A Norwich castle will compete with the National Gallery in London for the 2026 edition of the Art Fund Museum of the Year, the most prestigious UK prize in the sector. Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery in East England and the 202-year-old institution located in Trafalgar Square have been shortlisted along with The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, The Box in Plymouth and the V&A East Storehouse in London. The winning museum, to be announced 25 June at a ceremony at Cutty Sark in London, will receive £120,000, while the four other finalists will receive £20,000 each.
“Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery comprises a medieval Castle Keep, and a museum. Following a major £27.5m redevelopment, the Keep reopened in August 2025 and is now the most accessible castle in the UK,” says an Art Fund statement. As part of the Royal Palace Reborn project, the museum has also created a new Gallery of Medieval Life, developed in partnership with the British Museum. The new spaces are “filled with the types of furniture, textiles and painted decoration that could have greeted Henry I when he stayed in Norwich in 1121,” says the museum’s guidebook.
The National Gallery gets the nod for its wide-ranging bicentenary projects which included an £85m project to upgrade its Sainsbury Wing entrance, an ambitious public art piece in Trafalgar Square devised by the artist Jeremy Deller and a “once-in-a-lifetime” rehang called C C Land: The Wonder of Art. The gallery’s latest capital project involves building a £350m extension on the site of St. Vincent’s House to house modern and contemporary art.
Another London powerhouse museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, launched the V&A East Storehouse in Stratford last May, winning plaudits for offering a new museum experience based on breaking down “physical barriers and removing glass cases so visitors can get closer than ever before to national collections”. The venue has since drawn over 500,000 visitors; its sister institution, the V&A East Museum, launched 18 April.
Meanwhile the Fitzwilliam is “reimagining the role of a historic university museum: not as a neutral guardian of objects, but as an active participant in social dialogue, knowledge exchange and collective responsibility,” says Art Fund, which emphasises the innovative programming at the Cambridge museum founded in 1816. Highlights in 2024-25 included All Over the Place, the US artist Glenn Ligon's first major solo exhibition in the UK, and Rise Up, which brought together historic objects and contemporary art to explore the lives of abolitionists.
The Box in Plymouth marked its fifth birthday in September last year and has drawn more than one million visitors (a 2025 report published by the gallery says that it has since boosted the city’s economy by £244m). “Striving to be ‘nationally known and locally loved’, The Box preserves the city’s cultural collections of more than two million artworks, objects, specimens, and archival materials,” says Art Fund. A Beryl Cook exhibition held at the venue this year was critically acclaimed.
The Art Fund Museum of the Year judges are Tony Butler, the executive director of Derby Museums; the artist Yinka Ilori MBE; the author Alice Loxton and the broadcaster June Sarpong. Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, an open-air museum in County Durham that brings 19th and 20th century history to life through “immersive exhibits”, won last year’s Art Fund Museum of the Year prize.
The eligibility criteria for the prize state that prospective galleries “must be based in the UK and be either a public museum, gallery, historic house, library or archive which has spaces for the public to visit and experience the visual arts or other object-based collections”.
