Edinburgh council hopes to reopen People’s Story museum in December

Edinburgh council says it hopes to find a way to reopen the People’s Story museum in December following a public outcry over its closure.

The working-class history museum, on the city's Royal Mile, has been shut for the past two months due to lack of staffing caused by a recruitment freeze. The council had proposed keeping the museum closed until April 2025 as it grapples with a £26.7m gap in its budget for next year.

The council is also planning to make another of its cultural venues, Queensferry Museum, available to the public on an appointment-only basis while it consults on a new operating model. These two measures would save around £205,000 a year.

Councillors were not consulted on the People's Story closure before it happened and the move has been heavily criticised, with the museum’s supporters saying they fear the venue will never reopen.

A number of high-profile figures across Scotland, including Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, have spoken out against the closure, accusing the council of trying to airbrush the city’s working class roots.

Former councillor and MP George Kerevan, who was part of the Labour administration that established the People’s Story, told the BBC that he was “incandescently angry because it’s a trivial amount of money they are trying to save”. He said he believed the decision was not about making savings but about “expunging the history of Edinburgh”.

The council’s culture and communities committee held a meeting last week to consider the proposal to close the museum “on a seasonal and temporary basis through the autumn and winter months, reopening in April 2025”.

Following the meeting, the council’s convenor for culture, Val Walker, told Museums Journal that committee would seek to find a way to reopen the museum in December rather than in April 2025. However, she said that there were “challenges to overcome”.

Walker said: “We are totally committed to reopening the People’s Story museum, but we recognise that there are challenges to overcome.

“We have listened to and read the statements from our passionate community, and part of our role as councillors means that we sometimes need to make hard decisions.

“No one wants to see the People’s Story museum closed, but the situation that we were faced with was that officers were having to react in an unplanned way to not having enough staff to safely open every museum, so closures were happening in an unplanned way.

“This temporary closure of the People’s Story has been put in place and it is an absolute commitment from me that at the December committee meeting we will be looking at the ways in which we can reopen that museum – not in April but in December.”

According to a committee report, the city’s museums and gallery service has experienced a significant drop in self-generated income due to the impact of Covid on previously high-earning sites.

The council is planning a new collections centre and transformation programme for its museums and galleries, starting next year, which it says will seek to “improve the offer to residents and visitors while remaining within agreed budget parameters”.