'We had to make very difficult decisions to survive' - York museums boss

During much of the last 12 months, we have missed you greatly. We could not have imagined, a year on, that the Yorkshire Museum, York Castle Museum and York Art Gallery would still be closed as result of this global pandemic

Financially we have lost nearly £3 million of income normally generated through visitor admissions and venue hire. This has put us under huge financial strain and we had to make very difficult decisions to survive, including losing 30 per cent of our staff through redundancies last year.

Support from Arts Council England, DCMS and the City of York Council as well as the generosity of many people who have donated to us has helped us continue as a charity. We would like to thank personally every single person who has made a donation.

Throughout such a challenging and difficult year there have been moments of brightness and change. We were quick to embrace new ways of sharing our collections, such as the now world-famous Curator Battles on Twitter. This simple idea of asking museums to share objects under a given theme meant our objects were seen by more than six million people. Another success were the Takeovers of our social media feeds, working with community groups to shed new light and share different perspectives on the collections in our care.

We were delighted to be able to reopen York Art Gallery and York Castle Museum on August 1. At York Art Gallery more than 400 people helped us choose what paintings would be in our reopening display and we celebrated the key workers and NHS in a community exhibition entitled Our Heroes.

At York Castle Museum, where free-flow visits weren’t practical with social distancing, we created a new range of guided tours, which were extremely popular. Our Christmas offer, featuring projections on our famous Victorian Street Kirkgate, was also a hit, despite the huge challenges of creating a new offer during a second national lockdown.

For the majority of the year we have been able to keep York Museum Gardens open.

It is our ambition to reopen York Art Gallery for May 28, with the launch of a major new exhibition Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years. We hope to be able to open York Castle Museum in May too, with a range of guided tours designed to give fascinating new insights into some of our most famous displays. We hope to open the Yorkshire Museum when it becomes financially viable to do so.

The pandemic will leave a legacy on the Trust. Given the huge financial losses entailed, we predict we will continue to need additional support for at least the next two years to survive and more to invest in updating galleries. But there is also a positive legacy. We have developed our audiences online and learned new collaborative ways to reach York’s young people in need. As we move from survival to recovery we want to learn from the pandemic and work with audiences and communities to recover and rebuild together.

In these unprecedented times, all York Museums Trust staff have been fantastic in their response, adapting to new ways of working to make sure we continue to reach our audiences. I know I speak for everyone in York Museums Trust when I say we can't wait to welcome people to our museums again.

Reyahn King is the Chief Executive of York Museums Trust