It's not just England - I went to an after hours reception in the National Museum of Scotland, and part of that included a tour of the archives - rooms and rooms of artefacts locked away in the basement. Art galleries are the same - hundreds of paintings locked away in basements, rarely being seen by the public. We should use the dialogs that are evolving round the Elgin Marbles and other disputed artefacts to start a re-evaluation of the collections - what we should show, what we should store, what should we re-patriate, and what to do with the surplus.

Storage is a massive problem, but because its one if the least sexy parts of museums there's little money allocated to do something about it.

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