Category: Research

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.

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.

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

Life as a research assistant

I work part-time as a research assistant for the Mapping Museums project at Birkbeck. My main job is maintaining the project’s database of over four thousand museums – but what does that involve? I’ve written a short piece about the work of data collection, data checking, and some of the ways in which the long list of museums is still growing. You can read it here.

Serendipities of online community

The many-headed monster blog, run by a group of academic historians, has been publishing a series on the best way to build communities online. Under the tag #SchOnline, the posts have covered teaching, conferences, online meetings, and more.

As part of the series I wrote about the benefits of Twitter and blogs, based on some of my recent experiences of doing research online.

The whole series is well worth reading – the contents page is here: https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2020/07/22/schonline-scholarly-communities-online/