Sir Neil Cossons obituary
Neil Cossons, who has died aged 87, wore a convincing disguise as a mild, respectable, affable, slightly conventional chap,But over a long and outstanding career in the museums and heritage sector – during which he was director of the Science Museum for 14 years – civil servants, trustees and ministers who battled with him over policy and funding discovered he was as tenacious as a terrier,He was determined to preserve and promote Britain’s scientific and industrial heritage and make culture accessible to all,In 2000 he became chair of English Heritage, the quango responsible for protecting the historic environment – since split into Historic England and the charity English Heritage, which cares for 400 sites and monuments,In his first year there, he led the steering group that produced Power of Place, an influential policy document produced in partnership with other heritage organisations, which stressed the value and potential of the wider historic environment including high streets, town centres and suburbs; it set the tone of his interests at English Heritage.
He fought a war of words with the then London mayor, Ken Livingstone, over what he saw as poor-quality towers splintering the London skyline, and championed terrace houses in Liverpool and other northern cities threatened with wholesale demolition,He campaigned to preserve English Heritage funding and to convince politicians of the importance of heritage in the daily life of the nation, not just as tourist attractions,In 2005 when the then culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, insisted that a 5% government grant slash was “a good outcome” for English Heritage, he told her to her face in public that she was wrong,His audience took it as the fighting words of a man who had finished his term of office and was heading for the sunlit uplands of the private sector,In fact he was about to sign on again, at the age of 66, leaving only in 2007.
He took office at a time when epic lottery-funded millennium projects were opening their doors – or apologising for missing the deadline – across the country.One of the starriest was the British Museum’s £100m Great Court, designed by Norman Foster.Cossons accused the museum of “dereliction of their duty to the building” over their contractor’s use of slightly cheaper French Anstrude Roche Claire stone instead of British Portland.He inherited the ambitious English Heritage plans for Stonehenge, where the facilities had been condemned by a parliamentary committee as “a national disgrace”, but the schemes became bogged down in bitter controversy over the proposal to divert the main road into a long tunnel under the site.A new visitor centre finally opened in 2013; the row over the road tunnel continued.
Cossons was born in Beeston, Nottingham, the son of Arthur, the head of a local boys’ junior school, and Evelyn (nee Bettle), a teacher, and was educated at Henry Mellish grammar school in Bulwell, before studying geography at the University of Liverpool, from where he graduated in 1961.He inherited his deep interest in industrial history and archaeology from Arthur, who also taught miners’ night classes and took the family on regular outings to industrial heritage sites.After stints at Leicester Museum, the Railway Museum in Swindon and Bristol City Museum, where he was curator of technology, at the age of 29 he was appointed deputy director of Liverpool Museum.In 1971 Cossons became the first director of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, a site regarded as the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and he set about preserving not just the scattered iron foundry sites and the famous bridge, but the unlisted and threatened vernacular buildings of the town where the ordinary workers had lived, which he regarded as an essential part of the story.Under Cossons, Ironbridge became a major tourist attraction, with 250,000 yearly visitors by the end of his tenure, and in 1986 it was inscribed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
He moved to London in 1983 to become director of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and three years later was appointed to the directorship of the Science Museum.Ian Blatchford, the present director, said that Cosson’s legacy “can be seen around the museum to this day”.The new Wellcome Wing – now the West Hall – opened in 2000, as the epitome of his belief that visitors should interact with displays rather than be static observers.It was a startling contrast to the rather staid traditional galleries, with features including a floor-shivering recreation of the impact of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on a Japanese supermarket; the Imax screen housed within the extension was at the time the largest in the UK.One of English Heritage’s acquisitions under Cosson’s chairmanship from 2000, and his favourite building, was the 18th-century Ditherington Flax Mill in Shrewsbury, which he had first visited as a student.
By the late 20th century it was abandoned and derelict, Grade I listed but with its importance as the first iron-framed building in the world, the ancestor of modern skyscrapers, forgotten even by local people.After carrying out emergency repairs in the hope that some sympathetic developer would take it on, English Heritage bought it in 2005 and fully restored it: it now houses a visitor centre and a variety of work spaces.On a visit with the Guardian he patted one of the forest of iron columns, originally designed to make the building fire proof, like a man greeting an old friend, and declared it “one of the most important buildings in England – or anywhere”.Cossons wrote or edited a number of books on industrial archaelogy and heritage management.One of his last public appearances came in November last year, when he attended the ceremonial handover of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust into the care of the National Trust.
He was appointed OBE in 1982, and knighted in 1994.In 1965 he married Veronica Edwards, whom he met as a fellow student at the University of Liverpool, and they had three children, Elisabeth, Nigel and Malcolm.Neil Cossons, curator and museum director, born 15 January 1939; died 29 March 2026
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