Canterbury Museum – Media Release

A record 684,812 people visited Canterbury Museum and its Quake City exhibition in Christchurch’s Re:START mall during 2014, topping the previous record of 647,152 visitors set in 2008.

Museum Director, Anthony Wright says that it’s fantastic to see visitor numbers exceeding pre-earthquake levels as the Museum retains its status as a major tourism destination and a much-loved and popular attraction for Cantabrians.

“We’re having a busy summer with good weather, a number of cruise ship visitors and other tourists in town and several thousand children and their families visiting the Museum each week. Our natural history centre, Discovery, and the annual Great Museum Santa Search have proved very popular with children and Selling the Dream, a retro exhibition of classic New Zealand tourism posters, is attracting excellent audiences,” says Mr Wright.

“We’re already more than half way towards achieving our annual target of 575,000 visitors for the June 2014 to July 2015 financial year and we haven’t yet opened our major summer exhibition T-Shirts Unfolding,” says Mr Wright. “Based on the huge success of the RISE exhibition, presented in partnership with Oi YOU! at the Museum last year, we’re expecting a big surge in numbers when T-Shirts Unfolding opens on 14 February.”

T-Shirts Unfolding is part of the SPECTRUM street art festival which is conceived and presented by Oi YOU!. T-Shirts Unfolding, in partnership with Melbourne’s T-world, explores how, from humble beginnings 100 years ago, T-shirts have become the most popular item of clothing on the planet and a canvas for street art creatives.

With two venues – the Museum and the YMCA – and new large-scale works in several locations around the central city, this year’s festival promises to be even bigger than RISE which attracted 248,000 visitors to the Museum during its three-month run, making it the Museum’s highest ever viewed exhibition.