Description
After being partners for 27 years, the British Museum announced in June 2023 that they are ending their sponsorship deal with BP. This means the end for one of the highest-profile and most controversial sponsorship deals in the UK in recent years. BP is now banned by almost the whole British arts world.
Before the British Museum, numerous cultural organisations like the Tate and the Royal Shakespeare Company have ended funding partnerships with BP in recent years.
The news came to light after The Guardian filed a freedom of information request, in which the museum confirmed that no further exhibitions or other activities are being sponsored by BP.
Before the ban
BP has been a sponsor of the British Museum since 1996 and was until recently the title sponsor of the museum’s major exhibitions. These ‘BP Exhibitions’ allowed the company to boost its brand by associating itself with the UK’s most visited cultural institution. BP gave money to create the ‘BP Lecture Theatre’ where the museum’s major events are hosted, including important policy-maker events.
The campaign by Art not Oil and Culture Unstained to get BP out of the British Museum led to:
- A 2016 report, showing how the British Museum had broken its own ethics rules in renewing its partnership with BP,
- A 2018 map called Crude Connections, mapping BP’s influence from the British Museum to Russia and revealing relationships between politicians, meetings and cultural institutions,
- A 2018 briefing ‘From War to Warming: the shameful story of BP in Iraq’ in partnership with Platform and Campaign Against Arms Trade,
- A 2019 resignation of the Egyptian author and British Museum trustee Ahdaf Soueif citing the museum’s intransigence on BP sponsorship,
- A 2021 statement on the clear conflicts of interest of the new chair of the British Museum, former Chancellor George Osborne
- A 2022 reveal on Channel 4 News on a secretive ‘Chairman’s Advisory Group’
- Another 2022 reveal, showing the museum’s director actively pursuing renewal of the BP sponsorship deal, while 300 archaeologists wrote the museum calling on it to drop BP.
- A 2022 formal submission to the British Museum trustees setting out how renewing the partnership with BP could breach the Museum’s own policies, backed by climate scientists, archaeologists, culture sector workers and youth climate strikers,
- A 2022 letter signed by more than 80 cultural figures and climate organisations urging the museum to speak out on human rights in Egypt and call for the release of British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah and all political prisoners in Egypt before COP27. This letter and subsequent actions were linked to a new BP-sponsored exhibition on Ancient Egypt.
- And now finally in June 2023, the BP sponsorship has been ended.
