A Five-Year-Old Plymouth Museum Wins the UK's Biggest Museum Prize
On 25 June, aboard the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, the broadcaster June Sarpong handed a cheque for £120,000 to Victoria Pomery, chief executive of The Box in Plymouth. It was the largest single prize in world museum culture — the Art Fund Museum of the Year award — and it went to an institution most Londoners would struggle to place on a map, beating the National Gallery and the V&A East Storehouse to the title.
That upset is the story. The Box is not a household name. It opened in September 2020, mid-pandemic, after a £48 million capital investment that fused Plymouth’s former city museum and library with the adjoining St Luke’s Church into a single building — part museum, part archive, part community hall, holding more than two million objects, artworks, specimens and archival records drawn from the city’s collections, its film and television archive, and its local-studies library. Five years on, it has logged 1.3 million visits and, according to its own economic-impact reporting, driven £244 million into the Plymouth economy and £100 million in measurable health and wellbeing benefit.
Judges did not reward scale, though. They rewarded a specific curatorial choice: letting artists loose on the archive rather than simply displaying it. The prize citation singled out three projects — Osman Yousefzada’s engagement with colonial-era holdings, Jyll Bradley’s work opening up the archive to public use, and Jeremy Deller’s initiative built around the public collection — as evidence that The Box was “reimagining the future through Plymouth’s past” and testing “how reframing historic collections can challenge traditional museum narratives,” in the judging panel’s words. Sarpong, one of the judges, put it more simply: “What stood out so strongly with The Box was the sense of pride and connection it has created across Plymouth.” The panel went further still, calling the museum a “revelation in so many ways — a true jewel in the crown of the South West.”
It is worth sitting with who The Box beat. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, the National Gallery in London, and the V&A East Storehouse — each of them either older, better funded, or backed by an institution with a global name — were this year’s other finalists, and each received a £20,000 consolation prize. That The Box outpolled institutions with far larger budgets and national profiles says something about where the judges decided the year’s most significant museum work actually happened — not at a flagship London institution, but in a regional museum’s decision to hand its archive over to living artists and let them make an argument with it.
Art Fund’s director, Jenny Waldman, framed the win as validation of a model rather than a single show: “In just five years, the Box has transformed how Plymouth’s remarkable collections are shared and experienced, creating a welcoming space for visitors and reaching beyond its walls into public spaces and almost every school in the city.” That is the more durable claim underneath the ceremony. Museum of the Year has, in recent cycles, tended to favour institutions that treat access and community engagement as curatorial substance rather than an afterthought bolted onto a press release — The Box’s figures on schools engagement (89 percent of Plymouth’s schools have taken part in its programming, reaching roughly 10,000 children a year) point in that direction, whatever one makes of self-reported economic-impact modelling.
None of this settles the more interesting argument the award raises without quite making explicit: whether a museum’s civic reach — visits, school participation, pounds attributed to the local economy — should carry as much weight in these judgments as connoisseurship, scholarship, or the rarity of what’s on the walls. The Box’s win doesn’t resolve that tension. It just puts a five-year-old museum in a converted library, at the western edge of England, at the centre of it for a year.