Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's claim on a visitor's time rests on two collections that would each justify a trip alone: the largest public holding of Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts art anywhere, and the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found, shown together with Egyptian, Assyrian and Mesopotamian material deep enough to rival institutions many times its size. All of it is free to see. Around that core sits a building worth the visit in its own right, a Victorian civic monument still mid-way through putting itself back together after a four-year closure, which means the collection a visitor meets today is real but partial, and the museum itself is candid about that rather than pretending the 2024 reopening was the whole story.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery opened on 28 November 1885, when the Prince of Wales cut the ribbon on a new gallery built into an extended part of the Council House, above the offices of the city's own Gas Department. That arrangement was not an accident: the profits of the municipal gas supply, in effect, subsidised the gallery, which let Birmingham get around the Public Libraries Act 1850's limits on spending public money on the arts. The building was designed by the Birmingham architect Yeoville Thomason, who also designed the adjoining Council House, and its ironwork was made by the Birmingham firm Hart, Son, Peard and Co.

The collections predate the building by two decades. In 1864 the Birmingham Society of Artists and other donors, including the former mayor Samuel Thornton, gave the city 64 pictures and the Sultanganj Buddha, first shown to the public in 1867 in the Free Library building before overcrowding forced a move to Aston Hall. A 10,000 pound gift from Richard and George Tangye restarted the campaign for a dedicated gallery in the 1880s, and further donations, including 50,000 pounds from the newspaper proprietor John Feeney, paid for later extensions. Seven galleries had to be rebuilt after German bombing in 1940.

The museum closed to the public in 2020, first for the pandemic and then for what turned into essential, years-overdue structural work: new heating, electrics, lifts and roofing across the whole Council House complex it shares with the city council. Birmingham's local authority put in 15 million pounds, with a further 5 million pounds from Arts Council England's MEND fund, on top of earlier repair spending, bringing the total closer to 20 million pounds by the time work finished.

The Gas Hall reopened first, in February 2024, for the Victorian Radicals exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art. The bulk of the permanent galleries reopened in phases through 2024, with a major reopening on Thursday 24 October 2024: the Round Room, the Industrial Gallery, the Bridge Gallery and the Edwardian Tea Rooms all came back at once, timed for the October half-term. By the museum's own account, only around 30 percent of its public gallery space had reopened at that point, with more promised in a phased programme that has continued since.

The single object most identified with the museum today is not Victorian at all. On 5 July 2009 the metal detectorist Terry Herbert, searching a ploughed field near Hammerwich in Staffordshire, found the first pieces of what became the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever recorded anywhere: just under 4,000 objects and fragments, most of it war-gear, buried in the mid-7th century. The find, valued at 3.3 million pounds and split under the Treasure Act between Herbert and the landowner Fred Johnson, is jointly owned by Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds and displays the greater share, with a reconstructed helmet and a recreated mead hall alongside the pieces themselves.

That sits within a much older set of collections: Egyptian mummies and grave goods, Assyrian palace reliefs, Mesopotamian tablets, and material from the ancient Mediterranean, assembled mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries and still among the deepest holdings of their kind outside a national museum in London.

Birmingham holds the largest public collection of Pre-Raphaelite and associated Arts and Crafts work anywhere, more than sixty paintings, sculptures and stained glass panels by Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and Simeon Solomon among others. The connection is not incidental: Birmingham's art school trained or influenced several artists working in the movement's wake into the early 20th century, and the city's manufacturers and patrons collected the group's work while it was still controversial in London.

Jacob Epstein's bronze Lucifer, made in 1944-45 and bought soon after, has become the museum's own equivalent of a mascot: it stood at the heart of the Round Room before the 2020 closure and was placed back at the centre of the rehung space, called One Fresh Take, when the room reopened in October 2024, deliberately mixing that older Pre-Raphaelite-adjacent inheritance with contemporary and Black British artists such as Lubaina Himid.

The museum does not present its history as a simple story of civic generosity, and it should not: the Sultanganj Buddha, its best-known non-European object, illustrates why. The largest substantially complete cast copper Buddha figure surviving from ancient India was uncovered by railway construction workers near Sultanganj, Bihar, in 1861, and paid for and shipped to England by Samuel Thornton, a Birmingham ironmonger and former mayor, who gave it to the city in 1864. Scholars, including the 19th-century antiquarian Rajendralal Mitra, debated the statue's removal from India almost from the moment it arrived. In the 20th and 21st centuries, a Birmingham city councillor and the Archaeological Survey of India have both, at different points, called for the statue to be returned to India; the museum has kept it on display, latterly in a gallery that also serves as a devotional site for Birmingham's Buddhist community.

The museum's current displays acknowledge this history more directly than earlier hangs did, using labels that name how particular objects entered the collection rather than presenting them without context, part of a wider shift across the reopened galleries toward foregrounding whose story is being told.

The clearest sign of how much the 2024 reopening left undone is the museum's own digitisation programme, Dynamic Collections, which the museum says will not finish cataloguing and photographing the works still off display until 2032. Reviewers who visited in the months after the reopening, writing for Museums Journal and for the Birmingham-based outlet The Dispatch, praised specific new ideas, the Made in Birmingham display under the Industrial Gallery's restored glass roof and the participatory, visitor-led tone of the new galleries, while pointing to unfinished corners: an assortment of French bronzes left standing without explanation in a stairwell, a Round Room still awkward for showing paintings under its lighting, and significant named holdings by artists such as Simone Martini and Edouard Vuillard still absent from the walls entirely.

The trust's own figures give some measure of what the partial reopening still achieved: 672,391 visitors in 2025, a rise of more than 300 percent on the closed-building years before, enough to place the museum 62nd among all UK attractions tracked by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions and second in the West Midlands. Free admission, a world-class hoard and a Pre-Raphaelite collection without rival outside London remain the draw regardless of how much of the rest of the building is still to come back.

Visitors and critics agree on the reasons to come: the free Staffordshire Hoard and Pre-Raphaelite displays, and the Victorian building itself, especially the Round Room and the glass-roofed Industrial Gallery. They are just as consistent on the caveat, which follows directly from the museum's history: the October 2024 reopening, after nearly four years shut for essential repairs, restored only part of the museum, and reviewers who came back looking for a transformed institution found real curatorial ambition in the new thematic galleries alongside empty corners and a wider collection still waiting off display.