Wrexham scores with funding for football museum

A new football museum for Wales is one step closer following a £2.7m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The National Football Museum in Wales is being created in Wrexham and the scheme includes a revamped Wrexham Museum alongside the new venue.

The new museum will house a permanent display of the Welsh Football Collection, with 90% of the items considered of national and international significance.

Artefacts include the shirt that John Charles wore for his first Wales match in 1950 and a cap awarded to Billy Meredith, a pioneer of Welsh football having played for Manchester City and Manchester United, as well as Wales.

Money from the National Lottery Heritage Fund means the museum can go ahead with the purchase of a significant Welsh football collection. This includes material relating to Cardiff City’s 1927 FA Cup final victory and a variety of Wales men’s international match programmes, the earliest dated 1901.

“This is huge news for Wrexham,” said councillor Paul Roberts, the Wrexham County Borough Council lead member for partnerships and community safety. “The new museum is set to become a major new national attraction for the city, drawing new visitors from all over Wales and beyond, and playing a key role at the heart of Wrexham’s burgeoning tourism and cultural offer.”

The Heritage Fund has awarded grants to a number of other schemes that will help museums engage audiences with their collections.

More than £800,000 has been given to the Diving Museum in Gosport, Hampshire, which is inside a Grade II*-listed Victorian gun battery on the seafront. The museum showcases the UK’s deep-sea diving history with a collection of more than 7,000 items from the ancient to the modern era, including the world’s first-ever diving helmet. The funding will go toward essential building repairs and allow for improvement in access and sustainability, whilst enhancing public engagement and visitor experience.

In St Ives, Cornwall, the Leach Pottery Museum has secured more than £3.4m from the Heritage Fund. This will support a project to create a learning and production centre that will help local communities to discover traditional pottery methods.

The museum is housed in the original home and workplace of the internationally acclaimed potter and writer Bernard Leach. It is considered the birthplace of British studio pottery.

Other schemes have been awarded development funding, which is designed to enable project plans to be developed and an application for a full Heritage Fund delivery grant to be made at a later date.

These include nearly £310,000 for the Museum of Aberdeenshire, which is home to about 250,000 items from Aberdeen Council’s museum collections. The aim is to create a new museum for Aberdeenshire at the historic Arbuthnot House in Peterhead.

The Egypt Exploration Society, an international research institute supporting Egyptian cultural heritage, has been given £61,000 to develop its plans to renovate its Camden home.

And the Lancashire Cricket Heritage Experience at the Emirates Old Trafford cricket ground has been awarded £176,000. The funding will help develop an interactive heritage hub featuring immersive technology, interactive displays and hands-on exhibits.