Many small museums fear they may be forced to close as visitor numbers fall and running costs rise.
Three in five said they were worried about their future, according to new research, with over three quarters describing it as the most challenging time they’ve known in the sector.
Hannah Harte, director of the London Museum of Water and Steam, in Brentford, west London, has seen footfall decline as much as 25% since before the pandemic.
“Year in, year out, opening this museum costs about £400,000 but that doesn’t include all the maintenance, all the building work,” she said.
“Those are all project work on top of that and we rely on an awful lot of volunteers to help us.”
Luckily, there is no shortage of those – but water drips into buckets from the leaking roof as the rain pours down.
The research has been carried out by the charity Kids in Museums, alongside web hosting company GoDaddy, and coincides with a campaign encouraging families to support their local, independent museums.
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The charity’s chief executive, Alison Bowyer, says that backing is crucial.
“People say they value their local museums, that they’re a really important part of their community, but they’ve really got to back that up by supporting their local museum, by visiting or donating,” she said.
“In the past 20 years or so about 500 museums have closed and those museums are not going to come back.
“Their collections get dispersed, their buildings get dilapidated, so those museums are lost forever.”
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And with many of the museums reporting a cut in spending by those who do visit and a drop in donations, it’s only making a difficult situation harder.
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At the London Museum of Water and Steam, £2.6m is going to help save an area of the site where one of the original steam pumps that sent water all around the capital from the 1830s is still in situ.
It’s a major job but none of that money can be used for maintenance elsewhere on the site so, for now at least, the buckets need to stay.
