UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience

Museums are a vital part of the UK's cultural and economic landscape. In England alone, they attract 100 million annual visits and have a turnover of £2.64 billion per annum. Senior staff in governmental and non-governmental museum agencies are deeply concerned that many museums will not survive the impact of COVID-19 with a correlative loss to the cultural and economic landscape.

Although museum agencies are urgently seeking funding and developing policy to manage the impact of COVID-19, they do not have established mechanisms for gathering comprehensive data on the UK museum sector, for tracking which museums are at risk of closure, and which actually close. Thus, they proceed with inadequate information.

This project will provide museum agencies with rigorous, timely data on which museums are at risk of closure, which museums close, which remain resilient, and how the profile of the UK museum sector changes as a result of COVID-19. We will develop indicators for risk and resilience that are applicable within the current crisis and assess whether the closures that occur have a disproportionate impact on particular audiences and localities.

The research draws on the expertise of an existing research team and combines quantitative and qualitative techniques including web-scraping, natural language processing, interview-based research, and primary data collection.