The Guardian view of small museums: stories of what we have been and who we are

These embattled but valiant institutions are testimony to a basic human urge to collect and share enthusiasms

Have you heard the one about the museum of cuckoo clocks that may have to be wound up unless the two brothers who founded it 34 years ago can find someone to keep it ticking when they retire? Or the Musical Museum, set up in 1963 by an electrical engineer with a passion for the history of recorded sound, where you can listen to self-playing violins, and dip into one of the world's largest collections of piano rolls? Or the UK's newest natural history museum, at whose 2022 opening the ribbon was cut with the claw of a baryonyx - a large carnivorous dinosaur? They are located respectively in Cheshire, Brentford and Sheffield.

Of the 2,500 museums estimated to exist around the UK, the great national institutions take all the air, with their blockbuster shows and their rows over funding, restitution of plundered treasures and - in the case of the British Museum - alleged thefts. Scepticism about their scale and their colonising impulses goes back to their earliest days, with the writer GK Chesterton opining: The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestiblemeal."