A Norwich fort will compete with the Nationwide Gallery in London for the 2026 version of the Artwork Fund Museum of the 12 months, probably the most prestigious UK prize within the sector. Norwich Fort Museum & Artwork Gallery in East England and the 202-year-old establishment positioned in Trafalgar Sq. have been shortlisted together with The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, The Field in Plymouth and the V&A East Storehouse in London. The successful museum, to be introduced 25 June at a ceremony at Cutty Sark in London, will obtain £120,000, whereas the 4 different finalists will obtain £20,000 every.
“Norwich Fort Museum & Artwork Gallery contains a medieval Fort Maintain, and a museum. Following a serious £27.5m redevelopment, the Maintain reopened in August 2025 and is now probably the most accessible fort within the UK,” says an Artwork Fund assertion. As a part of the Royal Palace Reborn venture, the museum has additionally created a brand new Gallery of Medieval Life, developed in partnership with the British Museum. The brand new areas are “stuffed with the varieties of furnishings, textiles and painted ornament that would have greeted Henry I when he stayed in Norwich in 1121,” says the museum’s guidebook.
The Nationwide Gallery will get the nod for its wide-ranging bicentenary initiatives which included an £85m venture to improve its Sainsbury Wing entrance, an bold public artwork piece in Trafalgar Sq. devised by the artist Jeremy Deller and a “once-in-a-lifetime” rehang referred to as C C Land: The Surprise of Artwork. The gallery’s newest capital venture entails constructing a £350m extension on the positioning of St. Vincent’s Home to deal with fashionable and up to date artwork.
One other London powerhouse museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, launched the V&A East Storehouse in Stratford final Could, successful plaudits for providing a brand new museum expertise primarily based on breaking down “bodily boundaries and eradicating glass circumstances so guests can get nearer than ever earlier than to nationwide collections”. The venue has since drawn over 500,000 guests; its sister establishment, the V&A East Museum, launched 18 April.
In the meantime the Fitzwilliam is “reimagining the position of a historic college museum: not as a impartial guardian of objects, however as an lively participant in social dialogue, information change and collective accountability,” says Artwork Fund, which emphasises the progressive programming on the Cambridge museum based in 1816. Highlights in 2024-25 included All Over the Place, the US artist Glenn Ligon’s first main solo exhibition within the UK, and Rise Up, which introduced collectively historic objects and up to date artwork to discover the lives of abolitionists.
The Field in Plymouth marked its fifth birthday in September final yr and has drawn multiple million guests (a 2025 report printed by the gallery says that it has since boosted town’s economic system by £244m). “Striving to be ‘nationally identified and regionally cherished’, The Field preserves town’s cultural collections of greater than two million artworks, objects, specimens, and archival supplies,” says Artwork Fund. A Beryl Cook dinner exhibition held on the venue final yr was critically acclaimed.
The Artwork Fund Museum of the 12 months judges are Tony Butler, the chief director of Derby Museums; the artist Yinka Ilori MBE; the creator Alice Loxton and the broadcaster June Sarpong. Beamish, The Dwelling Museum of the North, an open-air museum in County Durham that brings nineteenth and twentieth century historical past to life via “immersive displays”, gained final yr’s Artwork Fund Museum of the 12 months prize.
The eligibility standards for the prize state that potential galleries “should be primarily based within the UK and be both a public museum, gallery, historic home, library or archive which has areas for the general public to go to and expertise the visible arts or different object-based collections”.
