Nick Merriman is chief executive of English Heritage, a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings, and places in England. He began this role in February 2024. Before this, he was CEO of the Horniman Museum and Gardens from May 2018 and was previously director of the Manchester Museum for 12 years.
Merriman’s book Museums and the Climate Crisis examines some of society’s most trusted organisations. Together with a highly respected group of contributors, Merriman asks how museums that are not considering their own sustainability claim the authority to inform and inspire their visitors on climate change. He discusses why the museum sector has been slow to act on the climate crisis and how our cultural institutions can accelerate action and authentically amplify their influence.
Merriman also chaired the National Museum Directors’ Council’s working group on Environment and Ecology and led the first UK Museum COP to discuss these issues in October 2023.
“There is something distinctive that museums and galleries can bring to this overall global phenomenon of climate breakdown and biodiversity crisis,” Nick Merriman explained to blooloop in 2024, sharing the motivation behind the book. They are amongst a very small group of institutions mandated to take a long-term view—one beyond the short-term cycles of politics and economics.
“Also, museums are amongst some of the most trusted institutions and are a really powerful, slow form of mass media. In the UK, over half the population visits a museum at least once a year. So we have collectively a huge reach, trust, and this mandate to take a long-term view.”
Under Merrimans’s leadership at the Horniman, the South London museum, with its displays of anthropology, natural history and musical instruments, won Art Fund Museum of the Year 2022 for its work on acknowledging the museum’s colonial legacy and engaging the public with the climate and biodiversity crisis.