Ten years after the Brexit vote, museums still need space to talk about its impacts

When the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, museums quickly identified potential risks. Questions were raised about European funding, international partnerships, staffing, research collaboration, touring exhibitions and the movement of collections across borders.

Yet 10 years later, discussions about Brexit's impact on museums often remain surprisingly inconclusive.

Part of the difficulty is that people often look for a single Brexit story. Did Brexit impact museums or not? My PhD research suggests this question is difficult to answer because it assumes that museums experienced Brexit in the same way. They did not.

Since 2019, I have been conducting an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded, part-time PhD in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London, in which I have examined how Brexit affected organisational operations within English and Welsh national museums between 2016 and 2025.

The project focuses on three national museums, but the findings speak to wider issues across the sector.

What emerges is more complex than either critics or supporters of Brexit often assume. Museums entered Brexit from very different starting positions. Some were heavily engaged with European funding programmes, research networks, touring activity and international partnerships.

Others had fewer direct connections to the EU and experienced fewer immediate disruptions. Brexit did not affect a single museum sector; it affected a diverse group of organisations whose relationships with the EU and Europe varied considerably.

This helps explain why there is no single account of Brexit's consequences. However, the absence of a single narrative should not be mistaken for an absence of impact.

Across the museums studied, my research highlights how Brexit changed the conditions under which museum work is carried out.

Museums reported more complex arrangements for moving objects internationally, additional customs and transport requirements, increased administrative burdens and changes to funding opportunities.

In many cases, these changes did not stop activity altogether. Instead, they made certain activities slower, more expensive or more complicated to organise.

Some of the most significant effects are also among the hardest to measure. Researchers can identify exhibitions that took place, grants awarded, and partnerships formed.

It is much harder to identify collaborations that were never pursued, funding opportunities that were no longer available, or international projects that became less attractive due to additional costs and administrative burdens. Brexit's effects may then appear as opportunities forgone or activities that become less likely.

The challenge of understanding Brexit’s impacts is compounded by the fact that Brexit did not occur in isolation. Museums have also had to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, rising operational costs, changing visitor behaviour, funding pressures and wider political uncertainty.

As a result, Brexit-related effects are often absorbed into broader organisational challenges. This makes them difficult to isolate, but that difficulty is an important finding. Brexit can shape museum work even when it is not explicitly identified as a Brexit issue.

This is not only a research problem. It is also a public one. The debate that followed the Tate's comments in summer 2025 illustrates why. When Maria Balshaw linked falling visitor numbers to both Brexit and the pandemic, discussion quickly moved beyond visitor trends into broader debates about politics and culture.

Whatever position one takes, it highlights a broader issue: publicly discussing Brexit's consequences remains politically contentious.

This matters because museums are not separate from politics, even when presented that way. As public institutions, employers, research partners and international collaborators, they operate within policy environments that directly affect their work. The challenge is that acknowledging those effects can itself be interpreted as a political act.

Within this context, I found that museums adapt, find workarounds, absorb additional pressures and continue delivering services despite disruption. This resilience is important, but it can also obscure the factors that made adaptation necessary in the first place.

Ten years after the referendum, the most important question then is whether museums have sufficient space to discuss the impacts of Brexit openly, without the burden of resilience falling primarily on staff working behind the scenes.

The fuller findings from my research will be published later this year. For now, one conclusion is already clear: understanding Brexit's impact on museums requires moving beyond simple narratives of success or failure.

It means recognising that political decisions shape the everyday realities of museum work and creating the conditions in which museums can speak honestly about those experiences.

Kirsty Warner is a PhD Candidate and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy