British Museum ends BP sponsorship deal
'The museum joins Royal Opera House, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Shakespeare Company in cutting ties to BP.'
Friends celebrated the news last week that, after twenty-seven years, and a decade-long campaign, the BP sponsorship deal with the British Museum ended. Campaigners including Quakers hailed the move as a ‘momentous shift’ with fossil-fuel companies retreating from arts-funding. The museum joins Royal Opera House, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Shakespeare Company in cutting ties to BP.
The shift follows years of campaigning led by the activist group ‘BP or not BP?’ whose performance protests included an overnight occupation and bringing a four-metre-high Trojan Horse into the museum’s courtyard.
Last year, a formal submission to its board from climate and heritage experts intensified pressure on the museum. Quaker Paul Ekins, a professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at University College London, co-signed the letter arguing that renewing a sponsorship deal with BP could place the museum in breach of sector-wide ethics codes.
Freedom of Information (FoI) requests made by the Culture Unstained group, and reported in the Guardian on 2 June, confirmed that the final BP-sponsored exhibition ‘Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt’ closed on 19 February 2023, and this marked the official end of the British Museum’s contract with BP.
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