Neil MacGregor has announced he will step down as director of the British Museum at the end of the year. Announcing the news to colleagues, he said:
“It’s a very difficult thing to leave the British Museum. Working with this collection and above all with the colleagues here has been the greatest privilege of my professional life. But I’ve decided that now is the time to retire from full-time employment and the end of this year seems a good time to go.”
MacGregor took up the post of director of the British Museum in August 2002. Since then he has overseen a £135m transformation of the museum that included the opening of a new research and exhibition wing, the World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre.
During his tenure the museum has seen visitor numbers rise from 4.6m in 2002-03 to 6.7m in 2014-15 to become the most visited attraction in the UK and second most visited museum in the world after the Louvre, Paris.
Formerly the director of the National Gallery (1987-2002), where he presided over another major extension project in the shape of the Sainsbury wing, MacGregor is also known for his TV and radio work including the popular Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects.
An outstanding director
Paying tribute to MacGregor, chair of the museum’s trustees Sir Richard Lambert said:
“Neil MacGregor has been an outstanding director of the British Museum and has made an extraordinary contribution to public life in the UK and beyond.
“The Trustees are hugely grateful for everything he has done to bring the collection to life, and to tell its many different stories. We respect his decision to move on, and want to support him in his new projects.”
Whilst MacGregor is retiring from full-time employment, he says he will be “involved in a number of projects”. These include a new series for Radio 4 called Faith in Society, and advisory roles with Mumbai’s CSMVS museum and for the German Minister of Culture on how the new Berlin-based arts complex, the Humboldt Forum, “can become a place where different narratives of world cultures can be explored and debated”.
