The City Museum breaks its visitor record once again
The family of museums under Helsinki City Museum saw a total of 433,969 guests in 2017. The Helsinki City Museum, located at the corner of the Senate Square, attracted the most visitors, the total number being 362,631. The year was the second consecutive record-breaking year for the museum.
In 2017, the museums in the Helsinki City Museum family—the Helsinki City Museum, Hakasalmi Villa, the Worker Housing Museum, the Burgher’s House Museum and the Tram Museum—continued breaking records. The total number of visitors to all museums in the Helsinki City Museum family in 2017 was 433,969. The total number of visitors increased by nearly 10% from 2016 when the previous record from 2010 was doubled.
Located at the corner of Senate Square, the Helsinki City Museum had a total of 362,631 visitors by the end of the year. The second year of operation, 2017, resulted in an increase of nearly 50,000 visitors compared to the numbers of the opening year. Currently open at the City Museum are the Helsinki Bites exhibition, Children’s Town, the virtual Time Machine and the Helsexinki exhibition, which is open until 28 January 2018. Light installations by Alexander Reichstein, Willem Heeffer and Jussi Karjalainen will light up the courtyards of the museum until 10 January 2018.
Launched in late April 2017, the Helsinkikuvia.fi service also saw large numbers of visitors with the current selection of more than 48,000 photographs from the museum’s collections available to anyone free of charge. The City Museum was the first Finnish museum to make its entire, digitised photo collection freely available in high resolution. By the turn of the year, the service had accumulated nearly 300,000 visits.
The great year was topped off by the significant awards given to the museum. In 2017, the City Museum was selected as both the Finnish Museum of the Year and the winner of the international category in the Museums + Heritage Awards. In addition, the museum is one of the finalists in the European Museum of the Year contest. The award ceremony will take place in Warsaw in May 2018. The museum was also the first museum ever to win the public sector service innovation category in the Quality Innovation Award contest.
Closed for most of 2017, the Hakasalmi Villa saw a total of 22,044 visitors. The 100 and Counting photographic exhibition, consisting of the interviews of seven 100-year-old Helsinki residents as well as stunning collages of their portraits taken by photographer Vesa Tyni, was the highlight of the end of the year at the villa. Other major social changes over the past 100 years are also discussed through pictures from the interviewees’ home albums and other old photographs. The exhibition is open until 25 March 2018.
Located in the midst of the stone houses of Kruununhaka, the tiny Burgher’s House Museum was opened in the summer of 2017 after being closed for a long time. The oldest wooden house in the downtown area was visited by 10,260 people by the turn of the year. The Christmas season was a particularly busy time as visiting the house is a Christmas tradition for many. The Burgher’s House Museum will be open until 7 January 2018, afterwards closing for the spring.
The number of visitors to the Worker Housing Museum next to the Linnanmäki amusement park was 6,308. The museum is open from spring to autumn. The Tram Museum at Korjaamo Culture Factory in Töölö attracted a total of 32,726 visitors. Entrance to all museums in the Helsinki City Museum family is always free of charge.
