Migration Museum creates touring exhibition to mark NHS anniversary

A national touring exhibition marking the 75^th anniversary of the NHS has opened at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery.

Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS has been developed by the Migration Museum and will tour to Leeds later in the year and then London in 2024.

The exhibition, which can be seen in Leicester until 29 October, highlights the crucial role played by migrants in the NHS, which was created on 5 July 1948.

“Heart of the Nation builds on a digital exhibition that we launched during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020,” said Aditi Anand, the artistic director of the Migration Museum and curator of the NHS exhibition.

“At the time, the Migration Museum, along with all other museums across the UK, was closed to visitors and it wasn’t clear when we’d be able to reopen. We wanted to find a way to continue to provide a platform for migration stories and to reach and engage our audiences even though people couldn’t visit our museum in person.”

Heart of the Nation features dozens of personal stories contributed by people who have come from all over the world to work at all levels of the NHS from the 1940s to the present day. These are displayed alongside photography, film, newly commissioned artwork, artefacts and historical ephemera.

Anand said: “While we’ve obviously had to adapt and change the content of our digital exhibition to translate it into a physical exhibition, and we’ve brought the exhibition narrative up to date to reflect the current challenges that the NHS faces – a section of the exhibition features placards and perspectives from NHS workers currently on strike, for example – many of the stories and much of the content remains the same.”

Heart of the Nation comes ahead of the Migration Museum’s move to a permanent home in the City of London in 2026.

“Our long-term vision is to create a UK-wide Migration Museum ecosystem, encompassing a permanent home in London, a network of venues across the UK and a digital storytelling platform,” Anand said. “We hope that ideas, content and stories will flow seamlessly throughout this ecosystem, so that stories contributed online will be incorporated into our physical exhibitions in London and national venues and vice-versa.”

Since 2017, the Migration Museum, which is currently based in a venue in Lewisham Shopping Centre in south-east London, has been staging exhibitions, events and education workshops from a series of temporary venues in London. This has allowed it to build audiences, test ideas and gather feedback for what a permanent museum in London might look like. 

Anand said: “Heart of the Nation is a way for us to deepen relationships with partners and collaborators across the UK and to test and gather feedback on how a network of venues might work – whether in partnership with existing museums and galleries, such as our fantastic launch partners at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, or via pop-ups and non-museum-sector partnerships, such as the next step of our national tour in Leeds, where we’ll be staging the exhibition in Trinity Leeds shopping centre in partnership with real estate company Landsec.

"These learnings will be invaluable as we develop and hone our plans for our national network of venues going forward."