Your support: success stories
BP

BP is the British Museum's most long-standing corporate partner, generously supporting the British Museum's public programme on an annual basis since 1996. The company is committed to supporting the British Museum through to 2017.

Over the course of 19 years BP has supported numerous special exhibitions as title sponsor, most recently the hugely successful Vikings: life and legend, Ming: 50 years that changed China and Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation. Over the course of the partnership, this has allowed in excess of 3 million visitors to view BP supported British Museum exhibitions or displays in Bloomsbury or further afield. In addition, BP has supported special public events at the British Museum around Chinese New Year and the Mexican Day of the Dead. These celebrations have brought over 67,000 visitors to the Museum from London and further afield.

In 2000 BP funded the BP Lecture Theatre, as part of the Great Court development at the British Museum. This is an invaluable resource for the Museum's education and public programme as well as generating additional revenue through conference hire. In 2014 alone over 66,000 members of the public were able to attend Museum-run events and activities in the BP Lecture Theatre - allowing school groups, local communities, national and international visitors to engage more deeply with the Museum’s programme and collection.

BP also supports the Museum in its national and international work; notably, it is currently the sole corporate partner to support our national programme of touring exhibitions. China: Journey to the East, supported by BP, was the largest exhibition of ancient Chinese material to be seen outside London. Shown at 7 partner museums and galleries between 2009 – 2012 it has been the most popular British Museum UK touring exhibition to date, with over 450,000 visitors. Made in China: an imperial Ming vase, the most recent BP-supported UK touring exhibition, travelled to Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol and Basingstoke in 2014 - 2015 and gave over 121,000 people the opportunity to see this priceless piece in displays across the UK. With its support in 2012 for Mummy: The Inside Story in Mumbai, BP also enabled the British Museum to tour an exhibition to India for the first time. Such activities feed into the Museum’s organisational commitment to share its collection of over 8 million objects with a worldwide audience.