The weekly feature rounds up the latest updates in museum appointments, openings, funding and new exhibitions from across the UK.
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Appointments
The former director of Freud Museum London has been appointed director of Trent Park House of Secrets, a visitor attraction due to open in Enfield, London next Spring.
Former Freud museum director to lead new ‘Trent Park House of Secrets’
Openings & closures
The Booth Natural History Museum in Brighton will close for 12 months for essential improvements to its collections and infrastructure. The museum, founded in 1874, houses over 600,000 specimens and will offer monthly special event days during the closure.
The Museum of Homelessness in London has reopened after a winter break, and has shard nine stories and testimonies which it has collected alongside objects from the community since 2017.
Exhibitions
The reimagined exhibition ‘It Takes a Village’ at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft explores over 20,000 arts and crafts objects from fresh perspectives, including rarely seen works by Ethel Mairet, Eric Gill, Joseph Cribb, David Jones and Amy Sawyer. Over 100 collection objects will be displayed, featuring a limestone relief by Joseph Cribb, screen-printed textiles by Grace Denman, and a never-before-seen silk wedding dress made and worn by Petra Gill. The exhibition runs from 5 July 2025 – 1 February 2026.
The striking crystallised gold specimen dubbed ‘the Dragon’ is now on display in Natural History Museum’s recently refurbished Vault in London, on loan from the Houston Museum of Natural Science for its UK debut. The rare specimen, discovered by miners who carefully extracted it from an underground mine wall, joins other mineral treasures including the Aurora Pyramid of Hope diamond collection and the Devonshire Emerald. The Dragon will remain on display in the Minerals Gallery from now until it is replaced by the Winchcombe meteorite for the ‘Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth?’ exhibition opening 16 May 2025.
A new room within Tate Britain’s permanent free display of Turner’s work has opened, showcasing exquisite watercolours and sketches including his earliest work made at age 12 and a newly identified image of the Tower of London on fire. The display draws on research from a comprehensive catalogue of Turner’s 37,500 works on paper, which will be freely accessible on Tate’s website from November. Later this year, Tate Britain in London will culminate its Turner celebrations with a major exhibition ‘Turner and Constable’ exploring the rivalry between these two British art figures, running from 24 November 2025.
A major exhibition examining JMW Turner’s work and enduring influence will be on display at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. ‘Turner: Always Contemporary’ will feature National Museums Liverpool’s collection of Turner’s oils, works on paper and prints alongside pieces by artists including Claude Monet, Bridget Riley, Maggi Hambling and Jeff Koons that explore themes of travel, landscape and artistic experimentation. The exhibition runs from 25 October 2025 – 22 February 2026.
Artist Pablo Bronstein will unveil a grand assembly of paintings on paper depicting new versions of the Temple of Solomon at Waddesdon Manor. The exhibition includes cross-sections, aerial plans, façade details, and visualisations of contents such as the Ark of the Covenant, menorahs, and the columns called Jachin and Boaz. ‘The Temple of Solomon and its Contents’ runs from 16 July – 2 November 2025.
The upcoming ‘Macbeth: An Exhibition’ at Perth Museum will feature costumes worn by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the 2015 film adaptation, alongside original illustrations by Sir Quentin Blake and historic artefacts including the Clach na Bratach stone and an 11th-century sword. Other notable items include a rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio from the National Library of Scotland and Charlotte Rose’s painting ‘Dagger of the Mind’. The exhibition runs from 25 April 2025 with no specified end date.
