Workers at Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) in London have voted to strike on 11 and 12 August 2026 over pay and working conditions, in a ballot that returned one of the strongest mandate figures in the UK heritage sector's recent wave of industrial action.

Seventy-seven per cent of those who voted backed strike action, on a turnout of 90 per cent. A further 88 per cent voted in favour of action short of a strike — meaning refusals of overtime, work-to-rule and similar measures short of a full walkout. The figures were reported by The Art Newspaper on 3 August The Art Newspaper.

Royal Museums Greenwich encompasses four sites on the south bank of the Thames: the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House, the Royal Observatory and the Cutty Sark, the restored nineteenth-century tea clipper. Staff are represented by Prospect, a UK trade union covering specialists across the heritage and cultural sectors.

Prospect's members at RMG are seeking London Living Wage accreditation this year — a formal commitment to pay a rate calculated annually to meet the real cost of living in the capital — along with paid breaks for security workers, concrete policies on fixed-term contracts, and improved training and development opportunities.

The museum's management disputes the framing of the dispute. RMG told The Art Newspaper that negotiations with Prospect had already produced a two-year pay settlement covering 2026/27 and 2027/28, agreed by the union and implemented. The museum said the remaining areas of contention relate to "a small number of non-pay matters," and that it held a formal ACAS conciliation meeting — ACAS being the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, a publicly funded body that mediates workplace disputes — in July.

RMG also said it plans to keep all four museum sites open during the strike to maintain service to the public.

The Greenwich walkout is not an isolated event. Prospect members at the V&A East Storehouse — the Victoria and Albert Museum's new open-access collection facility in east London — and across the V&A's three other London sites have also voted to strike in a separate dispute over working conditions. The Art Newspaper reported on 30 July that the V&A East Storehouse vote centred on what the union described as "Amazon-style" working conditions The Art Newspaper.

Prospect's General Secretary, Mike Clancy, framed the two disputes as part of a coordinated escalation. The union, he said, is stepping up industrial action across UK cultural venues, and heritage-sector members "will not put up with it anymore."

That language signals a widening fracture between some of Britain's most visited museums and the specialist staff who run them — the curators, conservators, security officers and front-of-house teams whose work is largely invisible to the millions who pass through the doors each year.

For visitors planning a trip to Greenwich in mid-August, the museums say they will stay open. Whether the strike changes the conversation about museum workers' conditions is a question the rest of the sector will be watching closely.