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Florence Nightingale Museum to fully reopen after pandemic shutdown
Fundraising efforts have helped secure museum’s future two years after Covid forced it to close indefinitely
The Florence Nightingale Museum has announced it will reopen five days a week from Thursday 12 May thanks to new funding and increasing numbers of tourists coming to London.
In January 2021, the independent museum warned it was closing for the “foreseeable future” and would undergo a major restructure with its 13 members of staff. A £64,500 Cultural Recovery Fund grant and private donations allowed it to run monthly open weekends last summer, but its future still looked far from secure.
“After concerted fundraising and as tourists begin to return to the country and visitors head for museums, we are so pleased to be returning to tell the story of Florence Nightingale and the people following in her footsteps today,” the museum’s director David Green said.
“At the time of the forced closure, we were at our busiest, in the early stages of [Nightingale’s] bicentenary celebrations. The closure stopped us in our tracks and was immensely costly, and the extended lockdown put the museum at risk. We are now on a surer footing and absolutely delighted to open our doors again, hopefully for good this time.”
As well as the Arts Council England grant, the museum received a small reopening grant from the London Museum Development Team and an Art Fund Respond and Reimagine grant. Green told Museums Journal that new expertise recruited to its board has also helped with more creative fundraising efforts, and its first commercial sponsor, Phastar, which is supporting a a new statistics display.
The museum will reopen with a newly updated bicentenary exhibition reflecting the enduring relevance of Nightingale’s work – from the medicine she took to the Crimean War and her pet owl, Athena, to her cameo appearance in the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate video game. A family activity trail has also been developed for the reopening.
The museum will reopen with nine members of staff, down from 13, which is due to a mixture of temporary contracts ending, resignations and two redundancies.
Thursday 12 May 2022 is the 202nd anniversary of the birth of Nightingale.