Queen Victoria drawing and flight system among over 1,700 missing museum objects

A drawing of Queen Victoria and an aircraft navigational system are among the more than 1,700 items that are absent from museums in England.

Freedom of information requests by the PA news agency to museums and galleries that receive public funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) asked for information on missing items from the last 20 years.

This follows the British Museum’s disclosure in August that an unnamed member of staff was sacked after more than 2,000 artefacts were found to be stolen, missing or damaged.

Trustee chairman and former Chancellor George Osborne said records were “altered” by the sacked employee and suggested there was a lack of complete cataloguing at the museum.

Other museums such as the , which reopened in 2023, revealed in the FOI that it has 45 “not located”