Beamish wins Museum of the Year 2025 award

Beamish, The Living Museum of the North has been named Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025.

The open-air museum in County Durham saw off competition from four other finalists: Chapter multi-arts centre in Cardiff, Perth Museum, the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and Compton Verney art gallery in Warwickshire.

The £120,000 prize was presented to Beamish chief executive Rhiannon Hiles at a ceremony at the Museum of Liverpool, the first time the event has been held outside London.

This year's award was particularly focused on community impact, with all five finalists selected for their deep connections with local communities.

The other four finalists each received £15,000, bringing the total prize pot to £180,000.

Beamish is a social history museum that brings north-east England's Georgian, Edwardian, 1940s and 1950s history to life through immersive exhibits. Visitors engage with costumed staff and volunteers and experience regional stories of everyday life.

The museum, which celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, recently completed its Remaking Beamish project, which saw the recreation of a 1950s town developed with community input from people with firsthand knowledge of the original spaces.

The project involved more than 32,000 community members, 14,338 schoolchildren, and 35,000 volunteer hours to create 31 new exhibits within the museum. The year also saw the opening of the aged miners’ homes, which tell the story of the welfare provision for retired miners in County Durham.

The museum provides innovative educational programming for 40,000 schoolchildren annually. In 2024, it welcomed over 838,630 visitors, and remains the region’s most visited attraction.

“Beamish is a museum brought to life by people – a joyous, immersive and unique place shaped by the stories and experiences of its community,” said Art Fund director Jenny Waldman, who is chair of the judges for the Museum of the Year award.

“The judges were blown away by the remarkable attention to detail of its exhibits across a 350 acre site and by the passion of its staff and volunteers. With three quarters of adults in the north-east of England saying museums make them proud of where they live, Beamish is a shining example of how museums enrich and celebrate local communities.

“Warmest congratulations to Beamish on winning Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025. You have been a jewel in the crown of the North East for 55 years and I’m sure you’ll continue to delight visitors for many more to come.”

Hiles said: “We are incredibly excited and truly elated to be named Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025.

“To receive such a prestigious award is a real honour, a phenomenal achievement, and is credit to the amazing people who make Beamish such a special place. Thank you to our fantastic staff and volunteers and to our communities, visitors, supporters and partners for their support.

“Our thanks to Art Fund for this award – it has been a privilege to be shortlisted alongside such fantastic museums, a huge well done to all of the finalists.”

The ceremony was attended by UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy, who told the audience that museums had a vital role to play in overcoming division and building a "more self confident country".

“Our mission as a government is to open up the arts everywhere for everyone,” she said. “And I know that is something that all of you in this room share: to tell the story, not just of some of us, but all of us, our whole national story to the world in a time of enormous strife.

“When it feels that we found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another, it is museums like these that we're celebrating and honoring today who demonstrate to people in every part of our country that their contribution is seen and valued.”

Nandy said she would draw “inspiration from the work of our brilliant museums to open up opportunities to a new generation, to tell our whole national story to the world, to build a more self confident country”.

She said the country needed to “celebrate the fact that we are so good at these things, whether it's music, film, art, culture, galleries or museums, we are some of the best in the world, and when we do it right, we light up the world”.

“Your museums, your institutions, are needed now more than ever,” she added.

The 2025 judging panel included artist Rana Begum; David Dibosa, director of research and interpretation at Tate; Jane Richardson, chief executive of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales; and comedian Phil Wang, who also presented the award ceremony. The judges visited each of the finalists to inform their decision-making.