They have expanded into dog collars, pencils, lawnmowers, teapots and cuckoo clocks. Perhaps, it has been suggested, Britain may just have reached peak museum.
A former arts minister has called for the country to move away from the “bricks and mortar motif” of a museum. And the world-class objects created and collected over millennia? Put them in a shopping centre, Ed Vaizey said.
Mr Vaizey, the culture minister under David Cameron, was highlighting a government-commissioned review of the sector, which suggested that public funds should be used to repair existing museums rather than build new ones.
There are 2,600 museums in England alone, holding about 200 million objects. However, the Mendoza review concluded that they “struggled to make best use of their collections”, with 90