The Hidden Crisis Inside Britain’s Museums

Visitors rarely think about museum storage. For most of us, the museum experience is defined by touring exhibitions, cafés and bars, learning spaces and gift shops. Yet, across the UK, the vast majority of museum’s holdings remain out of sight, and in increasingly precarious conditions.

These unseen storage spaces – the resting place of the artefacts a museum has been designed to care for – have become one of the clearest indicators of the financial pressures reshaping Britain’s cultural sector.

New research commissioned by the National Lottery Heritage Fund reveals a sector whose storage infrastructure is reaching its limits.

The report, titled Museum Collections, Storage, Access and Resilience Research (2026), was undertaken by social research agency BMG Research in partnership with museum consultancy Barker Langham. Conducted across the UK, the study combined a survey of 218 museums with interviews involving 15 sector stakeholders. Survey responses were anonymised, while stakeholder comments are reproduced throughout the report without being individually attributed.

According to the research, 60 per cent of museums say their stores are already full, only 15 per cent meet recognised conservation standards and more than two-thirds do not calculate the cost of storing their collections. More than 70 per cent of collections remain in storage. The figures describe an immediate conservation challenge. They also point to a broader shift in museum priorities that has unfolded over the past decade, driven by Brexit concerns and the pandemic. In the researchers’ own terms, museums should begin to treat storage as “critical infrastructure, not a discretionary cost.”

Museums have invested in visibility

Since the financial crisis in 2008 and subsequent reductions in local authority funding, museums have operated under a sustained and growing pressure to demonstrate public value. Success is measured through impact indicators – visitor numbers, educational programmes, fundraising and commercial activity. Institutions compete for audiences, sponsorship and philanthropy while seeking new sources of earned income through ticketed exhibitions, retail, hospitality and venue hire.

Those priorities are understandable. But they have also changed where scarce resources are directed.

Storage generates little income, rarely attracts political attention and is almost entirely invisible to visitors. When budgets tighten, investment in roofs, shelving, environmental controls, cataloguing and conservation staff is easily postponed in favour of projects that produce immediate public or financial returns.

The study reflects those choices. Interviewees repeatedly describe huge maintenance backlogs, deteriorating buildings, shrinking collections teams and years of deferred investment in storage facilities. In some instances, experienced conservators have been replaced by entry-level employees who lack the specialist skills needed to care for highly perishable materials.

One interviewee told the researchers: “While capital funding for such projects is occasionally available, it rarely includes revenue funding to cover additional staff or operational costs.”

Ultimately, these conditions are the inevitable consequence of funding priorities that place immediate financial and public returns above fundamental collections care.

Dinornis novaezealandiae skeleton at York Museums Trust, 2013. Photo: Jonathan Cardy via Wikimedia Commons

The hidden cost of austerity

Local authority museums, particularly those outside London, illustrate the consequences most clearly. The research shows how years of reductions in revenue funding have reshaped organisational priorities among institutions operating with more limited resources.

Capital funding occasionally arrives for new buildings or redevelopment projects, but funding for collections staff has proved far harder to secure. The report details a downward spiral: as professional teams have shrunk, cataloguing backlogs have grown, preventative conservation has slowed and strategic collections management has become increasingly difficult.

Maintenance has followed the same trajectory. Survey respondents describe leaking roofs, mould, unstable environmental conditions and council-owned buildings whose repair has repeatedly been delayed. Others report uncertainty over the future of storage buildings as local authorities seek to repurpose or dispose of property assets.

One respondent said: “External store buildings are not fit for purpose. Chronic underfunding and limited spending by local authority facilities teams means the buildings are low priority and poorly maintained.”

Another said: “The majority of the museum storage is in buildings that the local authority would like to repurpose or dispose of.”

The consequences extend beyond the condition of the objects themselves. Incomplete documentation makes it harder for museums to understand what they hold, respond to emergencies, plan exhibitions or make collections available for research. Public access is also affected because stores lack visitor facilities or the staff needed to supervise them. Only two per cent of museums currently offer open-access storage.

Another interview participant described the practical challenges of making stored collections publicly accessible: “People love the collections centre, coming behind the scenes and seeing objects for what they are... but it is resource heavy. The location of collections centres, often on industrial estates where public transport is not good... makes access an issue.”

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England, 2013. Photo: Sarah Stierch via Wikimedia Commons

Collecting continues because museums cannot stop

One of the report’s most revealing findings exposes a contradiction at the centre of contemporary collections management – the political stasis around deaccessioning.

Eighty-three per cent of museums continue to acquire new material, the report finds. At the same time, almost half disposed of nothing during the previous year. The result is a system that is expanding more quickly than it can organise, document or house itself.

Archaeology demonstrates the problem particularly clearly. Major infrastructure projects continue to generate substantial archaeological archives that museums are expected to preserve indefinitely. Storage capacity has failed to keep pace. 

The report echoes recommendations first set out in Arts Council England and Historic England’s Options for Sustainable Archaeological Archives (2021), commissioned by Arts Council England and Historic England and authored by Quinton Carroll, Sally Croft, Manda Forster, Samantha Paul and Justin Wiles. The report advocated for a new system in which archaeological archives are managed as a coordinated national collection rather than leaving individual museums to absorb ever-growing deposits.

As the Heritage Fund research notes, the 2021 study proposed “approaching the issue as a national collection to be managed appropriately with centralised documentation and storage— either in a regional hub and spoke model or as a single collection.”

The same conclusion emerged repeatedly in the report’s anonymised stakeholder interviews. As one participant put it: “We have a growing need for centralised, shared, or off-site storage solutions, especially for large or oversized objects. These challenges indicate mounting pressure on collections care infrastructure and the need for strategic, long-term planning across the sector.”

The same pressures increasingly affect contemporary collecting. Museums acknowledge that important acquisitions are constrained simply because there is nowhere suitable to keep them.

One building cannot solve a structural problem

Against this backdrop, the V&A East Storehouse stands apart. The new collections centre in east London, part of The Victoria and Albert Museum and unveiled to the public in May 2025, offers a markedly different vision of museum storage, as it treats reserve collections as a core part of the visitor experience. It also demonstrates what becomes possible when storage is recognised as cultural infrastructure – one supported by significant capital investment.

Most museums operate under very different conditions. Many rely on ageing buildings, rented warehouses or adapted industrial units while attempting to care for nationally significant collections.

The Storehouse is frequently presented as a model for the future. But, for much of the sector, it currently represents an aspiration rather than a realistic blueprint.

Weston Collections Hall at V&A East Storehouse. Photo Kemka Ajoku. Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum

A test of what museums value

The report argues that expanding storage alone will not resolve the crisis. Museums require sustained investment in collections staff, documentation, environmental management, rationalisation and regional collaboration.

Ultimately, the storage crisis is inseparable from the way museums are funded.

Over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, institutions have become increasingly adept at generating commercial income. Resources have poured into marketing and outreach campaigns in an effort to attract new visitors as overall football has decreased. Those pressures have reshaped organisational priorities across the sector.

As the report’s conclusions echo states: “As museums face reduced capacity, their priorities have focussed on resilience, attracting audiences, generating income and staying open. Unfortunately, stored collections often lack the attention they need, making it even more important to highlight their value now.”

Storage may sit beyond public view, but it underpins every exhibition, loan, research project and acquisition. The study suggests that its condition has become one of the clearest measures of the long-term resilience of Britain’s museums – and of the trade-offs embedded within the sector’s current economic model.