Beamish Museum has won the Art Fund award for Museum of the Year 2025, beating Chapter, a multi-arts space in Cardiff, Compton Verney, an 18th century Warwickshire mansion, whose sculpture park is home to Louise Bourgeois’s Spider, Perth Museum, which opened last year and Golden Thread, a contemporary arts hub in Belfast.
Rhiannon Hiles
In response to the award, Rhiannon Hiles, Beamish’s Chief Executive commented:
““We are incredibly excited and truly elated to be named Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025.
“To receive such a prestigious award is a real honour, a phenomenal achievement, and is credit to the amazing people who make Beamish such a special place. Thank you to our fantastic staff and volunteers and to our communities, visitors, supporters and partners for their support.
“Our thanks to Art Fund for this award – it has been a privilege to be shortlisted alongside such fantastic museums, a huge well done to all of the finalists.”
Rhiannon was handed the £120 000 prize, said to be the biggest such museum prize in the world by comedian and Art Fund judge Phil Wang, comedian and judge for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025, at a ceremony on 26th June at the Museum of Liverpool.
Phil Wang
Phil Wang, who visited Beamish Museum as part of the judging process, was clearly impressed. Of his visit to Beamish he said:
“Beamish is a worthy winner of this year’s Art Fund Museum of the Year award. Our visit was one of the most fun days I’ve had in years.
“An unbelievable level of commitment from staff, and a jaw-dropping amount of detail ran through everything. They had to drag me kicking and screaming out of there.”
Communities
Meanwhile, Chair of Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, Chris Loughran said:
“Communities sit at the heart of Beamish. They always have and they always will.
“We’re proud to be a place, a space and an anchor for all. Beamish is the North East’s leading visitor attraction, but it also is the beating heart of our region’s identity and values. That’s why I am especially proud of the museum’s work to support wellbeing and learning activities, as a welcoming and inclusive place.
“Our next strategy will take us to 2035 and see Beamish play an even larger role in supporting the region’s communities and economy. We could not have achieved this without all of our staff, volunteers and supporters.”
This was really important as the Museums Association has pointed out that the 2025 award was focused particularly on community impact and indeed all five finalists were selected for their deep connections with local communities.
A sanitised rose-tinted view of the past?
Beamish has had its detractors, including in the North East. An editorial comment in the Guardian on 30 June, talked of Beamish containing the “ephemera of ordinary lives” rom teapots to trolleybuses. It also mentioned how past is brought alive at Beamish by more than 800 local volunteers and staff in period costumes, while “you can buy bread from the Victorian bakery, pat pit ponies and get a fifties bouffant blow‑dry at the hairdressers”.
The editorial goes on to argue that this is clearly a sanitised version of the past, where you can “go down a pit without getting your hands dirty”. The editorial also noted how cultural historian Robert Hewison wrote in his 1987 polemic The Heritage Industry that Beamish was part of what he identified as a Thatcherite phenomenon of ersatz nostalgia and commercialisation: “Instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage”.
Five years later, writing in the book Geordies, Bill Williamson wrote of Beamish that, “history here is literally spectacular, a drama in a theme park, straining credibility, to become a village where previously none existed”, before going on to say that, “at Beamish, the bad old days become a bench mark against which to measure progress and bask in the heartwarming glow of a nostalgic past. It is one free of the squalor, the tensions and the defeats. It is free too of the hard graft and steady political gains which were also part of that past and which, in the tedium of committee work in trade unions or branch meetings of the Labour Party or the Cooperative store, even of the chapel, people were encouraged to take their destiny in their own hands with the promise of a better world to be built.”
A source of pride
However, it is not easy to build a museum, which can reflect every aspect of life in the place and time it is trying to depict. Regularly going to museums all over the North East and much of the north of England I have found that many of them tread a fine line between being interesting and entertaining to the public, so that they get enough visitors, while not becoming so dumbed down that people visiting them end up learning nothing and feeling nothing. Beamish treads that line better than many do.
In the same book, Geordies, in 1992, Bill Lancaster noted that, “the most notable local museums, Beamish, the Science and Military Vehicle collections and numerous industrial heritage siters display a strong deep-rooted pride in the region’s industrial past.”
This is a point also taken up by the Guardian in it editorial. They note that the North East has seen the waiting list for social housing increase dramatically in the last five years, and consequently, an “idyllic “model” village might have been expected to cause resentment. Instead, research shows that it is a source of pride”.
The editorial ends up by saying: “For many, museums are as much a part of the British summer as music festivals and sporting events. They are certainly a lot cheaper. With the world’s treasures in our pockets, and limitless information at our fingertips, today’s museums must offer something more, especially for children. Long before mobile phones, Beamish was one of the first immersive museum experiences. Here the past is not a foreign country – you can get there on a tram”.
Comment
There are those who see Beamish as showing us a rose-tinted version of the past and there is certainly some truth in this assertion, even though to be fair, a banner hall with miners’ banners has been added since the book Geordies was published in 1992.
That said, it is still a very popular museum with many within our region and can undoubtedly act as a very good starting point for children, who going by reactions when I ask when I visit schools to teach local history, nearly all seem to have visited it by the time they are 11.
And yes, it would be good if more of the children who visited Beamish were told by their teachers exactly what a cooperative shop was and why they were special, rather than just seeing it as an ‘old shop’. However, Beamish does act as a great introduction to life in the past in the North East. It is perhaps up to others to fill in some of the gaps that Bill Williamson spoke about, while we can all be proud of Beamish’s achievement in winning the Art Fund Museum of the year Award for 2025.
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