Emergency Exit at English Heritage

Dr Nick Merriman OBE quietly quit English Heritage on June 24th, “for personal reasons relating to family health”. Naturally we must all extend sympathy to him and his wife Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate.

Merriman had been EH’s chief executive for just over a year. As the Telegraph reported on July 4th, at current rates of deficit the quango which cares for over 400 historic sites, many of them ruins, could run out of money in three years. The Guardian reported anger among the 2,535 employees (plus about 5,000 volunteers) over a badly-managed cull of 7% of the payroll.

From 2018-24, Merriman directed London’s Horniman Museum, as I wrote in DS last year. In 1897 the Horniman was the first in the outside world to display bronze and ivory treasures from Benin (in present-day Nigeria). Merriman orchestrated the giving away of his museum’s entire Benin collection in 2022, as I described in Cultural Property News when reviewing his book about that disgraceful process.

Not coincidentally, the Horniman was awarded Museum of the Year in 2022, with its director receiving an OBE in the 2024 New Year Honours. For connoisseurs of car-crash interviews, Janina Ramirez’s short chat with him on YouTube, celebrating the Horniman’s win, will be one to treasure. Merriman will have to hope that wherever he believes his talents will best be deployed next, the selection board hasn’t watched this smug-fest of virtue-signalling.

The Restitution Study Group, speaking for black descendants of Africans whom the Benin Obas enslaved and sold, commented:

While heralded by some as a moral act of restitution, Merriman’s oversight of the Horniman’s 2022 transfer of looted Benin artefacts failed a key ethical test: inclusive and informed consultation with British Afrodescendants — particularly those descended from captives sold by the Benin Kingdom in exchange for the manilla currency used to create the bronzes.

Instead, consultations were limited to a narrow set of participants, mainly African-born Londoners and schoolchildren, many of whom were not informed of the slave trade origins of the bronzes. This exclusionary process echoes colonial-era decision-making, where the voices of those most affected by historical atrocities were disregarded in favour of top-down ‘benevolence’.

By facilitating the gifting of the Horniman’s Benin bronze Collection to heirs of Benin Kingdom royalty — who profited from the enslavement of Africans — without transparent engagement of the descendants of those captives, Merriman committed a grave disservice. The bronzes are not neutral heritage objects; they are moulded from the very currency used to buy human lives, embodying generations of pain and displacement. … The heritage sector must reflect on how restitution is carried out — and who gets to decide. True justice demands full consultation, not selective virtue.

A chief executive obsessed with decolonising and ‘climate emergency’ was never going to be a good fit at EH, which is going to need hard and serious work if it isn’t to implode. His wife’s galleries, Tate Modern (footfall down by 25% since 2019) and Tate Britain (32% down) have their own troubles. They’ve lost 2.2 million visitors between them.

In April the Standard deplored Tate’s “asinine wokery”, remarking that:

The infamous racist chair label in the Tate’s 2021 Hogarth and Europe exhibition — in which the commentary alongside a self-portrait suggested the chair Hogarth was sitting in, possibly made from colonial timbers, could “stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity” — was just the tip of the iceberg.

People who get their news from the BBC have to put up with its obsessions and bias. But visiting museums and galleries is a matter of choice, not necessity: the public increasingly resents hectoring from some curators and directors, disagrees with them, and is staying away in droves. Once offended, people resist going back, and that’s becoming a serious problem for some of the UK’s best-known galleries and museums.