The board of trustees extended the closure, releasing all volunteers from their duties and making all staff redundant. The initial closure was an emergency measure to stabilise the charity, a spokesperson for the board tells The Art Newspaper. According to research commissioned by the charity Kids in Museums in early 2025, as many as three in five small museums and galleries in the UK fear the same fate. Where the council owns the building, local authority-funded museums’ collections tend to be left in situ because it is cheaper than paying for storage. Rex says such a framework needs to include the question of how funding is balanced between national and local museums, and, crucially, “the question of revenue funding now that local governments have been so stripped down”.