‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?
The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.
It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year. Add together everything owned by the Louvre, the National Gallery and the V&A, and you still have fewer than half the objects possessed by the British Museum.
Related: Behind the scenes at the British Museum – in pictures
It is not the oldest museum in Britain, but in essential ways it is the ur-museum, the one that set the pattern for all Britain’s national museums. Founded in 1753, it is the result of the decision of Sir Hans Sloane, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish doctor and collector enriched by, among other things, the labour of enslaved people in Jamaica, to leave his remarkable collection to the nation for “the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons”. Unlike its nearest counterparts overseas – the Louvre, the Hermitage – it was not established as a monarch’s projection of power, or, like the Metropolitan Museum, as an act of philanthropy by the super-rich. Instead, it was set up by, and is ultimately answerable to, parliament. Its aim was to shape the citizens of a newly united country, in the wake of the Jacobite attempt on the throne of 1745.
Today the British Museum is at a crisis point. It is not surprising that it should be. It is the British Museum after all. If Britain itself is searching for meaning in a postcolonial world then why should not its most resonant, its most celebrated museum? I remember being in Nairobi in 2006 with Neil MacGregor, director from 2002 to 2015. I was reporting on the opening of an exhibition – it was the first time that objects from the BM had been lent to any institution in Africa. I interviewed Idle Omar Farah, then the director-general of the National Museums of Kenya. “We feel this is going to be the central theme [of debate]: why are these objects, which come from here, kept in Britain?” he said. When I put this to MacGregor, he replied, with unusual testiness: “Repatriation is yesterday’s question.”
Events proved him wrong. Especially in the years of identity politics that have followed the 2008 global financial crisis, repatriation has become today’s question. Criticism of the museum particularly coalesces around the Benin bronzes, objects looted by the British from Benin City’s royal palace during a punitive attack in 1897, and the Parthenon sculptures, the legality of whose purchase by Lord Elgin has been disputed since the 1810s. The museum has said little publicly on these matters and, as far as the public is concerned, done little. Into this vacuum has rushed the notion that everything in the British Museum is stolen – a view that the museum, showing weak leadership, has done little to explain, complicate or rebut. Hartwig Fischer, director from 2016 to 2023, is a sensitive scholar, but he “could never find the levers of power”, one trustee told me. “You could have a fascinating conversation about Montesquieu with him, but you could never build on those conversations, and no vision for the museum emerged.” (Fischer declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The museum is almost invariably the most popular attraction in the UK, with about 6 million visitors a year. But much of its fabric, like the fabric of the rest of public-sector Britain, looks dingy and outmoded. Its funding is sparse by comparison to its peers in Paris and Berlin. Its staff are underpaid. It is in the early stages of a decades-long revamp, with £50m provided by BP, sponsorship from which has now been rejected by most other British cultural institutions. It has a new director, Nicholas Cullinan, formerly head of the National Portrait Gallery – but it is still unclear whether he possesses the skills to steer this complex institution through its immense renovation and transform its reputation.
Cullinan’s predecessor resigned after it was shockingly revealed, in August 2023, that one of the museum’s own staff, a senior curator in the Greece and Rome department, had allegedly stolen or damaged 2,000 items from the collection. The museum has named Peter Higgs as the suspected perpetrator (his son, speaking on his behalf, has denied the allegations). Over the course of three decades, ancient gems and gold jewellery had allegedly been removed from a museum strongroom – a facility that, according to security protocols, no employee should have been permitted to enter unchaperoned. Items had been apparently sold on to dealers, or auctioned on eBay.
“There was a deep sense of betrayal and loss,” said museum employee. “We live for those objects. What you aim to do is leave those collections in a better state than when you found them – to make sure that they benefit from you being there.”
That has always been the most important principle of the British Museum, the assumption on which its legitimacy rests: that it looks after the objects in its care. The alleged thefts and their aftermath tore up that compact between the institution and the public. The claim that the BM is, at the very least, a safe home for the contested objects it houses was shattered. Its popularity as a visitor destination may have been undented. But trust in the institution, already shaky, collapsed.
