AHRC-funded research to examine UK museum closures

A new research project examining museum closures in the UK has recieved £1m funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The project will look at museum closures and the dispersal of collections within the UK museum sector.

Titled Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025, the two-year project will be based at Birkbeck, University of London and King’s College London.

Research will begin in October and be led by Fiona Candlin, professor of museology at Birkbeck.

The research team said: “We will investigate the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums. 

“A knowledge base will be designed to model and store the collected data, and visualisations and analyses of the data will be developed. Above all, we aim at critically reassessing notions of permanence and loss within the museums sector.”