New report suggests over 500 museums have closed since 2000

Image: Shipwreck Treasure Museum, Charleston, Cornwall closed in 2024 - courtesy Shipwreck Treasure Museum

Almost 530 museums have closed since 2000 and the risk of closure is far higher within the first 10 years of a museum’s life, a ground-breaking report has found, according to the Museums Association.

It states:

'Published by the Mapping Museums Lab at Birkbeck, University of London in December 2025, the report is based on a large-scale, two-and-a-half year research project on museum closures over the past 25 years.

'The study – the first of its kind conducted on the UK museum sector – documented the closure of 524 museums between 2000 and 2025, examining why they closed and what happened to their collections.  

'Fiona Candlin, the director of the Mapping Museums Lab, gave an overview of the “rich and extensive” data gathered by the project at the launch event. The research found that the sector has grown since 2000, with 870 museums opening over that period.

'However the growth rate of museums has “flattened” in recent years and the sector is ageing, with fewer new museums opening every year.

'Fiona Candlin said.

"The project found that the closure rate has stabilised to around 1% after reaching a high of 2% during the austerity years of the early 2010s. Age is a significant factor in determining the risk of closure, the data showed, with museums much more likely to close before they are 10 years old. Many new museums that opened in the late 20^th century did not survive until 2025, according to the report. Private museums - museums run by individuals, families, organisations or businesses – had the highest rate of closure at 37%.

'However local authority museum provision has also shrunk significantly, with the rate of closure outpacing opening among local authorities. The report recorded the loss of 139 museums – 8% of the local authority sector - over the past 25 years.

Ten districts that had local authority museums in 2000 did not have any in 2025, including Barnet, Wandsworth, Neath Port Talbot and Caerphilly, while a further 21 local authorities had lost all but one of their museums.

'By contrast, the closure rate for independent museums rarely rose above 0.5% over the same period.

'A wide range of reasons were cited for closure, with funding cuts being the most common trigger for local authority museums.

“Local authorities are struggling to cover the costs and the rising costs of statutory services, and museums are an area where spending can be legally reduced or indeed cut entirely,” said Candlin. “They're not statutory so we're seeing funding cuts for them.”

'Meanwhile rising costs were the biggest risk for independents.

“Museums often close incrementally,” said Candlin. “They gradually reduce their opening times. They shift to seasonal opening, they end up just having open days, and finally, they are completely closed.”

'The study showed that footfall was no guarantee of survival. Thirty large museums, each attracting between 50,000 and 100,000 visitors a year, closed since 2000. More than 100 medium-sized museums that received between 10,000 and 50,000 visitors also closed, with medium-sized museums reporting a higher rate of closures than openings over the 25-year period.

“These museums had an audience; they were serving their communities,” the report said. “They may have been uncommercial or unsustainable, but they were not irrelevant.”

'Some closures were strategically planned, with 45 museums closing because a replacement museum was planned or as part of an amalgamation process. Loss of premises was also a  common reason for closure, particularly for military museums.

'The research project explored what happened to collections after closure.

'It found that in recent years, the collections of closed local authority museums were increasingly likely to be put in storage or remain mothballed in situ rather than being transferred to other museums.

'No reports of irresponsible disposal were found by the study. “On the contrary, it was clear that staff at closed museums had often put a great deal of time, thought and imagination into securing appropriate homes for their collections,” the report said.

'The research found that such transfers went to a wide variety of recipients, including other museums, the armed forces, civic organisations, schools and universities, as well as some more unusual venues such as care homes, lighthouses and airports.

“One of the things to stress about some of these transfers is that they can be really beneficial to the recipients,” said Candlin.

'The Mapping Museums Lab has launched an open-access web application allowing users to explore and visualise the data.

'Neil Mendoza, who led the UK Government's 2017 Mendoza review of museum provision in England and is now the chair of

Historic England, said the data gathered gave a snapshot of a “dynamic sector”.

“We need to understand the museum sector completely… It's not a totally negative picture,” he said at the launch event. “In a way, it's quite a positive picture, as well as the thinking about the terrible times that people can go through in the sector.”

'The data would help inform discussion on what the UK museum sector should look like in future, he said.

“What kind of museum sector do we want? What kinds of museums should we have? How many should we have? Do we have too many? Do we have too few?,” he asked.

“[With the data] we will be able to understand museums by size, by location, by type, by outcome. It’s really useful and it's really going to be important for museums.”'