Charlotte Higgins is right to highlight the straitened circumstances of the UK’s museums (War has shown Ukrainians – and the rest of us – why museums are so important for telling our stories, 27 May), but there are deeper issues in the sector than a lack of cash to modify working practices and maintain displays.
The Mapping Museums project at Birkbeck, University of London has shown that more than 800 museums have closed in the UK since 1960. There can be many reasons for museums to close: founders retire, land and buildings are lost when leases cannot be renewed and, yes, reductions in income. But lack of funding is often a result of political choices. It is probably not by chance that the rate of closures has accelerated since 2010 – a period that coincides with austerity policies, with all their ramifications.
New museums have continued to open regularly, but 2010 was the first time that closures outstripped openings, and there are now signs that the sector may have begun to shrink. As Higgins says, we need museums. Closures often mean loss of access to collections, and in turn to public history. That too is a crisis that needs attention.
Dr Mark Liebenrood
London
• Charlotte Higgins is right to draw attention to the vital role played by museums, but sadly Kherson is not alone in having its museums “plundered and emptied”.
The national cultural heritage of Sudan is in grave danger. After six weeks of violence, museums, libraries, theatres and archives are all under threat. Already, the Muhammad Omar Bashir Centre for Sudanese Studies at Omdurman Ahlia University has been entirely destroyed by fire, with the loss of thousands of books, manuscripts and priceless primary sources describing the nation’s history.
Over the river in Khartoum, the Natural History Museum has suffered the destruction of not just its documentary archive but the death by starvation and thirst of many of its rare animals.
Friends inside and outside Sudan, glued to their Twitter feeds, hold their breath every time Rapid Support Forces are filmed gathering outside archive buildings: hoping that an anonymous exterior (or the militiamen’s inability to read the signage) will leave a precious library or archive unmolested for another precarious day.
Of course, safeguarding cultural heritage pales in significance compared with the murder, injury, rape, urban ruin and displacement resulting from the conflict.
But this war risks killing the soul of Sudan as well as its physical body. If and when the fighting ends and a civilian government is re-established, the world must pledge not just a commitment to justice but to the protection of Sudan’s art, music, literature and historical record.
Fergus Nicoll
Oxford
• Charlotte Higgins’s piece gave an important additional dimension to the current war on Ukraine by Russia. The role of museums as custodians of nations’ histories and cultures is often overlooked. The Ukrainian emphasis on collecting artefacts of the current conflict is a reminder of the century-long attempt by Russia, Soviet and post-Soviet, to subjugate and obliterate Ukraine as a separate entity, nation, people and culture. Timothy Snyder reminds us of this history in Bloodlands, beginning with the occupation of Ukraine in the 1920s and the subsequent famines, first through incompetence, then by design, resulting in the death of millions through starvation.
Mass starvation is no longer being used as a weapon of war, but Russia continues to use the other methods it adopted from 1920 in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe in the territories it has occupied – deportations, destruction of cultural institutions and artefacts and suppression of the Ukrainian language. History does indeed repeat itself, and it’s more important than ever that museums and other cultural institutions retain the past and record the present.
Blaine Stothard
London
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