The Box Plymouth has been named Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026, winning the £120,000 prize at a ceremony held aboard the Cutty Sark at Royal Museums Greenwich on 25 June. The award, the world’s largest museum prize, was presented to Victoria Pomery OBE, Chief Executive of The Box, by broadcaster and judge June Sarpong OBE.
The Box opened in September 2020 following a £48 million capital investment, and in the five years since, it has welcomed more than 1.3 million visitors while establishing itself as one of the more compelling arguments for what a civic museum can do when it takes its relationship with its city seriously. Its impact report, published to mark its fifth anniversary last year, calculated more than £100 million in health and wellbeing benefits to the local population and a £244 million boost to Plymouth’s economy since opening. The institution has engaged 89 percent of Plymouth’s schools.
Art Fund director and chair of the judging panel Jenny Waldman described the museum as “a true jewel in the crown of the South West,” noting that in five years it had transformed how Plymouth’s collections are shared and experienced, reaching beyond its walls into public spaces and into almost every school in the city. “Its social and economic impact demonstrates what long-term investment in culture can achieve,” she said.
The Box brings together more than two million artworks, objects, specimens and archival materials under one roof, using Plymouth’s own collections to tell the city’s story while giving space to communities and individuals whose histories have not always received institutional attention. Three artist-led projects in 2025 extended that approach in different directions. Osman Yousefzada’s exhibition When Will We Be Good Enough?, which ran from November 2024 to March 2025, addressed colonial histories through the lens of the collection. Jyll Bradley’s Running and Returning, on view from April to November 2025, explored ways to make archives more personally relevant and accessible. Jeremy Deller’s Hello Sailor!, part of the National Gallery’s The Triumph of Art programme, brought collections into Plymouth’s public spaces during the summer.
This summer, The Box presents two major exhibitions. Echoes of Us, running from 20 June to 20 September, draws on the Government Art Collection and includes works by Barbara Hepworth and Chris Ofili. Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour opens on 4 July and runs until 4 October, bringing together 26 works spanning seven decades by one of the most significant British abstract painters of the twentieth century.
The learning and engagement programme runs alongside the exhibitions and includes a family programme that draws 30,000 visitors annually, weekly sensory sessions for under-fives, and a schools programme that reaches 10,000 children each year.
June Sarpong, who served on the judging panel, said what distinguished The Box was the sense of genuine civic ownership it had generated. “From local groups such as the Windrush community to its partnerships with the university, it is a museum that genuinely belongs to the people it serves,” she said. Museums Minister Baroness Twycross, who visited The Box the week before the announcement, described the award as thoroughly deserved recognition of work that was bringing Plymouth’s story to life in ways that connected with communities across the region.
The other four finalists, each of whom receives £20,000, were the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the National Gallery in London, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and V&A East Storehouse in London. The total prize fund across all five finalists amounts to £200,000. The judging panel also included Tony Butler OBE of Derby Museums and historian and broadcaster Alice Loxton.
The Art Fund Museum of the Year prize is funded through membership subscriptions from National Art Pass holders alongside broader support from funders and individual donors. National Art Pass holders receive discounts at all five shortlisted museums as well as hundreds of other institutions across the UK.
The award recognises activity from autumn 2024 through to winter 2025, with judges looking not only at overall institutional achievement but specifically at unexpected and forward-thinking practice that pushes at the boundaries of what a museum can be. In a year when the shortlist included two major London institutions and one of the most celebrated university museums in the country, the judges’ decision to select a five-year-old civic museum in Plymouth sends a reasonably clear message about where they think the most interesting and necessary museum work is being done.
The next exhibition will be Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour 04 Jul 2026 – 04 Oct 2026