Fears for the future of the art museum at University College London (UCL), which houses works by artists such as Paula Rego, J.M.W Turner and Stanley Spencer, have been eased by news that it has found a new temporary home. This follows a report published in the Observer last October, which alleged that the museum was under threat of being “dismantled” as part of redevelopment plans marking the university’s 200th anniversary.
UCL celebrates its bicentenary in 2026 and, via its website, recently announced plans to transform its spaces into a “welcoming and inclusive environment, combining the charm of the 19th-century heritage with the functionality and standards of the 21st century”. This includes, says David Bindman, UCL’s emeritus professor of the history of art, converting the rooms that once held the museum into a flexible event space.
When this particular proposal came to light last year, UCL staff expressed concern that the museum’s collection was being put at risk by the building work, and there were fears that it would be placed into long-term storage. Now, it has been confirmed that the institution—which was previously located in the university’s South Cloisters, directly accessible from the main quad, and is currently closed as redevelopment work begins—will be moved to a more tucked away space within the same building while a permanent solution is sought.
The UCL Art Museum’s former premises
Courtesy of UCL Art Museum
A lack of exhibition space?
The museum’s temporary space, which is expected to open in April, will be split across two areas—a study room and a smaller storeroom. “It looks like a reasonable space though it will require quite a lot of signposting to find it”, Bindman says. “It's not something you're going to come across the way you would with the museum where it was.”
A more pressing issue, The Art Newspaper understands, is that unlike in the previous premises, this new location will offer no wall space for exhibitions. In addition, Bindman says he had hoped that paintings currently on display in the UCL staff common room—including a collection highlight, Spencer’s The Nativity (1912)—would be brought out into permanent public view, but there are no current plans to do so. The museum will, however, continue to loan out works.
It remains unclear how long the museum will be in its temporary premises, or how it will feature as part of UCL’s campus in the long term. At the time of writing, UCL had not responded to The Art Newspaper’s request for comment. In a statement to the Observer last year, before the temporary move was announced, a spokesperson said: “While the Art Museum will be temporarily closed, its collections are being carefully stored and can still be accessed for research, teaching and for open days. In the longer-term we aim to provide new gallery and exhibition space, so our students and the public have better access to these important art works.”
The subject of the museum’s future has inspired reflections from beyond the university itself. Esther Chadwick, a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a specialist in 18th-century British art, tells The Art Newspaper: “As someone who believes passionately in the importance of teaching with objects, I’m pleased to hear that the Art Museum is now on the agenda in discussions about the future of the UCL campus. It’s vital that there be continued access to the museum for students and the public and that the collection have a permanent home. There is so much potential here—in future I could imagine an even more ambitious UCL museum that brought the university’s art and cultural collections together, which would make it one of the finest university museums in the UK.”
The Flaxman Gallery at UCL
Courtesy of UCL Art Museum
A diverse collection
The UCL Art Museum is home to more than 10,000 works dating from 1490 to the present day, among them works by former students of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art. Women artists make up around 45% of the Slade collections, with standout works including Paula Rego’s Under Milk Wood (1954), a group portrait that draws inspiration from a poem by Dylan Thomas, and Dora Carrington’s Female Figure Lying on her Back (1912), a work reflecting the Slade’s then progressive rules allowing women to paint from life.
The collection—which also includes strong holdings of 16th-century German prints, and an array of English and French caricatures—is used by a wide range of students, Bindman says. These include students of mathematics, cardiology and postcolonial studies, the museum’s curator Andrea Frederickson has said in a previous interview. It has been made accessible to the public by appointment and also through loans and temporary exhibitions on site, including some held in collaboration with other London institutions such as the British Museum and the now-closed Zabludowicz Collection.
Yet to be confirmed is the future of an expansive collection of plaster models by the British neoclassical artist John Flaxman, which were first brought to UCL in 1847. Dozens of them remain set into the walls of UCL’s Flaxman Gallery, which was specifically designed to house them, though many more were for a long time housed in the UCL Art Museum’s former space—and are now stuck in off-site storage. Despite the 200th anniversary of Flaxman’s death coinciding with UCL’s own bicentenary next year, The Art Newspaper understands that it has not been confirmed when and how the new museum space will be able to put the works back on display.
Pressure for a permanent solution
Going forward, Bindman emphasises that there is a lot of interesting work that could be done relating to art at the university. This includes uncovering and restoring a mural depicting Henry Crabb Robinson, one of the founders of the London University—which later became UCL—alongside literary greats he knew such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The mural is housed in the nearby Dr Williams Library, which UCL acquired last year.
The decision to preserve the UCL Art Museum—while a more permanent solution is found—appears to have been made possible in part by the pressure applied by dedicated academics at UCL, and the associated media coverage it has brought. Bindman expresses concern, however, that teaching staff are having an increasingly small role in such decisions.
“[There was an idea to] do something dramatic to improve UCL, which all seems fair enough and fine. But there does seem to be a point at which the academics don't really contribute enough to that,” he says. “I suspect that happens in a lot of universities, [here] and abroad too.”
