From major museum openings and significant relocations to restoration projects and leadership changes, 2026 promises to be a year of notable activity across the UK’s museums and heritage sector. This look-ahead charts the key developments scheduled for the year, from the Bayeux Tapestry’s arrival at the British Museum to cultural venues launching across the country.
Museums + Heritage Advisor presents an at-a-glance guide to what’s planned for the sector in 2026.
Early 2026
The Natural History Museum will open a ticketed Pokémon pop-up shop in its Cranbourne Boutique in January 2026. The shop will stock exclusive products including clothing, stationery, accessories and soft toys designed in collaboration with the museum to mark Pokémon’s thirtieth anniversary, with high demand expected.
The Arts Marketing Association is set to launch ‘Goose’, an AI platform designed to support heritage organisations with marketing and audience development. The £250,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund-backed platform will provide an AI-powered mentor and coach to address the marketing skills gap in the sector, learning from each user’s experience to build collective knowledge from the heritage workforce.
Baroness Margaret Hodge’s independent review of Arts Council England was published in December 2025. The government will publish its response in 2026.
March
In March the V&A will reopen the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Galleries, expanded from four to seven rooms in March 2026. The galleries will showcase masterpieces of silver, enamel, gold boxes and micromosaics, including over 200 gold boxes displayed in the round and a dedicated room exploring Nazi and Soviet looting, with new provenance research on objects including two silver-gilt gates from Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery.
Also set for March, the National Trust will take over Ironbridge Gorge museums following a £9m DCMS grant in March 2026. The transfer includes 10 museums, 35 listed heritage buildings and a collection of more than 400,000 objects from the UNESCO World Heritage Site, which has been operated by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust since 1967.
April
V&A East Museum will open on 18 April 2026 at East Bank in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, east London. The five-storey building, designed by Irish architecture firm O’Donnell + Tuomey, is the sister site to V&A East Storehouse, which opened in May 2025. The museum was co-created with young people, creatives and those living, working and studying in east London..
May
Art Fund’s Going Places programme will see the first of 40 collaborative exhibitions open as part of a £5.36m five-year touring project involving 20 museums across the UK. The first exhibitions opening in 2026 include Green Spaces Shared Places at The National Memorial Arboretum and Long Distance Connections at Penlee House Gallery & Museum in May, New Faces New Focus at Open Eye Gallery in September, and Founding the Future at Watts Gallery and Four Lanterns at William Morris Gallery in October.
Hull Maritime Museum will reopen in spring 2026 following a major restoration of the Grade II* listed building. The reopening has been pushed back from late 2025 due to delays including the need to replace the building’s entire roof, which was originally thought to require only partial restoration.
The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration will open in Clerkenwell as the UK’s only permanent place for illustration and the world’s largest dedicated space for the artform. The £12.5m centre will occupy an 18th century waterworks site with three galleries, a free library, learning spaces and London’s oldest surviving windmill, opening with MURUGIAH: Ever Feel Like…, exploring identity and mental health.
M+H Show and M+H Awards
The Museums + Heritage Show will take place at Olympia, London on 13-14 May 2026. It will bring together over 3,400 cultural sector professionals, and feature more than 70 talks, 90 speakers and 150 exhibitors, with free admission for anyone working in the museums, heritage and cultural sectors.
Also in May is the Museums + Heritage Awards. The awards, sponsored by Altair Media, celebrate the best in museums, galleries and cultural and heritage visitor attractions, with the ceremony taking place later in the year. Entries for the awards close on 30 January 2026.
Mid-2026
London Museum will open at its new Smithfield site in 2026, where it will display more than 14,000 Roman artefacts from the Bloomberg Collection gifted by Bloomberg Philanthropies alongside the museum’s £20m donation, its largest private donation to date. The museum is creating an immersive exhibition in 800 square metres of Victorian brick vaults discovered during construction, due to complete in July 2026. Banksy’s ‘piranhas’ police box, which appeared on Ludgate Hill in 2024, will go on permanent free public display.
The British Museum will develop initial designs for its Western Range galleries redesign by mid-2026. Lina Ghotmeh Architecture won the architectural competition to redesign the galleries, selected from more than 60 entries.
The Museum of Youth Culture will open in spring 2026 at St Pancras Campus in Camden. The 6,500 square foot venue, which includes three gallery spaces in an eight-metre deep basement, was originally scheduled to open in December 2025 but has been delayed after a leak caused by roadworks adjacent to the building.
Works will commence on transforming Northumberland Hall in Alnwick into a new home for Bailiffgate Museum & Gallery. The volunteer-run museum has received £4.3m from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to relocate to the Grade I listed Georgian building, originally built in 1826 for the third Duke of Northumberland.