* * *
Everything in the British Museum is political. On a cold December day, after being searched in one of the museum’s dismal security tents (to be replaced by “welcome pavilions” next year), I headed to the first floor galleries where there was a small display of objects from Maqdala, the Ethiopian fortress looted in 1868 by British troops, among whom was a British Museum representative. Some of the objects taken were sacred tablets, which had been seized by emperor Tewodros II from churches prior to the British attack. These are deemed too holy to be seen in public: they sit in a curious limbo behind closed doors while discussions between the museum and Ethiopian authorities continue.
Museum communiques speak much of “dialogue” in such cases; critics are impatient for action. In some cases, the impasse is being solved through long-term loans. Last year, a quantity of Asante gold was sent to Ghana by the BM and the V&A. But for those pressing for restitution, it may not be satisfactory to be permitted to “borrow” an object that you believe was stolen. Unlike some American museums, the British Museum cannot by law sell, give away or otherwise “deaccession” objects. That is the general rule – but there are some legal exceptions. There is a specific process that allows for the return of items looted by the Nazis (in 2014, for example, there was a case involving a drawing that had been bequeathed to the museum, which had been in a collection seized by the Gestapo in 1939). There is another process allowing for the return of human remains under certain circumstances. It is, therefore, possible to imagine a process being developed that might deal, on a more general level, with restitution claims. For the moment, there is no sign of things shifting.
Except, that is, in the particular case of the Parthenon sculptures, which George Osborne appears to have made his personal mission. Over the past couple of years, he has been working on brokering a deal, quietly meeting Greek politicians, sometimes in Athens, sometimes in Knightsbridge. But the British Museum – 300 years old, containing things that are 2m years old – has never been inclined to rush things. Often that makes it seem hopelessly sluggish; but occasionally its stately tempo seems an advantage, when it simply rides out volatile political trends. The place runs on museum time, not human time. When it excavated the Sumerian city of Ur between 1922 and 1934, for example, it agreed with the Iraqi government that thousands of cuneiform tablets, containing texts in Sumerian, should travel to London for study, translation and publication before being returned to Baghdad. Those easy to translate were returned fairly swiftly; but work was interrupted when curators were conscripted during the second world war. Postwar, work continued on the tougher, more fragmentary tablets, but events later in the century – the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the Iraq war and its violent aftermath, and the Covid pandemic – made returning the remaining tablets impractical. It was not until 2023 that the final 5,000 tablets were flown to Baghdad. There are no commercial flights between the two countries, so they were taken home from Northolt with the Iraqi president in his official plane, after he came to London for King Charles’s coronation.
Not far from the Maqdala display case, a large first floor gallery contains objects from prehistoric Europe and the ancient Middle East. Here, when not out on loan, is the Mold cape, a remarkable piece of bronze age goldwork that is intermittently claimed by Wales, where it was discovered in 1833. This star object faces off against the Cyrus cylinder, on which is inscribed an account of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus of Persia in 539BCE. The artefact, excavated by the British-Assyrian archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam in Iraq in 1879, was loaned to Iran in 2010, when Barack Obama’s administration was negotiating its nuclear deal with the country. The then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally greeted Neil MacGregor as he stepped into the National Museum in Tehran.
This year, the Cyrus cylinder was due to be lent to Israel’s national library in Jerusalem, but the loan has been postponed, the museum citing Foreign Office travel advice. Nearby, the Levantine gallery, showing artefacts from Israel, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, are under restricted opening hours “for the safety of our visitors and the collection”, a spokesperson explained. Present violence resonates even here, among the relics of lost civilisations.
* * *
The public galleries are just the crust, the thin outer layer. These rooms are dotted with locked doors, barely noticed by the visiting public. Look out, next time you pass through, for discreet labels stuck to some of these doors, showing an illustration of a lion in profile. It is museum code for “evacuate me urgently in case of fire or flood” and means you are passing a storeroom. The symbol, it dawned on me this autumn, when I spotted a version made from glazed earthenware on display in gallery 47, derives from a set of 19th-century iron lions that adorned the building’s railings until they were removed in 1895. Only a museum could invent a code so arcane, so historically self-referential.
Other unnoticed doors lead to offices, libraries, laboratories and study rooms. Scholars and students from across the world slip through them discreetly all day. Arguably this is where the real business of the museum happens: this where knowledge is teased from 2m years’ worth of human-made things. It is also where odd little functions of the British state are performed. If you unearth an ancient or important metal object with a metal detector, it may have to go through a long, bureaucratic process, overseen by someone in one of these labs inside the British Museum.
