UKRI awards £70m to university museums and collections

University museums and collections from 21 higher education institutes will receive a share of £14m of Higher Education Museums, Galleries, and Collections funding each year until 2029/2030.

The funding from Research England – part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation – has been raised from £11.7m and will go to 40 higher education museums, galleries, and collections, compared to 33 in previous rounds.

Among those receiving the multi-year grants are nine museums and collections at Cambridge University, which will share more than £2.9m, and four at Oxford, splitting more than £4m.

Three Birmingham University collections will share £400,000, while the Royal College of Music Museum and The Courtauld Institute of Art will get over £221,000 and £696,000, respectively.

Dr Liz Hide, Director of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University, which has been awarded £210,000 a year, said the funding would go toward “[ensuring] researchers can fully utilise our new Collections Research Centre, and enabling our outstanding collections to inspire many new avenues of research across both the sciences and the humanities.”