The West Yorkshire Archive Service Kirklees hub will open in its new purpose-built facility at Our Cultural Heart in Huddersfield. Over 20,000 boxes of historic records dating back to the 12th century will be moved from the current Victoria Lane location to the new environmentally controlled facility, which will feature enhanced public research areas and operate as a history hub within the broader library development.
Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth will reopen following essential repairs to the Grade II listed building. The museum closed in May 2025 to allow for work including the installation of a new roof, repairs to the suspended ceiling and replastering of damaged interior walls.
The Garden Museum will open the gardens at Benton End House to the public ahead of redeveloping the house. Benton End in Suffolk was the former home of artist and gardener Sir Cedric Morris and partner Arthur Lett-Haines, where they established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing with pupils including Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling.
Trent Park House of Secrets will open to the public in Enfield following restoration of the building, which has stood empty since 2012. The museum will feature historically accurate restored and furnished rooms telling the story of the Second World War ‘Secret Listeners’, intelligence operators whose covert eavesdropping of German POWs led to wartime breakthroughs including information about Hitler’s weapons programmes and Holocaust atrocities.
September
The Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed at the British Museum from September 2026 to July 2027 as part of a loan swap with France. The exhibition will mark the first time the 70-metre medieval embroidery depicting the Norman Conquest has been in the UK since it was made nearly 1,000 years ago. The MP for Hastings and Rye has called for the exhibition to extend to the area where the Battle of Hastings took place, with a letter to the British Museum chair urging that local residents be given access to tickets and travel cost assistance.
English Heritage will launch new education facilities at Stonehenge including a dedicated Learning Centre with STEM discovery lab and digital studio, alongside the Kusuma Neolithic Hall, a reconstructed Neolithic building classroom for 30 students. The hall will be built using historically authentic methods and locally sourced materials including thatch, coppiced timber and chalk daub, based on archaeological evidence from nearby Durrington Walls.
Late 2026
Paisley Museum will open in the second half of 2026 following a further delay to the £65m transformation project. The opening has been pushed back from spring 2025 due to unforeseen construction issues encountered during the first major refurbishment in the building’s 150-year history, with construction expected to complete by the end of 2025 before the fit-out phase begins.
Set for 2026
Glencoe Folk Museum will reopen in 2026 following restoration of its 19th-century thatched cottages and 6,000-item collection. Actor Brian Cox has launched a £100,000 fundraising appeal to close a funding gap by March 2026, with the redevelopment creating new accessible exhibitions, a Community Gallery and improved facilities for school visits.
Durham County Council will open The Light in 2026 at the site of the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Art Gallery, which closed in 2016. The building is being stripped to its basic structure and almost completely rebuilt to house the county’s only contemporary art gallery, a dedicated DLI Gallery, and facilities for events and conferences, serving as a sister venue to The Story.
The final design for the Queen Elizabeth II memorial will be announced to coincide with what would have been Her Late Majesty’s 100th birthday year. The £23m-£46m memorial in St James’s Park will include a standalone monument with a figurative representation of the late Queen at the Marlborough Gate entrance, following approval from the Prime Minister and His Majesty The King.
Leadership moves
Abigail Pogson will take up the role of chief executive at the Barbican Centre in January. Pogson, currently chief executive of The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, will lead the Grade II listed cultural destination through its £191m Renewal programme to restore and revitalise the buildings.
Maria Balshaw will step down as director of Tate after nine years leading the organisation. Her final project will be curating a career-spanning exhibition of Dame Tracey Emin’s work at Tate Modern in February 2026, with her tenure seeing the establishment of an endowment fund that has secured over £50m of donations and the building of 150,000 Tate Members.
Ralph Rugoff will step down as director of the Hayward Gallery after 20 years in post in Spring. Rugoff was appointed in May 2006 and has overseen the international touring of Hayward Gallery exhibitions and supervised the Arts Council Collection hosted at the Southbank Centre.
Dr Giuseppe Albano MBE will lead the opening of Trent Park House of Secrets as its director. Albano joined in June 2025 from Freud Museum London and was previously curator and director of the Keats–Shelley House in Rome, taking responsibility for the overall operation of the museum as it is transformed into a visitor destination revealing the story of Second World War intelligence operators.
Mervyn Metcalf will succeed Edward Bayntun-Coward as chair of the Holburne Museum in Bath in July 2026. Metcalf has served as a trustee since 2024 and brings finance and charity sector experience, whilst Bayntun-Coward has served as chair since 2017.
Admiral Sir Trevor Soar will step down as chair of Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust in November, after completing ten years in post. Sir Soar was appointed in 2016 and has overseen projects including the completion of the Fitted Rigging House and steering the trust to financial independence.
