The weekly feature rounds up the latest updates in museum appointments, openings, funding and new exhibitions from across the UK.
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Museum Moves
Appointments
Bath Preservation Trust (BPT) has appointed its first chief operating officer. Spencer Hancock will join the charity in early September to take up this new role.
Openings & closures
The opening date for the new Football Museum of Wales and Wrexham Museum will be Friday 25th September 2026, Wrexham Council has announced.
Opening date set for Football Museum of Wales and Wrexham Museum
Exhibitions
Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn
Ashmolean Museum | Oxford
Opening: 26 November 2026 – Closing: 13 June 2027
The Ashmolean Museum presents ‘Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn’, the latest in the Ashmolean NOW series, showing the artist’s camera-less photographs in dialogue with works by the British Romanticist painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81), including Palmer’s early Shoreham-period drawings. The free display spans Fabian Miller’s career from his ‘Sea Horizon’ series (1975) to new digital prints made from unique exposures on discontinued Cibachrome paper, shown for the first time, alongside works such as ‘Our Bright Dream’ (2014–15) and the series ‘Midwinter Blaze’ (2019). The exhibition also includes facsimiles of prints by photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot from the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean’s William Blake ‘Book of Job’ (1826).
Lessons of the Hour
Perth Museum | Perth
Opening: 9 October 2026 – Closing: 11 April 2027
Perth Museum presents ‘Lessons of the Hour’, exploring abolitionist and human rights campaigner Frederick Douglass’s time in Scotland and Perthshire’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade, on the site of the former City Hall where Douglass delivered four speeches in 1846. The free exhibition centres on Turner Prize-nominated artist Isaac Julien’s film ‘Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass’ (2019), presented as the first and only Scottish venue on a new ARTIST ROOMS tour from Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The tour continues to Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and Arnolfini in Bristol.
God Save the Queens
Museum of Youth Culture | London
Opening: 22 October 2026 – Closing: 22 November 2026
The Museum of Youth Culture presents ‘God Save the Queens’, marking fifty years since Poly Styrene and a generation of pioneering women helped shape punk’s music, art and identity. Held in the museum’s basement gallery, the exhibition brings together artwork, photography, fashion and personal archival material from the women who transformed punk’s visual and cultural language.
Bath Society of Artists 121st Annual Open Exhibition
Victoria Art Gallery | Bath
Opening: 19 September 2026 – Closing: 7 November 2026
The Victoria Art Gallery presents the Bath Society of Artists’ 121st Annual Open Exhibition, showing original work selected through open submission from artists across the country, spanning painting, printmaking, sculpture and mixed media. This year’s invited artist is British painter and printmaker Basil Beattie RA, a figure in the UK’s mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism who was given a dedicated room at Tate Britain in 2007. The exhibition includes over £5,500 in cash prizes and a Public Choice Prize voted for by visitors, with many works available to buy.
Bayeux Around Britain: Casting a Masterpiece
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery | Hastings
Opening: 10 September 2026 – Closing: 8 November 2026
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery presents the Stothard Cast, a group of hand-painted plaster casts of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, as the first stop on a national touring Spotlight Loan from the British Museum. Made by artist Charles Alfred Stothard from moulds taken directly from the Tapestry in 1816 and acquired by the British Museum in 1878, the three casts depict Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy, drawn from scenes 46, 30 and 48. The display is accompanied by a life-sized 3D-printed replica visitors can touch and hand-embroidered replicas of Tapestry details. The loan continues to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (12 November 2026 – 10 January 2027) before touring to the National Library of Wales, Rievaulx Abbey, The Great Tapestry of Scotland and Rochester Cathedral.
Funding
Exeter City Council has approved £260,000 to support a £2.4 million funding bid to replace the Royal Albert Memorial Museum‘s aging boiler system and restore the Roman Wall Bridge, with a further £665,000 approved as a contingency should the bid fail or the infrastructure break down first.
