The weekly feature rounds up the latest updates in museum appointments, openings, funding and new exhibitions from across the UK.
Museum Moves is supported by DJW Projects Limited: DJW Projects Limited. DJW Projects Limited is recognised as one of the UK’s leading forces in the audio-visual industry, providing creative lighting, Audio Visual and multimedia solutions globally to achieve the ultimate technological experience, using sound, lighting, vision and interaction.
Appointments
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is in search for a new director, as Clare Lilley steps down from the role after more than three decades. Lilley was appointed director in 2022, having previously served as Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s director of programme, and beginning with a range of curatorial posts.
Openings & closures
The Museum of Youth Culture is to open its first site in Camden later this year. Described as the world’s first museum dedicated to youth culture, it will open its door in October 2025.
Museum of Youth Culture to open permanent Camden site later this year
Exhibitions
The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield presents ‘Make It! Play It!’, celebrating games focused on making and modelling through digital and traditional techniques. The exhibition features playable LEGO® classics including LEGO® Star Wars: The Complete Saga, LEGO® Creator and LEGO® Racers 2, alongside rarely seen LEGO sets from both the museum’s and The LEGO Group’s collections, plus handmade indie games such as Scarlet Deer Inn and The Master’s Pupil. Visitors can also experience the exclusive pre-release version of Platypus Reclayed, accompanied by daily drop-in creative sessions. 24 July 2025 – 1 September 2025.
A private collection of over 300 objects belonging to Victorian painter John Everett Millais and his Perth-born wife Effie Gray will go on long-term loan to Perth Art Gallery. The collection, unseen for 30 years, includes oil paintings, works on paper, and studio tools The free public display ‘Millais in Perthshire’ will feature more than 25 highlight objects in Gallery 3, marking the first time these items have been shown to the public in Scotland. Opens 25 July 2025.
British Motor Museum will launch ‘Beep-Beep, Yeah!’ in the new Rubery Owen Gallery, exploring the connection between sound, music and motor cars through interactive elements including tuning a 1970s radio and experiencing a BRM V16 P15 race car engine. The exhibition features a white 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V once owned by John Lennon, a 2019 Wells Vertige Prototype, a 2018 Nissan Leaf, and a 2022 Bentley Bentayga amongst other vehicles demonstrating automotive audio systems. The exhibition runs 18 July 2025 – Spring 2026.
Henry Moore Institute in Leeds presents ‘Beyond the Visual’, the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition where blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process. The exhibition features seven new commissions alongside historical and contemporary works by sixteen international artists including Lucia Beijlsmit, Lenka Clayton, Fayen d’Evie, Barry Flanagan, Hillary Goidell, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, David Johnson, Jennifer Justice, Georgina Kleege, Aaron McPeake, Sam Metz, Serafina Min, Henry Moore, Bryan Phillips, Collin van Uchelen and Ken Wilder. The exhibition runs from 28 November 2025 – 8 March 2026.
Magna Carta and the North’ at Durham Cathedral in Durham displays the only surviving 1216 Magna Carta alongside issues from 1225 and 1300, plus three Forest Charters. The exhibition features contemporary art installations including ‘The Words That Bind Us’ projected onto the Nave floor and large-scale voiles by artist Ash Mills suspended in the Galilee Chapel. The exhibition runs until 2 November 2025.
The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner presents ‘Contraptions & Connections: A Celebration of Imagination and Ingenious Invention’, featuring quirky machines, kinetic sculptures, and fantastical inventions from William Heath Robinson’s classic drawings to contemporary automata. Key exhibits include a musical machine built from piano and sewing machine parts by Fi Henshall, recycled plastic fish that appear to swim mid-air by Tim Lewis, a self-drawing chalkboard by Jim Bond, and fantastical football automatons by Michael Landy. The exhibition runs 26 July 2025 – 26 October 2025.
The ‘Revisions’ exhibition made by the Warlpiri of Central Australia and Patrick Waterhouse presents reworked maps, flags, photographs, comic illustrations and archival material, with Warlpiri artists applying traditional dot painting techniques to documents tracing Australia’s colonial history. The exhibition includes the UK premiere of ‘The True Story’, a two-channel video installation beginning with Captain Cook’s observation of the Transit of Venus and narrated by Warlpiri community members. Whitby Museum in Whitby displays this collaboration between Warlukurlangu Art Centres from Yuendumu and Nyirripi communities and British artist Patrick Waterhouse, 10 July 2025 – 5 October 2025.
Funding
Trent Park Museum Trust has secured funding to more widely share its wartime espionage and deception stories with local communities and online. After standing empty since 2012, Trent Park House is now being restored and transformed into a museum and heritage site which will open to the public in Spring 2026 as ‘Trent Park House of Secrets’.
Grant fuels WWII spy storytelling at Trent Park House of Secrets
