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
Three new trustees have been appointed to serve three-year terms on the board of Historic Royal Palaces. Thomas Harris, chartered accountant and heritage building specialist; Dan Jones, historian, author of “The Plantagenets” and presenter of Netflix’s “Secrets of Great British Castles”; and Dame Caroline Michel, CEO of Peters Fraser and Dunlop literary agency and Chair of the BFI Trust.
Openings & closures
St Andrews Heritage Museum & Garden is to reopen next month after an 18-month closure. On 14 September 2025, the Scottish museum’s £1.8m transformation will be revealed, featuring new local history displays, interactive exhibits, and “The Garden Gallery” temporary exhibition space. The renovated museum now offers visitors recreated historical shops, sensory garden installations, and displays covering everything from local fisherfolk to photography.
Jersey War Tunnels has announced plans to construct a new museum on its existing site, which will display previously unseen archive materials and house an expanded WWII collection.
Jersey War Tunnels plans new museum to house expanded WWII collection
Exhibitions
The sixty-first ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’ exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London will showcase 100 images selected from a record-breaking 60,636 entries, judged anonymously on creativity, originality and technical excellence. Featured works include a dramatic lion and cobra stand-off by Gabriella Comi, Arctic wolves by Amit Eshel, and photographs of flamingoes, coyotes and red deer by emerging young photographers as young as nine years old. The exhibition will incorporate the Natural History Museum’s Biodiversity Intactness Index to provide insight into changing planetary habitats, running 17 October 2025 – 12 July 2026.
Hatton Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne will present ‘Some Kind of Love: Actions and Reactions to Living on a Damaged Planet’, a solo exhibition by Uta Kögelsberger featuring video installations, photography, and sound works exploring human-ecological relationships. The exhibition includes Fire Complex (2020–22) documenting California’s Castle Fire aftermath, Forest Complex (2023–24) examining Alpine forest pressures, Off Road (2008–14) investigating American West landscapes, and the newly commissioned Forest Choir (2025) created with Brussels Opera Youth Choir. The exhibition runs 20 September 2025 – 24 January 2026.
Queer Britain in London presents ‘Top’ by Claye Bowler, an installation disguised as a museum store that archives the artist’s seven-year journey through the UK’s healthcare system to access gender-affirming top surgery. The exhibition comprises drawings, films, photographs, letters, sculptures, and collected objects, displayed alongside items from the Museum of Transology and the ‘We Are Queer Britain’ exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the UK’s first Pride March. The exhibition runs 10 September 2025 – 23 November 2025.
The Dorset Museum & Art Gallery in Dorchester presents ‘Jane Austen: Down to the Sea’, an exhibition marking 250 years of Jane Austen. The museum hosts two special events: an evening with bestselling author Gill Hornby and novelist Tracy Chevalier on 5 September 2025, and a film screening of Pride & Prejudice (2005) on 13 September 2025. The exhibition closes on 13 September 2025.
The exhibition ‘Sleeping and Waking’ at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham features Kate McDonnell’s immersive installation ‘Night Tides’ alongside artworks by Bethlem Hospital patients spanning two centuries that explore archetypal dreams and nightmares. Never-before-exhibited objects include dream diaries by Dr Edward Hare, an illustrated version of James Hadfield’s poem ‘Epitaph to my Poor Jack, Squirrel’, and a dream drawing by William Kurelek. The exhibition runs from 14 August 2025 – 22 November 2025.
‘Earth Fire Iron: Alan Evans and the New Iron Age’ celebrates the work of artist-blacksmith Alan Evans (1952–2023), who grew up in Whiteway near Stroud and pioneered the contemporary forged metalwork movement from the late 1970s. The exhibition at Museum in the Park in Stroud features a small-scale model of Evans’ Treasury Gates at St Paul’s Cathedral, works by his British and European contemporaries, and pieces by emerging blacksmiths including Melissa Cole, Sam Pearce, Lisa Wisdom and Cameron Pearson. The exhibition runs 6 September – 2 November 2025.
‘A body of knowledge: Discover 500 years of book collecting at the Royal College of Physicians’ explores medical book collecting through one of England’s oldest surviving doctors’ libraries at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) Museum in London. The exhibition features hundreds of early printed books from the Dorchester Library wrapped in conservation-grade paper as part of Catherine James’s art installation ‘Making Visible’, alongside the first display of a portrait of Lady Grace Pierrepont, whose 17th-century book donation helped re-establish the library after the Great Fire of London. The exhibition opens 11 September 2025.