Or, to take another example, if a customs officer at a British airport opens a suitcase and finds what she suspects is an illegally smuggled artefact, she will send it to the British Museum for assessment, study and eventual return to its place of origin. In 2016, a flask, big enough to hold two medium glasses of wine, caught the eye of a customs official at Gatwick. A dull silver colour, the object is engraved with images of bulls in profile interspersed with foliage. British Museum curator St John Simpson concluded it was about 4,000 years old, and had most likely come from southern Afghanistan, where illegal excavation and looting has been rife. In 2018, it was delivered to the Afghan ambassador. Such handovers have been halted since the fall of Kabul in 2021, but curators keep communication open with the new staff at the National Museum in the Taliban-controlled country. Even when official diplomatic relations are fraught, a mycelial network of archaeologists still crisscrosses the globe.
In the Egyptian galleries on the first floor, near some particularly beautiful ancient tomb paintings lush with images of date and palm trees, you might see a high set of locked doors. Behind them is a disused gallery, the upper reaches of its walls painted with modern reproductions of ancient Egyptian mourning scenes. The decoration is apt: this is now a storage place for human remains. On a table, when I visited last summer, skulls had been laid out for medical and forensic anthropology students visiting from the US. “We were talking through kind of the signs and features that we can see on the bones that tell us that they had leprosy,” explained bioarchaeologist Rebecca Whiting, an enthusiastic young curator with a floral shirt, dangly earrings and a black manicure. The room is also the resting place of 50 medieval corpses, donated to the museum by the Sudanese government after a cemetery was cleared during the building of a dam 20 years ago. (The museum has strong links with Egypt and Sudan, and offers training and research fellowships to colleagues from both countries.) The corpses’ hair, eyelashes, the warp and weft of their clothes, sometimes even their tattoos, are still visible.
The museum is the grave for 80 complete human bodies from Egypt, nine Peruvian ones, and 6,000 or so partial human remains. Among these are a Hawaiian bowl studded with human teeth and a Tibetan trumpet made from a human femur, embellished with silver, coral and turquoise. Is it any wonder that some of the people who work at the museum – among the dead, among ancient objects vibrating with history, sometimes with violence – tell of hauntings? One senior curator told me he feels goosebumps on his arm when he works after hours. “The ghosts are everywhere,” he said.
Next door to the Sudanese corpses, in the human remains workspace, a postdoctoral scholar was studying the contours of teeth, better to understand population changes in Nubia between the neolithic and medieval periods. The museum is full of such scenes: work that can seem arcane or recondite, but is part of the great blood flow of knowledge through the institution. “The museum is a labyrinth – and that is also a metaphor for what it is,” Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel prize-winning geneticist, and former British Museum trustee, told me. He meant that the museum is physically bewildering. But also, that its seemingly unconnected activities are part of one great structure that has a pattern, and meaning.
* * *
Sometimes the fastest way to traverse the confounding territory of the museum is through its entrails. In the basement slumber redundant boilers the size of lorries, and visitors walk through brick-lined corridors reinforced to protect you from air raids (from the last war, though maybe they will come in handy again). The science department plunges three levels below ground. A huge X-ray machine, presided over by the experimental physicist Daniel O’Flynn, can analyse objects as large as lifesize Greek sculptures. Onwards through the warren, and researchers are using molecular analysis to look at lac dye, a crimson colorant used in India and Vietnam; others wield an electron microscope to examine how the gold of seventh-century BCE Greek jewellery was worked; others are scrutinising the wood of Vindolanda tablets – Romano-British letters and memos found south of Hadrian’s wall, written on sheets of willow, alder, birch and ash.
Or you could survey it from above: take one of the museum’s 56 lifts, helpfully colour-coded to aid navigation, climb some precipitous metal stairs, and navigate the place from the roof. From this perspective, it becomes clear that behind the calm personifications of the pediment – Mathematics and Painting, Geometry and Drama – lies a hectic landscape of vermicular ductwork and endless grubby skylights, some of them patched with flapping lengths of gaffer tape. When I visited in the spring, the director of estates, a cheerful Scot called Russell Torrance, gazed benignly over his rackety domain, and explained the museum’s chaotic jigsaw of interlocking buildings. Here were asbestos and water ingress, there were corrosion and leaks. “We speak a lot of keeping the wheels on the bus,” he said.
