Museums at Night

Culture24 co-ordinates Museums at Night, the annual festival encouraging new audiences to discover culture and heritage venues on their doorstep in a different light.

Museums at Night 2013 takes place over the weekend of Thursday May 16 to Saturday May 18. All UK cultural and heritage venues are warmly invited to run evening events over this weekend and to register them on our DDE database, to take advantage of the publicity benefits of being part of this huge UK-wide festival.

Resources to support participating venues can be found on the Museums at Night sector-facing blog, which features behind-the-scenes news from the campaign and case study guest posts from museums and galleries.

The campaign has grown rapidly since Culture24 took it over in 2009 largely because of our partnership working. In the past we have teamed up with Future Shorts to offer venues short film activity packages, the Faber Archive to offer compelling competitions, and Sky Arts to make Museums at Night documentaries and subsidise museum sleepovers.

Find out more about the festival in the Museums at Night section on our arts and heritage guide Culture24.org.uk.

The Museums at Night 2013 festival launch took place aboard the Cutty Sark.

For Museums at Night 2012, Culture24 kicked off an exciting new competition called Connect10, offering UK arts and heritage venues the chance to win one of ten adventurous contemporary artists and a share of £7000 for their Museums at Night event. 28 venues competed for the 10 artists, and reached out to their audiences for support: over 22,000 public votes were cast, and 18 venues ran events and received a share of the funding.

Read an independent evaluation of the 2012 campaign:

Download the Executive Summary.

Download the full Evaluation Report.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the campaign or working in partnership, please contact Nick Stockman at nick@culture24.org.uk or on 01273 623279.

If you have any questions about participating, please contact Rosie Clarke at rosie@culture24.org.uk or on 01273 623336.

 ”Nick and Rosie have been brilliant. You know if you do a Museums at Night event they will do their best to promote it. Museums at Night is the best of all the national initiatives because the team works so hard.”

 Laura Crossley, Sheringham Museum