre we seeing a quiet degradation of the free offer?\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked in May for details on what that framework will contain, and a timeline for its delivery, a spokesperson for the department said: \u201cDCMS have already begun discussions with ACE on the scope of this strategic work. We will have more to say about our ambitions in due course.\u201d <\/p>\n
Following his appointment as prime minister on 20 July, Burnham dissolved the Department for Science Innovation and Technology, distributing its function between other departments. As a result, the DCMS is being expanded and restored to its previous iteration as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with Nandy remaining in post to head it up. A DCMS spokesperson confirms that the Arts Everywhere Fund programme and the new strategic framework for museums in England apply to the current parliament and so they will continue under Burnham\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
In his first speech at Downing Street, Burnham promised to unveil a ten-year plan in the coming months. The Campaign For the Arts organisation launched a petition on 25 July demanding that Burnham include the arts and culture in that plan. At the latest count, it has garnered over 22,258 signatures. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex announced in January that it would temporarily close…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[191,41676,662,5,6],"class_list":["post-98671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-closures","tag-ditchling-museum-of-art-craft","tag-museums","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117049602021122595","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98671","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=98671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}