Work is due to begin on a new energy centre to replace the museum’s dying gas-fired boilers, and there are plans for the complete refurbishment of the galleries – particularly ramshackle from this purview – on the western side of the complex. The museum employs a Harris hawk to discourage crows, who have a propensity to drop stones on the curved glass roof of the central Great Court. Every time they crack one of these bespoke panes, Alice Fraser, the museum’s head of capital projects, told me, it costs tens of thousands of pounds to replace it.
However impressive the view, though, the most profound essence of the museum was not to be discerned from this Olympian perspective. I found it when, one day last spring, I went to see Neil Wilkin, curator of British and European history. He was in the study room for his section, a wood-panelled, book-lined room, where anyone, he said, can make an appointment to come to look at items from the stores. He had something to show me. It is known as the Burton Agnes drum, and it is indeed the shape and size of a small toy drum, though its actual purpose is obscure. It was buried in the neolithic age in Yorkshire, in the grave of three children, where it lay until it was excavated in 2015. It is made of solid white chalk intricately carved with lozenges, zigzags and chevrons: an object infinitely delicate. “It is friable, we could rub out that decoration easily,” said Wilkin.
As he described the ways in which he was trying understand the patternings on its surface, I could see his reverence for the thing, his tenderness, his curatorship – in the pure sense of taking care. The dead children with whom it had lain in the earth for 5,000 years were not abstract to him: he told me he had been researching it when he and his partner had their own first baby. When I asked him what he had thought when he first heard that a colleague was suspected of damaging or stealing 2,000 objects, he paused and for a moment I almost thought he might weep, or shout. “I think I felt a kind of disbelief that that was a conceivable thing to do,” he said, quietly.
* * *
Perhaps the greatest factor in any thief’s favour was that the museum did not quite know what it had. Many of the objects stolen had never been formally registered – that is, fully recorded and given a museum number – or photographed and entered on to the museum’s digital database. Sir Mark Jones, the interim director after Hartwig Fischer’s resignation, pledged that everything in the collection would be entered into this database by the end of 2029. But even with £5m in the budget for the task, some are unsure it can be achieved. One senior curator told me that only 10% of the thousands of pottery shards in his part of the collection have been fully documented on the system. Dealing with the remaining 90% is a gargantuan task. “If I did literally only that for the next five years, maybe it would be possible,” he said. “People seem to think we have minions. I don’t have minions. It’s just me.”
The scale of the task is as confounding as the scale of the museum’s collection. The keeper of prints and drawings, Hugo Chapman, told me that his section, which contains about 1m things from Michelangelo to Hockney, took 31 years to digitise. Jones told me that to understand the museum at all, it was necessary to think of it as more like a library than a museum. “What we are is an archive of material culture,” he said.
Millions of its objects are not displayable. The museum’s collection grew fastest between the 1970s and the 90s. But 70% of the 1.7m objects that entered the collection then were unlovely looking bits of broken pottery, tile and brick from archaeological digs in Britain. A third of the collection is now made up of such material. (The excavations that swelled the stores so dramatically tracked construction booms and the building of Britain’s motorways.) In previous centuries this type of thing would have been disposed of, and only the more obviously impressive things kept, but from the 70s onwards the habit was to keep everything, anticipating the moment when fresh scientific techniques might reveal new knowledge.
It was in a series of immense new warehouses on the outskirts of Reading, in April last year, that I began to have some dim feel of the scale of the collection – though it seems impossible that any single human mind could contain the whole of it. (“Even at the end of my term I was constantly discovering, for example, that to my amazement we had the definitive collection of the Phoenician presence in Sardinia, for example,” former director Neil MacGregor told me.) Here, 40 minutes by bus from the railway station (taxis not claimable on expenses by curators), is the new British Museum Archaeological Research Collection.
This is the building that will house the great overspill, objects that were until recently kept in the former Post Office Savings Bank HQ in West Kensington. It has bright study rooms, smooth, wide corridors and modern laboratories, and is convenient for the motorway and Heathrow, and thus for dispatching or receiving loans. It seems built for giants, and the sunlight washes in. The atmosphere is nothing like the dim, archaic corridors of the mothership in Bloomsbury. It feels like some kind of escape craft – the vessel in which a chosen few will flee this planet, taking with it mysterious fragments of its civilisations.
