Image: Museum of Cannock Chase (Geoff Pick The Museum of Cannock Chase CC BY-SA 2.0)
Museum of Cannock Chase maintains collection care and digitisation projects despite closing to public on 26 April 2025, with community outreach planned.
The Museum of Cannock Chase closed to the public on 26 April 2025, but collection management and community engagement activities are continuing at the site.
A dedicated team of collections specialists remains active at the museum alongside volunteers, maintaining regular conservation work, condition monitoring, and environmental controls for the collection. The museum is seeking additional volunteers for collections and community projects.
Closure of Staffordshire museum proposed to save council costs
The organisation is undertaking a large-scale digitisation and cataloguing project for the entire collection over the coming year. With support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, each item will be photographed and added to a national database of significant UK heritage items. The museum states this process will help bring to light new and previously untold stories from Cannock Chase’s rich history and create a unified, searchable system for items that have been recorded in various ways over the decades.
New community outreach programmes are being developed to take the collection beyond the museum building. Plans include pop-up exhibitions co-created with schools and local groups, allowing participants to design displays based on their interests in topics such as mining, wartime life, or local family stories. The museum also plans to take handling collection items, including old telephones, mangles and wash tubs, into care homes and schools for hands-on sessions.
The closure decision followed a major public consultation involving over 2,000 respondents. The museum states that current plans have been shaped directly by what local people identified as priorities: keeping the collection safe, sharing more local history, and ensuring accessibility for everyone in Cannock Chase.
The museum continues to support a local community group exploring the potential to reopen the museum in its current location. The group is developing business and operational plans, with ongoing collaboration planned as this work progresses.
