The British Museum will reopen to visitors next week after one of its biggest ever dustings. More than 30 staff members have been working on dusting the museum’s plentiful collections over the last three weeks in preparation for allowing visitors back in from 27 August.
Ladders and a cherry picker have to be used to clean some of the museum’s larger objects, including the 12-metre-tall cedar wood totem pole in the Great Court.
Fabiana Portoni, the museum’s preventative conservator and an expert in all things dust, said the accumulation of dust particles on objects could cause long-term damage. The big source of dust is normally human visitors, who bring dust from hair fibres or clothes, and nearby traffic pollution.
“During lockdown, all of these sources were reduced. However, there was still dust present around the museum,” she said.
The lack of people actually meant dust accumulating in more unusual places where it would not normally be found, she added.
The one upside of closure has been the opportunity to carry out one of the biggest single cleaning projects at the museum for decades. “A lot of these objects, to be able to clean them, they require ladders and different equipment and we have to do it before opening or after opening, so the timing is a little bit reduced,” said Portoni.
“But now, because we are closed, we can spend hours cleaning and there’s no rush, so it is a good opportunity for that.”
The British Museum will be the last of the national museums and galleries to reopen in what has been a staggered process that began with the National Gallery on 8 July. It will initially only open its ground floor galleries, but that still means the opportunity to see more than 9,000 objects, including some of the museum’s most popular exhibits such as the Rosetta stone, the Parthenon marbles, the Aztec double-headed serpent, the Akan drum and the Discobolus.
It comes after 163 days of closure, the longest peacetime shutdown in the museum’s 261-year history.
As at other museums, visitors will need to book a timed slot. Numbers will be reduced and it will feel very different from the old days of heaving crowds. Last year there was a 7% increase in visits to 6,239,983, making it the most visited attraction in the UK.
Once inside, visitors will follow a single, one-way route through galleries that cover ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Assyria before moving into Africa, Mexico, North America and the Enlightenment gallery.
The artist Grayson Perry has agreed to lend a work that was the centrepiece of his exhibition at the museum nine years ago. Titled Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, it is an elaborate, fabulously decorated iron coffin ship. Curators hope to display the work in room 17, next to the Nereid monument from western Turkey, built around 390BC.
The museum is reopening cautiously. For the first two days, hours will be 10am-3pm. From Saturday 29 August it will be open from 10am to 5pm. It plans to reopen some of the upper-floor galleries from 21 September.
