Leicester Museum & Art Gallery Improvements

Improvements at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

Since 2019, the team at Leicester Museums and Galleries have been working hard, mostly behind the scenes, to make improvements to your flagship museum.

This ten-year Masterplan, entitled “Voices of Leicester”, has in the last few years created the Leicester Stories Gallery, secured external funding, and carried out the preliminary planning and architectural investigations required before major improvements can start.

From September 2024 the Museum will now be entering “Phase 4” of this plan, which will see positive changes and improvements to the Art Gallery part of the building. These works will take about 18 months to fully complete.

Firstly, parts of the building are now almost 200 years old, so need care and attention to help them last another 200 years. Our initial job will be to repair, conserve, and preserve the original and later walls, roofs, chimneys, and skylights above the art galleries. This will also include new guttering and rainwater downpipes, new ventilation systems, and revealing some of the original architectural features. This work is funded by Arts Council England’s Museum Estate and Development Fund, a funding programme specifically for the repair and conservation of Museum buildings.

Secondly, we will be fixing the confusing layout of the Art Gallery. Visitors regularly tell us how difficult it is to find their way around parts of the building, with its winding corridors and narrow points. To solve this, we’ll be creating a new internal public entrance into the art galleries, creating new doorways between them, and removing changes in floor levels, improving physical access for everyone.

A brand new space

A new café to the front of the Museum, with its own kitchen and additional visitor toilets, and a new reception and museum shop will improve both your welcome, and give visitors and passers-by a place to relax and spend time with family and friends.

But here’s the really exciting part.

We will be completely redisplaying all of the ground floor art galleries.

This will bring all your art “under one roof”, including incorporating the German Expressionist artworks within the ground floor displays, so that you will be able to better experience and interact with a wider range of artworks.

The current art and design displays will be changed and updated, with a mix of old favourites and new artworks from the museum collection, that are explained and explored in better, more modern, ways, for all visitors.

We’ll still of course have dinosaurs, fossils, and Ancient Egyptians, our award-winning range of engaging and exciting temporary exhibitions, curriculum enrichment workshops for schools, and lots of events and activities throughout all these works.

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery - Free to All Since 1849

We are excited about this opportunity to showcase more of Leicester's world class art and design collections, in relevant and inclusive permanent exhibitions.

The major building work and redisplay of the art galleries is scheduled to be complete by late 2025.

Finally, “Voices of Leicester” doesn’t just stop at improving the Art Gallery. Concurrently with this development work we will also continue working towards Phase 5 of the masterplan, which will hopefully start around 2027.

This will, if external funding is secured, see the creation of a brand new “Story of Leicester” gallery which will be co-produced with local people. This will tell the 2,000 year story of the city and its communities from prehistory to the Second World War, whilst a complementary social history gallery will explore different themes such as local industries, conflict, and women’s stories, in more depth. Upstairs, we aim to create a major modern Natural World and Environmental gallery, which will help people to understand their role in protecting wildlife, and how we can best respond to a changing global climate.