Category: Museum Closure

New article on museum closure

I’ve published an article on some aspects of museum closure in the journal Museum and Society: Museum Closure in the UK: Themes, Issues, and Trends. The journal is open access, so it’s free to read.

The article looks at a variety of examples from the UK and elsewhere, and draws on data from the Mapping Museums project to show trends in the UK’s museum sector. As a quick overview of some of the themes, here’s the abstract:

Museum closure has received little attention within museum studies. In this article I set out some of the main themes and issues that pertain to museum closure, with examples drawn mainly from the UK. Closure is difficult to define precisely, and in some cases it is also hard to date with accuracy, but I present a way of defining closure that focusses on museum sites. I also outline a typology of closures, distinguished using differing levels of impact and loss of access. Recent data makes it possible to analyse the trends of opening and closing in the sector during a period of over sixty years, and shows that, partly due to increasing closures, the sector has shown signs of stasis, if not shrinkage.

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

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.

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

Closing the Bakelite Museum

The Bakelite Museum opened in 1985 in London, moved to Somerset in the mid 1990s, and closed in 2018 when the lease expired. A new film by Fiona Candlin and the Derek Jarman Lab documents the museum and its process of closing.

Small museums often close leaving very few traces behind them, sometimes as little as a few entries in old guidebooks. But recording them more fully has great historical value. As Fiona writes:

It is important to document micromuseums because they often embody the concerns of specific groups at particular times and in particular places. Understanding what those concerns are is a means of understanding what people cared about. And it is important because micromuseums often construct exhibitions that have no obvious counterparts in major museums. The Bakelite Museum was a case in point because many of the artefacts were organised to create surreal juxtapositions or visual jokes. Tiny plastic living room furniture that was made for a doll’s house, including a television set, was placed on top of a television set, a dentist’s case of plastic false teeth and a clock embedded in a plastic ostrich with bendy legs were placed on a Bakelite coffin to form a memento mori, and wooden shoe-trees surrounded an electric heater evoking images of footwear being kicked off and feet warmed. 

The full feature on the film is on the Derek Jarman Lab’s website.

Types of museum closure

I’ve written a blog for the Mapping Museums project on types of museum closure. It’s the first published product of my ongoing PhD research. As I write in the blog:

Not all museums close in the same way. My own research into museum closure in the UK over the last sixty years shows that there are different types of museum closure, and some have more impact: they are more final than others.

Read the whole piece here: http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/mapping-museums/2020/04/29/types-of-museum-closure/