Museum Notebook: UK museums struggling in the time of Covid

Hardware Store at the Black Country Living Museum. Currently a Covid vaccination centre. Photo / Phil Sangwell

While cultural organisations are open as usual in Whanganui and the rest of New Zealand, it is a different story entirely elsewhere around the world.

Museums have struggled immensely during the ongoing pandemic, with sporadic closures, lack of income and staff burnout all taking their toll.

In the United Kingdom, museums have responded to these challenging conditions in different ways.

For almost a year now a majority of the 2500 museums in UK have been closed entirely.

During periods of eased lockdown in the last few months of 2020, some larger institutions were able to open with strict restrictions on capacity, pre-booked tickets and enforcement of social distancing and one-way trails through exhibitions.

In London, major facilities like the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery provided staff with PPE, and limited or removed their interactive displays and transitioned their cafes to takeaway options only.

For many smaller museums, these safety adaptations to their buildings and ways of working were not affordable or even physically possible.

As case numbers drastically increased over December and the government moved into stricter stay-home orders at the start of 2021, even larger, well-funded museums have had to close again.

While in lockdown, many museums have pivoted to innovative digital ways of reaching the public.

As children have been kept home from schools, museum educators have created engaging and exciting online programmes that highlight their collections and explore the world through videos, virtual exhibitions, workshops, apps, social media, activities and podcasts.

Talks by curators, behind-the-scenes virtual tours and large collection digitisation projects have all meant museums can continue some of their outreach while staff work from home.

Stained Glass Window. From the collection of the Florence Nightingale Museum, to close due to lack of resource during Covid. Photo / Amanda Slater

In some cases museums are also being transformed into mass vaccination centres. The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley (recognisable as a filming location for the TV series Peaky Blinders) has opened its doors in partnership with the National Health Service as a welcoming place to deliver vaccines to vulnerable members of the community.

Multiple other museums around the UK are preparing to follow suit.

Unfortunately, these periods of uncertainty have led many organisations to consider drastic cost-cutting measures, such as staff redundancies and indefinite or even permanent closure.

While many museums are partially funded by local councils or the Government, they also heavily rely on income from other sources including venue hire, entry costs, events, philanthropy and shop sales.

The Florence Nightingale Museum in London, which tells the story of the founder of modern nursing, recently announced its closure as the country went into its third national lockdown.

While the museum had received some emergency funding from the Government during its closures, drastic income losses throughout the year meant that it could no longer afford to pay staff.

Museum Notebook

If it has to close permanently, its collection will be dispersed. This situation is mirrored around the country. Figures from the UK's Museums Association show that around 4000 redundancies in museums nationwide have been caused by the pandemic.

As a newly arrived student, I would love to be able to visit my local museums here in the UK; however, this won't be possible for quite some time yet.

To everyone back home in New Zealand, make the most of your museums and galleries being open and check out their exhibitions this summer.

•Riah King-Wall was the Curatorial Advisor for the Teeth, Talons & Taxidermy exhibition currently running at the Whanganui Regional Museum. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Leeds, UK.