British Museum vows to help regional collections through tough times

The British Museum has said that is loaning works to UK museums at an unprecedented level to help them weather waters that are likely to be choppy for at least five years.

Launching the museum's annual report, the museum's director, Neil MacGregor, spoke of "new kind of engagement" with museums across the UK to develop the sense of there being "one national collection, one community of scholarship".

He said loans to regional museums – six of the Lewis chessmen to the Hebrides, for example, or Herakles to Bexhill – were complicated to fund but the museum was committed to continue loaning on a very large scale.

"It is part of the British Museum's role in helping regional museums across the UK with the difficult circumstances they find themselves in – using loans from the museum to persuade their own authorities to support them and to attract other support and other funding. It means an unprecedented level of travelling loans, right across the country."

MacGregor said the impact of the loans was remarkable. When a Pharaoh exhibition went to Dorchester, he said, it had record visitor numbers. "At every level, the museum feels this lending is critical."

MacGregor said the problems facing museums outside London were going to be one of the major cultural challenges of the next five years.

Only this week the problems facing the sector were laid bare in an annual survey by the Museums Association, which showed that 51% of UK museums had their funding cut this year and 31% have had a cut for the second year running. Of that latter group, 83% had cut staff and 49% had increased charges for schools.

This comes at a time when museums and galleries have rarely been more popular. The British Museum itself reported 5.8 million visitors in 2011-12, making it the most popular cultural attraction for a fifth year running.

The annual report was launched in a new gallery, funded by Citigroup, telling the history of money using the museum's extraordinary collection of coins and banknotes.

"It is a dull, grey story punctuated by raspberry episodes," joked MacGregor. "And it is our misfortune, of course, to be living in a raspberry episode."

The gallery is a reminder that boom and bust has a long history. MacGregor said: "As you all, with your loved ones, gather round the wireless to hear Robert Peston counter the next apocalypse, you can comfort yourself with the fact that it has all happened before and we can see that here."

Among the big exhibitions coming up will be the first devoted to ice age art, a time when humankind began making sculpture about the world about them. "It is not just a chance to see the beginnings of a cultural tradition, it is an exhibition about the arrival of the modern mind," said MacGregor. "Somewhere around 40,000 years ago, we start thinking differently, we start being able to conceive things that don't exist."

The last big show in the museum's reading room, about Pompeii, will be next year. From 2014, major charging exhibitions will be staged in the new £135m extension for which 90% of the funding has been raised, with the Vikings first up.

It was also announced that the Waddesdon bequest will be redisplayed in a new gallery thanks to funding from the Rothschild Foundation. The group of almost 300 objects is a remarkable collection of medieval and Renaissance jewellery, metalwork, glass and ceramics bequeathed by the Rothschilds in 1898. It lives in a rather tired-looking cul-de-sac of a room and from next year will be moved to a new space beyond the Enlightenment gallery.

Source