The Natural History Museum in London and Orkney’s former Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow are in the running to be named the UK’s Museum of the Year.

They are joined on the shortlist for the £120,000 award by Glasgow’s Burrell Collection and the MAC in Belfast.

Leighton House, located in London’s Holland Park, completes the five-strong shortlist.

The winner will be announced at the British Museum on 12 July, with the four runners-up receiving £15,000 each.

The 2023 prize marks the 10th year of Art Fund’s Museum of the Year, which aims to champion the UK’s 2,500 museums, galleries and heritage sites.

The fallout has been considerable. Forget the haves and the have-nots, Brexiters and remainers, north v south: some people are determined to make our disunited nation’s ultimate binary division the one between town and country. 

According to the popular caricature, one camp lives in concrete and glass towers, imbibes polluted air and superciliously treats the countryside as a playground for Disneyfied nature. The other resides in leafy lanes, brandishes shotguns and is increasingly besieged and undermined by city dwellers’ laws.

These two tribes, we are told, have clashed over foxhunting – a unique tradition or a barbaric relic according to taste. They’ve battled over badger culling – a vital disease control measure to protect cattle farmers or an unscientific muddle that’s cruel and pointless. And they’ve gone to war over dairy farming – an environmentally friendly and nutritious food production system or a cruel industry that turn animals into machines. 

The row over bird shooting licences is presented as the latest expression of the great divide. Is it a perverse attack on country livelihoods by townies who are happy to see curlews become extinct and lambs’ eyes pecked out because they hate shooting so much? Or is it an overdue, rational move to bring licences into line with wildlife laws and stop people massacring harmless jays and rooks for fun?

“Start pulling at the threads and the whole thing could fall apart.”

Prince Charles highlighted the importance of village pubs, traditional crafts and maintaining “cultural continuity” in an age of “stultifying mono-culturalism”.

This report from the Daily Telegraph demonstrates Prince Charles’ positive and ongoing deep support for rural Britain.

He also very powerfully identifies the opportunities to link tourism and the landscape – opportunities we are currently exploring in: Upper Teesdale, the Yorkshire Dales, Pembrokeshire and Cornwall.

If you would like to know more about our work on the interface between food, landscape, tourism and jobs, just drop me a note.