Lost museums – can you help?

Do you know what happened to the Vinas Dolls Gallery in Newark, which closed in 2015, or where the collection of the Norfolk Museum of Straw Works ended up after its founder Ella Carstairs died in 2017?

The Mapping Museums Lab at Birkbeck and King’s College London are researching museum closures in the UK from 2000 to 2025, and trying to find out what happens to collections when museums close. Do they go to other museums, or into storage, or are they sold? How much remains in the public domain and on display, and how much is dispersed elsewhere? The team are also interested in what happens to the buildings that these museums once occupied. What purposes are they then put to, or do they remain empty and unused?

The project began in October with a list of over 480 museums recorded as closed since 2000. The Mapping Museum’s team has succeeded in gathering information for almost 400, but the rest of the list have proved difficult to find out much about despite numerous enquiries.

And this is where AIM members come in. We know that the museum community has acquired a wealth of information over many years, and it’s possible that you may know what happened in some of the cases where our enquiries have stalled.

You may know something about the Mechanical Memories Museum in Brighton, which apparently closed in 2020 or 2021, the Abergynolwyn Village Museum in Wales, closed c. 2007, or the Museum of Cipher Equipment in Cupar, Scotland, which may have closed at any time between 2004 and 2017.

Click here to see the full list of closures>>

If you have any information about what happened to the collections or buildings for any of these museums, do get in touch, it would be very much appreciated:

Mark Liebenrood, Mapping Museums Lab on m.liebenrood@bbk.ac.uk