ABSTRACT
As we draw the chapters together for this book in spring 2017, strange things are happening in museums in our home countries, the UK and China. In the UK, already large museums are planning expansions, seemingly only able to survive in a state of perpetual growth. We have seen examples of collections being moved from museums in the north of the country to London, reducing the cultural resource for audiences in one location whilst simultaneously fuelling even more expansion in the capital (Ellis-Petersen 2017). Flagship Heritage Lottery Fund projects, part of the growth in new museums and updating and expansion of many established museums which took place across the country around the millennium, are under threat of closure as their funding is cut, and it is assumed that they can operate in just the same way as large London-based museums where tourism and corporate sponsorship now dominate (Newbould 2017). In extreme cases, these museums only continue to survive as a result of the energy, ingenuity and vision of their leaders. And once iconic exhibits and displays such as Launchpad in London’s Science Museum, which offered free educational fun to families for almost 30 years, have been replaced by high-budget displays with big business sponsors and placed behind a paywall (Macrae and Payne 2015; Garrard 2016). This is happening elsewhere in the country as the notion of charging for access to public collections gains greater traction in the face of cuts in public funding and a lack of alternative vision.
