It is great to see Tate sending objects on tour to Merseyside, but this is a drop in the ocean compared with the £150m given to London galleries by George Osborne to build new stores (Fostering curiosity: the Tate brings great art to the people of Merseyside, 22 February).
More than 150 years ago, Henry Cole, the founder of the V&A, commissioned special trains to take artefacts across the country. With a Victorian’s love of statistics, he wrote that the collection “had been visited by 359,125 persons … and the train had travelled 3,690 miles and been packed and unpacked 60 times”. When the V&A won the museum of the year award in 2016, the director used the money to reinstate Cole’s scheme.
It is time that London’s other major museums and galleries stopped spending vast sums on storage and gave the rest of the country access to their collections without them having to travel to London.
David Kennedy
Menston, West Yorkshire
• The mobile museum concept was not created by Musée Mobile in France in 2011, as your article claims. When I worked as an archaeologist for South Yorkshire county council in 1976-1981, its mobile museum toured town centres and schools, and ran popular exhibitions. One of these – The Eye in the Sky – explained why long-buried ancient sites can be visible in certain conditions and featured aerial photographs by myself and Derrick Riley.
Pete James
London
• We ran a mobile museum service in 1992 through the Museums Association of Namibia. We went around the country, sharing artefacts and stories, aiming to boost schools’ interest and to upgrade local museums. This outreach continues today. We wrote a journal article at the time about our experiences, available in Museum International at unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000110842. The National Museum of Botswana also had a mobile museum in the 1990s.
Peter and Christine Nias
Bradford
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