The UK museum boom: continuity and change 1960–2019

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage debates
• governance
• museum size
• closed museums
• data collection
• grassroots museums

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hudson's summation was echoed by Weil (1999).

2 See also Bob West (1988).

3 On the foundational role of the heritage debates for the new discipline of heritage studies see: Candlin (2012) and Woodham (2018).

4 For a broader analysis of closure see: Liebenrood (2022) and Museums Association (2017).

5 On UK museum surveys and reports between 1960 and 2017 see: Candlin, Larkin, Ballatore, and Poulovassilis (2019).

6 Longitudinal analyses tend to concentrate on individual institutions. Valuable exceptions include Babbidge (2005, 2018a, 2018b), O’Neill et al. (2019).

7 For a discussion of problems with museums data see: Candlin and Poulovassilis (2019).

8 The Mapping Museums dataset includes museums from the Crown dependencies.

9 Mapping Museums project website: https://museweb.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/home Accessed 03/10/22

10 The research team analysed the date covering the period 1960–2017 in Candlin, Larkin, Ballatore, and Poulovassilis (2020). Our findings have since been revised.

11 On the museum boom occurring in the late 1960s see: Samuel (1994).

12 For a detailed discussion of how our definitions of museums were formulated see: Candlin and Larkin (2020).

13 The Accreditation Scheme was introduced mid way through the period under study so in this article we do not consider trends within accreditation.

14 Arts Council England (ACE) uses a variety of indicators to assess size, and it is assessed differently depending on governance. Our indicators are in line with those that ACE use for independent museums.

15 In this study Local Authority museums that have retained ownership of the building and collection but have transferred management but not ownership of the collections to an independent group are still categorised as being local authority.

16 On DOMUS see: “Digest of Museum Statistics (DOMUS): Dataset Documentation” (2002 1994), EB 6/4, The National Archives, Kew.

17 In 2019, there were 18 women’s personality museums: Jane Austen’s House Museum; Bronte Parsonage Museum; Greenway (Agatha Christie); Dimbola Lodge (Julia Margaret Cameron); Grace Darling Museum; Elizabeth Garret Anderson Museum; Gaskell House; Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden; Octavia Hill’s Birthplace House; Florence Nightingale Museum; Marianne North Gallery; Pankhurst Centre; Hill Top (Beatrix Potter House); Beatrix Potter Gallery; Cae’r Gors (Kate Roberts); Mary Queen of Scots Museum; Violette Szabo Museum; Smallhythe place (Ellen Terry)

18 It was outside the scope of the study to systematically track the growth in numbers of visits to individual museums. Rather, we categorised museums according to the number of visits made in 2017, when we first collated the data. Please note that six of these museums only became huge in the last decade or so: Riverside, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, National Museum of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery, IWM London, Hampton Court.

19 The rising number of museums in Northern Ireland was not primarily due to the increase in independent museums. The balance of publicly funded and independent museums is much more even than in England, Scotland and Wales.

20 For an in-depth analysis of the geography of the UK museum boom at the level of local authorities see: Ballatore and Candlin (2023).

21 For a detailed analysis of how and why Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museums closed see: Liebenrood (2022).

22 In this we echo Drew (1984). The point about volunteer effort was reiterated in subsequent reports e.g. Morris (1988).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grants AH/N007042/1 and AH/V015028/1.