* * *
Except, that is, for the things that got away. In a corridor off the Greek and Roman study room in the Bloomsbury HQ, a six-strong team of academic sleuths is working to track down the gems that went missing from the strongroom. Tom Harrison, keeper of the department of Greece and Rome, who arrived at the museum in January 2023, as the losses at the museum were starting to be understood, presides over the group of art market specialists and scholars. They follow the money, stalking the gems through sales data from eBay, on which they were sold for as little as £50, and PayPal. Some have passed through multiple hands and into different countries.
As not all the missing objects had been photographed and described on the museum’s internal database (and where they had, the database may have been interfered with), the scholars have also had to reconstruct what the museum actually owned. Most of the lost gems came from the collection of the 18th-century connoisseur Charles Townley, so this work of reconstruction includes scrutinising 19th-century registration books, going through the 4,500 letters in the Townley archive, reviewing drawings he commissioned, studying an unpublished catalogue made in 1814, and tracking down wax impressions of intaglios and cameos made at the time (these last can be incredibly precise, showing up even, say, the tiny bubbles in glass gems that differentiate two objects cast in from the same mould).
In one of the offices used by the team is a kind of crime wall, with colour-coded, photocopied images of gems. The work relies on patience, dogged archival skills, acute visual memory, forensic ability to follow financial trails, and, in the end, charm and persuasion when confronting current possessors of items (according to Harrison, most have been cooperative; the museum offers to compensate them with the amount they paid). “I dream about the gems every single night,” said Ollie Croker, one of the project curators.
When I visited in the spring, they had found or recovered 626 items of the missing 1,500 (the remaining 500 or so of the 2,000 items were damaged). The figure now stands at 649. This is just for the recovery process: the police investigation is also grindingly slow. “There is steady progress,” said Harrison, “but occasionally, I worry about the mad scale of it. If you imagine 1,500 objects: some have gone out into the world in groups, but lots of them have gone by different routes, they’ve gone to multiple places, they are in lots of different countries.” When the team pins down a gem’s location, a handbell is rung in celebration.
* * *
Can the museum emerge from the crisis? Can it recover internal morale, get back the missing objects, reframe itself as something other than the museum that stole its contents? Some insiders I spoke to were optimistic: the new director’s honeymoon period might have passed, but it was still better than the situation under Fischer, when the place had been run, one staffer told, me, “like North Korea” by a small group of his subordinates. The curatorial staff are not made up of pith-helmeted imperialists, as outsiders might imagine, but internal conversations about, say, decolonisation are not heard publicly, and staffers sometimes fear speaking out. One trustee told me: “The museum is like a volcano with a thick crust of solidified lava on the top – the senior management.”
For the museum to remake itself in the public imagination, there will have to be movement on the most publicly controversial issues: the Benin bronzes and the Parthenon sculptures. The new Labour government seems open to the possibility of a partnership that might see the sculptures in Athens in return for loans from Greece to London. Some are sceptical: George Osborne, the chair, has advanced towards a deal without fellow trustees or staff always being in the loop, and without a proper process being put in place. MacGregor is cautious. “What is so concerning about the Parthenon conversation, is that nobody is saying what are the principles on which the removal of the objects from the public in London is being proposed. And it would be a permanent removal: Greek politicians acknowledge that Parthenon sculptures returning to Greece would not be able to leave again.”
MacGregor’s formulation of the British Museum as “a museum of the world, for the world” still holds, at least according to him. A global hub for scholarship, open to all. “And one of the reasons it works,” he said, “is because the UK now has a global population whose stories are in the British Museum.” But many aren’t so sure. “You can say it’s a museum of the world for the world, but the world hasn’t agreed that,” said a former senior manager.
When I visited the Reading storage centre in mid-2024, it was just beginning to be filled up: box after box marked “Mucking” had come in, the name of a village in Essex where the largest excavation in Britain, covering settlements from the neolithic to the medieval period, took place in the 1960s and 70s. Hangar-like halls were starting to be populated, too, with casts of Greek sculpture, their crates stacked with maximum efficiency using software used in the airline freight industry: you could see their disembodied limbs, their headless bodies. In one room, a carefully wrapped Mexican Day of the Dead sculpture loomed over a cast of a Celtic cross, a skidoo and a rickshaw. The whole place reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’s story about a map of the world made at exactly 1:1 scale. It felt as if the museum could contain everything that had ever been made.
• Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.