Museums closing

Sad to hear that two specialist museums are set to close. These are perilous times...

(via)

Firepower, London's oldest military museum, is to close at the end of 2016, in a move which allows Woolwich council to squeeze a more attractive return from the site. The root of the problem is “the Museum will be unable to live within the available income and it is also clear that the location is very unlikely to be able to deliver the number of visitors in the timescale needed for financial sustainability.” A new home will be identified locally to house some of the collection. The staff of the museum are unable to comment. A petition to save the museum has been set up here.

Another closure is the De Morgan Centre in Wandsworth - its last day is 28 June. This collection of ceramics by William De Morgan and his wife Evelyn, a painter, has struggled in recent years, and is currently occupying "a bit of spare space" at Wandsworth Museum, which is moving. The whole story is here.

On the more positive side, there's a tiny museum, somewhere in Senate House (University of London), that was never really open, though it had a bit of funding for a curator for a while and exists as blog posts about the collection. "Visit" the Museum of Writing's blog here. It shows an amazing variety of objects, like this toucan inkwell -

The collection, assembled by Alan Cole over several decades, consists of more than 80,000 individual artifacts and also contains reference materials to the history of writing.