Li Yuan-Chia and the LYC Museum – an amateur artist-curator?

‘Making Museum Professionals, 1850 – the present’ is an international research network bringing together academics and museum professionals to investigate the past, present and future of museum work.

At their first workshop in May 2023 I spoke about the artist Li Yuan-Chia, his LYC Museum, and whether his work there could be seen as amateur, professional, or in another category altogether.

You can read a shortened version of that workshop paper on the Making Museum Professionals website.

The UK museum boom: continuity and change 1960–2019

My first joint-authored academic article has been published. A result of the Mapping Museums project, it serves as an overview of much of the research that the team conducted.

The abstract:

During the late-twentieth century there was a significant increase in the number of museums in the UK. Apart from the polemic heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the boom in museums was not much investigated. Our project “Mapping Museums” collected and analysed data on over 4000 UK museums that were open in the period from 1960 to 2019. Here we present our findings. We show that the number of museums increased from around 1000 to a highpoint of 3360 in 2016, that the sector continuously expanded for 55 years, but that the rate of growth and closure varied depending on the museums’ size, governance, subject matter, and location. Small and medium museums proliferated, as did independent museums; growth in the South of England far out-paced that in the North; local history museums multiplied and new subjects came on stream. The museum boom re-shaped the sector.

Read the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09548963.2023.2227864. It’s behind an academic paywall, so if you want to read it but don’t have access, feel free to contact me.

How long do museums last?

The Museums and Galleries History Group recently ran a competition for new blogs about any aspect of museum history, and my entry won a prize. I looked at data on hundreds of museum closures to see what it could tell us about how long museums survive:

All closures in the UK since 1960 have been recorded by the Mapping Museums project, and as the project’s database includes the opening and closing dates for most of these museums, it’s possible to get an insight into how long museums typically last before they shut. What can examining the lifespans of those closures tell us about the nature of the UK’s museum sector?

You can read the whole thing here: http://www.mghg.info/blog/2023/1/15/how-long-do-museums-last

Creative Repurposing: Heritage Assets in Urban Renewal

Between May and July 2022, I’ve been working as a researcher for the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community. Our project examined the idea of ‘creative repurposing’ and my focus was the refurbishment of a short row of buildings at 170–175 High Street West, Sunderland.

Above: 170–175 High Street West, Sunderland, 2017. Photo © Alun Bull, Historic England Archive.

170–175 High Street West, Sunderland in 2022. An oblique view of three shopfronts from across the street. From left to right, a turquoise shopfrint with an A-frame sign outside; a dark green shopfrint with a curved bay window above, and a dark grey shopfront with the word POP in large white letters at upper left. Part of a fourth building neoclassical frontage with decorated columns is at the far right.
170–175 High Street West, Sunderland, 2022. Photo: Mark Liebenrood.

I worked alongside two other researchers, Rachel Delman and Jon Winder, who were looking at similar projects in Coventry and Barking & Dagenham.

You can watch one product of our research: an online event about creative repurposing in June.

London’s Lost Museums

Londonist has an article about London’s Lost Museums, including the Theatre Museum, the Cuming Museum, and the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum. You could argue that not everything featured in the article is a museum – the London Planetarium, for example – but it’s a nice sampling of the diversity of now-lost venues.

Cardiff Bay then and now

Part of my PhD on museum closure is about the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum. The museum stood on the waterfront of Tiger Bay, the part of Cardiff once filled with canals and large docks. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation redeveloped the area, renaming it as Cardiff Bay in the process. During the redevelopment, the Corporation bought the industrial museum’s site and sold part of it to a property developer. The Mermaid Quay shopping centre opened on the site in 1999.

These photos show the transformation of the bay area. The bay was tidal, and mud flats were exposed when the tide was out. That changed when the bay was enclosed with a barrage to raise the water level to a consistent height. The black and white photos were taken in 1979, two years after the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum opened. I took the colour photos in February 2022.

The former Steam Packet Harbour in 1979. The Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum (centre) and the Pierhead Building (right) are seen in the background. Photograph by Gordon Hayward, © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.
Cardiff Bay in 2022.
The Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum (left), and Pierhead building, 1979. Photograph by Gordon Hayward, © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.
Cardiff Bay in 2022. Mermaid Quay (left), and the Pierhead building. The Wales Millennium Centre and the roof of the Welsh Senedd building are just visible on the right.

Research on Museums and Collections in the Pandemic

I work as a researcher on the project UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience. It’s just one of many projects funded by AHRC researching the impact of the pandemic on the arts and humanities. At a recent workshop for some of those project teams, I found that many others are also working on research related to museums and collections. The workshop was organised by the Pandemic and Beyond project, and I wrote a summary of the museum-related research for their blog.

Read it here: https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter.ac.uk/blog/research-on-museums-and-collections-in-the-pandemic/

Museums and Galleries History Group Conference 2021

The MGHG postponed their Biennial Conference from 2020 due to Covid, but the programme for the 2021 conference on ‘Museum Networks and Museum History’ is now online: http://www.mghg.info/programme

On the first day I’ll be talking about some of my research on museum closure. I’ll discuss the complex network of connections around the Passmore Edwards, a museum in East London that closed in 1994.

Register for the conference here: http://www.mghg.info/tickets