Bowing to years of pressure and protests from climate change campaigners as well as academics and its own employees, the British Museum has severed its ties with BP. The oil and gas conglomerate had been a major sponsor of the London institution for twenty-seven years. The parting of ways comes just four months after the last five-year contract between BP and the museum expired and seven months after British Museum chairman George Osborne publicly expressed the aim of bringing the institution to net zero. According The Guardianwho broke the news, the museum acknowledged in a statement that “there are no other contracts or agreements in effect between the museum and BP.”
The British Museum is the latest major UK institution to move away from the fossil fuel producer, behind Tate (2016), the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Galleries of Scotland (both in 2019) and, more recently, the National Portrait Gallery (2022), among others. In 2018, the National Gallery in London stopped accepting funding from Shell, ending a twelve-year partnership. Currently, only the Science Museum in the UK receives funding from BP.
Campaign group Culture Unsustained reported that “certain terms” of the partnership remain in place until the end of 2023, as the museum has verbally agreed to allow BP to exercise its “supporter benefits” until then. The Guardian speculated that this likely means the conglomerate can continue to enjoy hospitality privileges such as the use of museum spaces for corporate entertainment and noted that the benefits are not tied to any business funding of the institution.
British-Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who resigned from the museum’s board in 2019 in part to protest BP’s continued funding of the museum, spoke warmly of the decision, saying: “It’s important that institutions like the British Museum do not give Big Oil the opportunity to look like a force for good in society; denying them that platform is important.
Chris Garrard, co-director of Culture Unsustained, called the parting ways a “massive victory” but urged greater distancing from the British Museum. “If it is serious about responding to the climate crisis,” he said, “the museum must now confirm that there will be no future relationships with fossil fuel producers, remove the BP name from its amphitheater, outright rejecting the climate-destroying business it represents.”
