Although the weather has been less than favourable this week, reopening week has been a success.
The Museum has received some great press coverage (examples below) and visitors have shown how eager they’ve been to come back to the Museum with some of the wonderful comments we’ve received from them.
Reopening Day (Mon 17 May)
On Monday, we hosted a journalist from Heart Radio who filmed the video report below. We think it’s a great testament to the work that staff have done to make the Museum a welcoming and safe place for visitors:
West Midlands Mayor Andy Street also visit on Monday to celebrate our first day of opening and to advocate for the sector. The visit gained coverage on ITV Central News as well as online:
#MuseumMoment
On Tuesday we participated in TikTok’s global #MuseumMoment marathon, which saw 23 museums from across 12 countries – including London’s V&A and New York’s Metropolitan Museum – host a live broadcast from the platform. BCLM participated with a live tour of Old Birmingham Road which saw more 150,000 people tune in to meet our characters and hear about Black Country life from the 1930s. Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make this possible and for doing the Museum proud by taking the Black Country story global!
Visitors Glad To Be Back
The Museum also featured in Tuesday’s Express & Star with some great testimonials from visitors:
Visitor Profile & Advance Bookings
We’ve also been fortunate to welcome back some small education groups this week who’ve chosen to come to the Museum as their first trip since lockdown; and, our outreach talks are continuiung to be popular with schools who cannot yet make a visit. The number of enquiries coming through to the Sales & Ticketing team bodes well for the next academic year as we seek to re-engage schools.
The weather has literally had a dampening effect on mid-week visitor attendance during our first week of opening. However, bookings for the coming weekend (22/23 May) are very positive with 99% of our target bookings achieved in advance at the time of writing. June half-term ‘Loff Out Loud’ is also selling well in advance with bookings increasing sharply (up by 33%) this week upon news of our reopening.
Upcoming News
We will launch our first on-sale of ticketed evening events soon with 1940s Evening as part of 1940s Weekend. We’re planning to go on sale to Members on 2 June and the general public on 9 June. An allocation of staff tickets will be available and we will update colleagues on details of this in a subsequent intranet post. However, most importantly and ahead of on-sale, we’ll share a programme preview with colleagues to let people know about plans for this year’s 1940s Weekend (17/18 Jul) and share some exciting news from the D-Day Darlings.
Thank you again to everyone for their hard work and commitment in enabling reopening to be such a success. It’s been wonderful to see the Museum come alive again with colleagues and visitors as it fulfils its purpose to engage all generations with living history.
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