The Secret Museum Director, Museums + Heritage Advisor, 11 September 2025
Advisor’s anonymous sector contributor: ‘Each decision is an act of erasure. Each absence is a silence I have enforced’.
The Secret Museum Director explores an uncomfortable truth: museums don’t just preserve history, they edit it with every object not on show.
I spend a large proportion of my life inside these walls. I understand the notion of what we, and museums everywhere are trying to be; we want to be a place to remember: a place passing down history via artefacts and stories. To the public, a museum is a place of memory. To me, it has equally become a place of forgetting.
Most mornings, before visitors arrive, I walk the corridors. I check the cases, watch for blown bulbs, and play the day’s actions over in my head. I straighten a label or two. And yet, as I pass each display, I cannot help but think of the things that are not there, the objects I have hidden away, the histories I have helped erase.