Immersive experience featuring ‘costumed folk’ shortlisted for world's biggest museum prize

An open-air museum that brings 1940s and 1950s history to life through “immersive exhibits” is one of five British museums selected as finalists for the 2025 edition of the UK Art Fund Museum of the Year, the world’s largest museum prize.

Art Fund has shortlisted Beamish, The Living Museum of the North in County Durham, which attempts to show what life was like in the Georgian, Edwardian, 1940s and 1950s eras through meetings with “costumed folk”. The 55-year-old museum recently completed its “Remaking Beamish” project, the recreation of a 1950s town involving 32,000 community members.

Joining Beamish museum on the shortlist are Chapter in Cardiff, the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire, the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and Perth Museum in Scotland. The winning museum, to be announced 26 June at a ceremony at the Museum of Liverpool, will receive £120,000, while the four other finalists will receive £15,000 each.

Perth Museum only opened in March last year following a £27m development and renovation of Perth City Hall, the Edwardian building that houses the museum, by the Dutch architects Mecanoo. Its crowning glory is the Stone of Destiny, which was returned to Scotland in 1996 after almost seven centuries in Westminster Abbey. The museum was backed by £10m from the UK government as part of the Tay Cities Region Deal, a public and private bodies partnership aimed at boosting investment in the area.

Chapter arts centre in Cardiff, a kunsthalle-type space, was founded in 1971 by the artists Christine Kinsey and Bryan Jones along with the writer Mik Flood. “Across visual art, film, performance, and multidisciplinary projects, we seek to explore the most urgent questions of our time,” says an online statement. The spaces' exhibition programme from 2023 to 2024 included shows dedicated to artists such as Adham Faramawy, Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye and Abi Palmer who focused on “slime, queerness, politics of space and deeply erotic, alien mating rituals”.

Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast houses the Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library and Archive, the first of its kind in Northern Ireland. After closing in 2023, the gallery reopened last year at a new address on Queens street in the city centre, presenting exhibitions by artists including Charlotte Bosanquet, Susan Hiller and Claire Morgan. The gallery says online that it is building a permanent collection of Northern Irish contemporary art “to preserve our visual history and safeguard works of art that could otherwise be lost to the public” such as the photographic series Sectarian Murder (1988) by Paul Seawright.

Meanwhile Compton Verney, which opened in 2004, is described online as “an accredited museum and charity located in Warwickshire, England—our history dates back to the late Saxon period”, with six permanent collections (Naples, Northern Europe, Portraits and Miniatures, Chinese Bronzes, Folk Art, and the Marx-Lambert Collection). Art Fund highlights recent initiatives at the institution such as a monthly dementia café and early years creativity projects involving more than 6,000 school children.

The Art Fund Museum of the Year judges are the artist Rana Begum; David Dibosa, the director of research and interpretation at Tate; Jane Richardson, the chief executive of Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales, and the comedian Phil Wang. The Young V&A, a museum aimed at children that reopened in London in 2023, won last year’s Art Fund Museum of the Year prize.

The criteria for eligibility for the prize state that prospective galleries “must be based in the UK and be either a public museum, gallery, historic house, library or archive which has spaces for the public to visit and experience the visual arts or other object-based collections”.