The Museums and Galleries History Group are delighted to host the following blog post by the winner of our recent competition, Mark Liebenrood.
The ICOM definition of a museum was recently rewritten, and in its new form still defines museums as ‘permanent institutions’. But while some museums have indeed been open for centuries, others have lasted only months before closing. 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?
There are 866 closures listed in the database to date, but only 566 museums have exact opening and closing dates – just under two-thirds of the closures. Nonetheless, that smaller set of museums can still offer a fairly accurate picture of museum lifespans.
The distribution of those durations is shown in the chart below. The median average duration of a museum in the sample is 23 years, shown by the dashed line. That duration may seem surprisingly brief, but the distribution is strongly weighted towards shorter lifespans. Half of these museums lasted between 13 and 40 years. Far fewer of the closed museums in the database have longer lifespans, and the chart shows a long tail of those small numbers that reaches to almost 200 years.
Is the average lifespan the same for all types of museums? Because the Mapping Museums data also records a museum’s governance and size, it is possible to determine whether there are variations in lifespan between different types of museum.
Governance
The chart above shows durations by the type of governance. At the top are local authority museums, and there are 151 closures of these recorded in the dataset. Local authority museums have a median average duration of 39 years, the longest of the four groups shown here. There are very few closures of national museums, and these are mostly branches rather than standalone museums. These have lasted for an average of 33 years. Independent museums have even shorter average durations. Not for profit independents have an average lifespan of 22 years, while those run privately have a shorter average lifespan of 17 years. Private museums are also the largest group in this data, with 187 recorded as closed. Based on these figures, private museums are far more likely to have shorter lives than other types.
Size
Considering the lifespans of museums by their size gives a different picture. A museum’s size in this data is determined by the number of visitors. Small museums received up to ten thousand visitors a year, medium museums up to 50,000, and large museums up to 1 million. Relatively few large museums have closed, and those that did had an average lifespan of 26 years. About three times as many medium museums closed, and these had a longer average lifespan of 36 years. Lastly, three times as many small museums closed as did those of medium size. Not only do small museums seem the most likely to close, but they have the shortest average lifespan of all three groups, at just 21 years.
Behind these statistics are the stories of hundreds of closures, most of which have yet to be told. Three museums lasted less than a year. The Museum of British Beer - The World of Brewing, which was near London’s Tower Bridge, opened in 1980 and closed months later for reasons that are as yet unrecorded. In 2014, the Prefab Museum in South London was open for just six months before being destroyed by a fire, and is now an online resource. And York saw the short-lived opening of the UK’s only Fish and Chip museum, which featured a coal-powered fish fryer. It closed just a few months after it opened in 2019.
What kinds of museums last an average length of time? As the sector is so diverse it is hard to generalise, but a small sample of the museums that lasted 23 years gives an indication of the variety: the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives (1963–86), which was the first film museum in Britain, Colchester’s Social History Museum (1974–1997), and the Prison Service Museum in Rugby (1982–2005).
Some museums stand out for their long lifespans. The local authority museum that was open longest was the Falconer Museum in Forres, Scotland, open for 149 years until it closed in 2020. The Geological Museum in London is the longest-lived national museum to feature in these statistics and was open for 151 years (its building and collections now form part of the Natural History Museum). The closed museum that lasted longest was the museum of the Royal Artillery in Woolwich, South London. This began life in 1820 at the Rotunda, a circular tent-like building designed by John Nash that had been moved to Woolwich Common from its original site at Carlton House. In 2001 the museum was moved to the nearby Royal Arsenal and renamed as Firepower. The museum lasted until 2016 – a grand total of 196 years – and is now in storage in Wiltshire.
The Rotunda, Woolwich. Photo: by Kleon3, CC BY-SA 4.0
As the data shows, most closed museums have had much shorter lives than the Royal Artillery Museum. On average, they have been open for little more than a tenth of that time. That statistic raises a question that I touched on at the start. How should we think about the supposed permanence of museums when so many were not permanent but temporary, and often short-lived?
Mark Liebenrood was research assistant on the Mapping Museums project from 2017 to 2021 and completed his PhD on museum closure in 2022. He is researcher on the project ‘Museums in the Pandemic: risk, closure, and resilience’, and a visiting early career fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, 2022–3.