Our first round Heritage Lottery bid has been successful
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 11 August 2011 10:43
Kew Bridge Engines Trust and Water Supply Museum Limited are pleased to announce that they have been successful in being awarded a development grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) of £127,600 in order to work up plans for a bid of just under £1.8million. Together with funding already agreed from Thames Water Utilities Ltd. this first-round pass from HLF will enable the Trust to proceed with the detailed planning phase of their proposals for re-developing the Museum. In reaching this position the Trust would like to thank Thames Water Utilities Ltd. for the previous support received from their “Ten for Ten” Community and Environmental Support Fund which has enabled the Trust to carry out the necessary research and planning activities to achieve this successful outcome.
The full project will include the provision of an enhanced reception, shop and café area which could be available to non-visitors; improved facilities for educational visits; discrete spaces/meeting rooms for community group meetings and temporary exhibitions/displays; new displays, interpretation aids and materials covering the full story of water supply and the role of the pumping station in this story; and an interactive fun/educational play area for younger visitors. Concurrently with these developments structural repairs will be completed on the remaining areas of the Grade I and II listed buildings that have not already been restored.
While the Museum will continue to offer visitors the unique experience of seeing the giant steam pumping engines in action, the proposals will give visitors much more to see and do when the engines are not running, changing the emphasis to one where water, its past, present and future supply and use, becomes the focus of the story, with the Museum’s buildings and engines placed more fully in the context of the water supply industry and the local community. At the same time the Museum will be expanding its educational support programmes to cover a wider range of syllabus topics and age groups within the schools programme, and to explore opportunities for involvement in tertiary and further education. The Museum currently has an active volunteer base, involved in all areas of its operations, and the development plans include proposals for extending this and expanding the Museum’s involvement with local communities.
Our next stage is to prepare a “second round” Heritage Lottery Fund funding application to cover the capital and some of the revenue costs for this redevelopment. To achieve this we have set a target of submitting the application in December 2011 in order that it may be considered at the Heritage Lottery Fund review meeting in March 2012. If this application is successful some work would start on site during the latter part of 2012, with the planned closure of the Museum for the first five months of 2013 to allow major construction works and fit out to take place, and a grand reopening in June 2013.