The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ and Redbridge Museum: Creating Equality, Exhibiting Ethnicity from a Local Perspective

Abstract

The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ was launched in 2018 and closed in 2021. The programme encouraged London’s small non-national museums to embrace the Arts Council England’s directions to stimulate participation across socio-economic barriers such as the Equality Act (2010) and the Equality Duty (2011) recommended. However, the project results indicate a top-down approach to the involvement of minorities that seems to clash with the idea of inclusiveness itself. The local museums aimed to establish a bottom-up local history experience where visitors were content creators. These two opposite perspectives share the same scope but use different methods to achieve inclusion. By discussing survey data, the article investigates the Diversity Matters Programme as realised by Redbridge Museum, London, revealing competing and conflicting power relations that underpin the engineering of diversity and inclusion.