Several Top Museums in UK Admit Hundreds of Items Were Lost, Stolen or Destroyed

Several museums in the UK have admitted that hundreds of items from their collections have been lost, stolen, or destroyed over the past five years, highlighting a sector-wide issue after the British Museum thefts scandal last year.

Institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Natural History Museum reported a variety of missing historic items. The information was released in response to Freedom of Information requests filed by The Independent, which first reported the news earlier this week.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Imperial War museum recorded 539 items as lost and one item as stolen. For the same period, the Natural History Museum reported 12 items from its collection had gone missing, while the National Museum of Scotland reported six items lost, one item stolen, and another destroyed in a fire.

The Independent reported that among the missing items from the Natural History Museum are mammal teeth over 65 million years old from the Mesozoic Era, as well as a stomach stone known as a gastrolith from its Dinosaur Gallery assumed to have been stolen. A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum told the Independent that security of its collection was a serious issue, which totaled more than 80 million items, many of them small ecological specimens such as teeth, fish, and frozen animal tissue.

Another item likely stolen from public display in 2022 was a telephone handset from the Havilland Comet 4C at the National Museum of Scotland. The plane was the world’s first commercial passenger jet aircraft, making its first commercial journey in 1952 and officially retired in 1997.

According to the Independent, other institutions that recorded the loss of items since 2017 include Museum Wales, which reported 16 missing items, and four lost objects at The Science Museum Group between 2018 and 2023. The newspaper also said cuts to budgets and staff at the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit had a “massive impact” on the already-small team’s ability to investigation art crime in London.

The news follows the recent appointment of Nicholas Cullinan as the new director of the British Museum after the institution’s previous leadership resigned due to revelations that 2,000 items in the museum’s collection were stolen or damaged, or otherwise went missing.

Cullinan joins the 256-year-old institution during a period of low-morale and serious questions about its operations. The museum is still trying to recover a significant number of missing items. Meanwhile, it is also tightening its security and inventory records, and is also facing renewed and impassioned calls for the repatriation of objects that many have claimed were looted. Among those objects are the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, both of which have long been main attractions of the British Museum collection.

Last year’s theft scandal led to the resignations of director Hartwig Fischer and deputy director Jonathan Williams.

The museum is also suing former long-time curator Peter Higgs over the missing items. While the institution’s initial announcement about the thefts did not name the staff member who was fired, Higgs was quickly identified in news reports.