The Florence Nightingale Museum has announced it will reopen on 12th May 2022, coinciding with International Nurses’ Day and what would have been Nightingale’s 202nd birthday.
The London museum indefinitely closed in January 2021 as a result of Covid-19. Last year it said that “regretfully, but inevitably” it would launch a major review and restructuring of its operations in light of the strains caused by the “damaging and continuing effects of the pandemic”.
The museum, which opened in 1989 and is in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, will be open five days a week.
Dire start to 2021 with national lockdown and Florence Nightingale Museum on the brink
The museum’s director David Green told the PA news agency that since closure it “has been a real emotional roller-coaster.”
“Certainly for me, I’ve never worked so hard in my life, especially those first few weeks after we closed, it was just so strange.
“We had to accept the fact that ultimately, as a central London location very reliant on international tourists, that market had collapsed.
“But also as the leading nursing museum in Europe, it also means we attract a lot of nurses and clearly they were just so busy with the pandemic, it meant they weren’t visiting us.”
Green said the planned bicentenary celebrations, which were put on hold because of the closure, are to be resumed and will include the Nightingale In 200 Objects, People And Place exhibition and exhibits including Nightingales certificate into the Statistical Society of London marking, its first female member in 1858.
