• British Museum branded “out-of-touch” and “indefensible” for signing up to new partnership with oil and gas company BP
• Campaigners to mount formal challenge to decision to renew relationship with fossil fuel producer and major polluter
• British Museum increasingly isolated within cultural sector that has all but rejected fossil fuel sponsorship in recent years

The British Museum is today facing a growing backlash after it announced that it had signed up to a new partnership with the oil and gas company BP.

Campaigners have branded the move “out-of-touch” and “indefensible” and plan to mount a formal challenge to the decision while arts activists have vowed to escalate their campaign of creative protests inside the Museum. The news comes just months after BP’s partnerships with the Royal Opera House and National Portrait Gallery came to an end and after 14 leading UK cultural institutions have cut their ties to fossil fuel funding since 2016.  

Chris Garrard, Co-director of Culture Unstained has said:

“This is an astonishingly out of touch and completely indefensible decision. It comes just days after delegates at COP28 agreed that the world must transition away from fossil fuels. We believe this decision is illegitimate and in breach of the museum’s own climate commitments and sector-wide codes and will be seeking legal advice in order to mount a formal challenge to it.  

The only way you can sign up to a new sponsorship deal with a planet-wrecking fossil fuel company in 2023 is by burying your head in the sand, pretending the climate crisis isn’t happening and ignoring the almost complete rejection of fossil fuel funding by the cultural sector in recent years. The Board of Trustees have not fulfilled their legal duty to protect the Museum’s reputation as this new partnership will only damage it further.”

The decision comes despite a decade-long campaign of creative resistance at the British Museum spearheaded by the activist theatre group BP or not BP? whose ambitious performance protests had made BP sponsorship one of the major controversies facing the museum. In 2022, a letter to the Museum from over 300 archaeologists set out how BP was ‘taking advantage of the British Museum’s status as a highly respected institution to associate its brand with values of high culture’ and the pressure was ramped up on the Museum after a formal submission to its Board of Trustees from climate and heritage experts spelt out how signing a new sponsorship deal could place the Museum in breach of sector-wide ethics codes. 

The new deal follows the end of the Museum’s 27-year exhibition sponsorship deal with BP. Documents obtained by Culture Unstained under Freedom of Information rules showed that this contract formally ended in February this year. However, the Museum later said it had made a “verbal agreement” with BP that the company had until the end of 2023 to use up ‘supporter benefits’ that were not taken during COVID-19 restrictions. 

The Museum had also confirmed then, in FOI responses to Culture Unstained’s lawyers, that there were no other contracts or agreements in effect between the Museum and BP, and that it had no records relating to renewing the agreement, or agreeing a new or different kind of agreement, with BP.

In November 2022, Museum Chair George Osborne told Trustees at the Annual Trustees Dinner that: 

‘Our goal is to be a net zero carbon museum – no longer a destination for climate protest but instead an example of climate solution.’

BP has been widely criticised after it announced in February that it would be abandoning its target of reducing its fossil fuel production by 40% by 2030, aiming instead for just a 25% production cut while also reporting that it had made record-breaking profits of £23 billion. Despite making claims of going ‘net zero’ by 2050, BP reduced its ‘low carbon spend’ from 2021-22 and has earmarked up to £6.2bn for oil and gas projects in 2023, double what it plans to invest on low carbon energy. The campaign against BP sponsorship had garnered wide support in recent years. Bestselling novelist Ahdaf Soueif resigned from the Museum’s Board of Trustees over the issue in 2019, and was supported by the Museum’s branch of the PCS Union which represents front of house workers and had previously passed motions formally supporting the campaign against fossil fuel sponsorship.

Professor Rodney Harrison, Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, has said:

“The archaeology, museums and heritage community will be extremely disappointed with this decision, which runs counter to national and international guidelines regarding ethical sponsorship for the sector and will further damage the museum’s reputation on the world stage. BP’s ongoing operations and lobbying on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is not only a threat to all of our planetary futures, but they also invest in and undertake work that has had, and continues to have, a negative impact on cultural heritage globally. It is difficult to see how this move aligns with Chair George Osborne’s stated aspirations to become a ‘net zero’ Museum.”

BP has partnered with the British Museum since 1996 but in 2018, it began a block 5-year sponsorship deal with the British Museum, Royal Opera House, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Shakespeare Company. All except the British Museum have now ended their partnerships with the oil and gas company while the Scottish Ballet, National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival and Tate galleries have also cut their ties to BP since 2016. 

The RSC exited its BP sponsorship mid-contract in 2019, saying,

Amidst the climate emergency, which we recognise, young people are now saying clearly to us that the BP sponsorship is putting a barrier between them and their wish to engage with the RSC. We cannot ignore that message.

BP had previously been the sponsor of the British Museum’s temporary exhibitions programme which had helped the oil and gas company to “artwash” its increasingly toxic reputation and further its fossil fuel extraction, with BP’s Vice President admitting that “naturally we are going to try to match a particular exhibition with somewhere we have an interest”.

BP consistently sponsored exhibitions that aligned strongly with its strategic business interests, such as those on ‘Indigenous Australia’ and a one-day festival on Mexico’s ‘Day of the Dead’, with a report by the Art Not Oil coalition uncovering how BP’s senior staff had been able to meet with strategically important policy makers at exhibition openings and private business receptions.