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

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

Phone box time machines – the UK’s smallest museums?

Telephone boxes across the UK have become defunct as so many people have acquired mobile phones. According to British Telecom, almost half of the phone boxes in the UK have been removed, but thousands more remain. In response to the decline in phone box use BT established a scheme, ‘Adopt a Kiosk’, that allows communities to keep their old red phone boxes. As time has passed, some of these boxes have been transformed into museums.

As I wrote in a previous blog, one of these telephone box museums is in Warley, West Yorkshire, and was featured on television. Run by the Warley Community Association, the box displays objects in its windows and has information panels inside.

Railways are a common theme of museums (there are over a hundred in the UK), and there is a phone box museum on this theme too. The Compton Down Railway Museum is sited at the Talyllyn Steam Railway and records the history of a miniature garden railway built by the enthusiast Peter Jones. The railway was rescued and became the Llechfan Garden Railway in the hostel at Twywn, the main station on the Talyllyn line.

Don’t confuse Talyllyn Railway in North Wales with Talyllyn Junction, which is in South Wales, near Brecon. There was a railway station at Talyllyn Junction, opened in 1863, but it closed in 1962. The small hamlet has a telephone box which has been refurbished by local volunteers and now features display boards about the area.

(The section on the phone box starts at 4:35.)

In another part of Wales, a telephone box houses a museum devoted to a photographer. Tom Mathias lived in Cilgerran, Pembrokeshire and documented life in his local area. His negatives were dumped in an outbuilding after he died in 1940, before being rediscovered by another photographer in the 1970s. The box stands just fifty metres from the house where Mathias lived.

Standing on a street in the Wirral, the last phone box in this list displays very few objects as it is devoted to a single pop song. It commemorates the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and their 1980 hit ‘Red Frame White Light’. The song was written about the phone box, which the band members used as their office as they did not have phones in their homes. After the box was removed by the local council a local fan managed to have it reinstated, repainted and decorated with artwork. Now a framed copy of the single is on display in the box, together with the lyrics of the song.

Update

After I published this post a reader got in touch to point out that there is another redundant phone box with local history information, which opened in January 2021. It’s in Burntisland, Fife, and the phone box displays timelines of Burntisland’s history.