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 could start.

With construction starting in January 2025, we are now in “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 complete.

So…What is happening behind the hoardings?

Firstly, parts of the building are now almost 200 years old, so need care and attention to help them last another 200 years. Initial works include the repair, conservation, and preservation of the original and later walls, roofs, chimneys, and skylights above the art galleries. This includes 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 are fixing the confusing layout of the Art Galleries. 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 are 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 new displays will feature 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 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, new café, redisplay of the art galleries, and new shop and reception area are scheduled to complete in 2026.

Finally, “Voices of Leicester” doesn’t stop here. Concurrently with this development work we are also working towards Phase 5 of the masterplan, which will hopefully start in 2027. We are grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for awarding us development phase funding to work up plans for phase 5.

If a delivery phase grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund is secured, Phase 5 works will 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.