I last visited Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft for It Takes a Village, the 40th-anniversary show that ran right up until the museum’s closure. Ethel Mairet’s workshop had been rebuilt so you could smell the dye plants and try the loom yourself; contemporary makers were working historic equipment in the gallery; visitors were adding their own objects to a map of the village, building the collection out of the community rather than around it. It was, very nearly, everything I’m about to argue for. And then it closed anyway.

It shut in February ‘for a period of reimagining’ – genteel language for a funding crisis currently battering every small independent museum. By May the staff were redundant, closure likely running into 2027. The grants that came weren’t to reopen; they were to close safely and pay the creditors. An archive of Ethel Mairet, Edward Johnston, Eric Gill, David Jones and Hilary Pepler, the craftspeople who put this corner of Sussex on the map, now sits in the dark, with nobody able to say when, or whether, it comes back. Silence, however well-meant, is still a message. Ditchling’s message to its own craft community right now is: we don’t know either.

So how can we support Ditchling’s trustees who are facing strong headwinds in an impossible climate? Perhaps we need to imagine beyond spreadsheets and transport models and question the museum model that has been quietly failing for years – objects kept safe from people, rather than for them. We live in an entirely different age from our Victorian ancestors whose extraordinary appetite for display birthed many a hallowed institution. But Victorians had no easily available content! Exhibition Road was the equivalent of a very big telly with BBC programming embedded in its gothic structures. I’d be the last woman standing to support the continuation of all our museums but the model clearly struggles and isn’t being saved by ever fancier tea room offerings and selling hand-printed greetings cards.

And craft museums should be prime candidates for ditching the glass barriers, the cases. The cards of curatorial prose standing between the audience and a chisel mark made by a living hand. Craft was never chiefly an idea to interpret. It’s a skill passed hand to hand, and glass is a hopeless conductor.

Compare the V&A East Storehouse in Stratford: a quarter of a million objects out of the basement and into an open hall, plus ‘Order an Object’ where you can book a slot, glove up and hold whatever you like while staff talk you through it. Half a million visitors in year one. Or MAD in New York, where resident artists work behind glass walls you can actually walk up to and ask questions through. Or Homo Faber in Venice, which turns an entire monastery into live demonstration every two years, artisans actually making in front of you. None of it is really about technology. It’s about deciding that the maker, not the label, does the explaining.

Ditchling was never going to out-scale the V&A or MAD, and it shouldn’t try. It’s a village museum with a handful of rooms, not a warehouse. But its whole reason for being was never really the objects. It was the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a community of craftspeople who lived and worked alongside each other. That’s the thing worth rebuilding: not open studios for their own sake, but the working craft community the museum was actually founded to hold. Ditchling’s own pioneers protested precisely this split of head from hand. It would be a quiet irony if the museum built to honour them spent its final years demonstrating the problem instead. There’s still time, but it needs a real message soon, not a holding page, and the rest of us saying, loudly, what kind of museum we want back.