OUR MUSEUM PROJECT UPDATE - OCTOBER 2023

Phase one of the Our Museum Project - Poole Museum has now successfully completed and has contributed to a 25% reduction in the Museum’s carbon footprint.

We closed the Museum’s doors to the public at the end of 2022 to prepare for phase two. A major task for us was the ‘decant’ of the museum. Each of our three buildings had to be completely emptied. This included all our artefacts, books, archives, furniture, filing cabinets, equipment, showcases, plinths, props … everything down to the last roll of Sellotape. A secure, temporary store had to be found and prepared, ready to house us until we are ready to move back in! Our artefacts and resources had to be carefully wrapped and packed safely for protection. We used over 600 Really Useful Boxes, these boxes are a staple in the world of museum storage as they’re ideal conservation standard!

‘Decanting’ the Museum was a huge project in its own right, with every member of the staff team involved in some way. We were also helped by our dedicated, trained collections volunteers who between them contributed 985 hours, cleaning and packing hundreds of objects.

 We had a number of particularly large and heavy objects both on display and stored at the museum. These included a horse-drawn fire engine, a 10m long Iron Age log boat, an iron-clad church safe weighing close on a quarter of a ton, and the wonderfully carved towering rudder from a c17th Dutch ship. These were challenging items to handle, and we needed a specialist removals team - see for yourself on the video shared below!

While the museum has been closed, we have been out on the road with ‘Museum on the Move’. This is our exciting outreach programme that is taking us out into the community, raising awareness of the Museum and our new offer, sharing our stories and collections, and giving us a chance to trial new ideas! Since we’ve been closed, we have connected with around 2,500 people through school workshop taster sessions, pop-up exhibitions, object handling, behind the scenes tours, talks, play, and creative activities. We have visited libraries, community centres, schools, parks, events, and festivals – building excitement for what’s to come. 

Behind the scenes, the curator team continue to look after the collection items, cleaning, cataloguing and restoring precious museum artefacts and all the books from The History Centre that are still in use for important research. The curators are also working with the exhibition interpretation designs, from agreeing layout of gallery floors to items to be included in cabinets to label writing.

With the buildings finally empty, at the beginning of October, we handed over the keys of the Museum to our main contractor, Greendale Construction Group Limited. Internal demolition works will be taking place into the new year as the teams work hard at removing flooring, internal walls, lifts and utilities.

We will be sharing ‘behind the scenes’ through our social media  Our Museum Journey (poolemuseum.org.uk)

There’s lots more to say and we look forward to updating you soon - Poole Museum Project Team

Poole Museum Redevelopment – our project at a glance!

· Transforming the museum into a thriving cultural space and community hub at the heart of a rejuvenated ‘Quay Quarter’.

· Secured £5m of third-party funding, our largest funder is The National Lottery Heritage Fund

· Conserving, restoring, and opening up all three of our historic buildings plus major improvements to public realm, signposting, and wayfinding

· Doubling publicly accessible space, significantly increasing the scale of the cultural offer

· Improving the environmental sustainability of the Museum and reducing our carbon footprint

· Transforming our visitor facilities, with a focus on accessibility and welcome for all

· Sharing our collections and stories in new ways with more and a wider range of people, including in our new collections studios

· Four new permanent galleries! Rediscovering Poole’s Maritime Heritage with three major new galleries showcasing our maritime archaeology and maritime collections, as well as a new Ceramics and Design Gallery, showcasing our Poole Pottery collection

· Changing and temporary exhibitions and displays: a new temporary exhibition gallery will bring in high-profile touring and temporary exhibitions, featuring loans from national museums, and there will be changing displays in our community gallery and throughout the museum.

· New flexible and accessible learning space for formal education sessions

The Our Museum Project progresses well with  consultation on the RIBA Stage 3 design plans completed by our design team lead by architects, ZMMA, and these have  been approved by the Our Museum Project Board.

Our  Chair, Felicity Irwin, is a member of this Board on behalf of PMF. The exciting details of these plans have been included in the Round 2 National Lottery Heritage Fund [NLHF] bid application that  has been submitted by the Our Museum Project Team and the application included an Activity Plan,  Interpretation Plan and a detailed Maintenance & Management Plan. We are due a visit by NLHF in November and we will hear the results of our application in early December.  

In the meantime, opening up works of the floors and walls of our heritage buildings has taken place to identify  building materials by Greendale and an archaeologist also attended, finding a couple of very old oyster shells in the foundations! 

Planning will be submitted for the Historic England funded works for Scaplen’s Court and  research for fundraising sources for the Activity Programme during the museum closure will also continue in  earnest.

The Our Museum Project team thank Felicity and Poole Museum Foundation for their ongoing support with the project. 

Poole Museums’ National Lottery Heritage Funded project Our Museum: Rediscovering Poole's Maritime Heritage is underway! We are excited to have been awarded an initial grant of £352k (known as a 'Round One Pass') to develop our plans for the future of the museum. This is called our Development Phase and it will run until January 2022 when we will find out if we have been successful in securing a further £2.2m (a 'Round Two Pass') to deliver the project. The Project Committee, headed by Chris Saunders, meets regularly and is comprised of senior Museum staff, the project team, and PMF Chair Felicity Irwin.

This exciting project will mean we can carry out essential works to conserve the Wool Hall and work with communities to co-create a brand-new maritime gallery at Poole Museum. The project will be rooted in the history and heritage of Poole through engagement with Poole Museum’s buildings and collections. However, it will bring these assets to life in creative ways through collaboration with diverse local audiences. In fact, the project will be informed as much by the needs of the community as the collection and will aim to reflect the interests of its audience in its object choices, interpretation and exhibition design. 

The Our Museum project team recently tested out a creative, collaborative approach to collections engagement, tied to the Writer in Residence program at Poole Museum. Resident Writer Adrian Harris led a socially distanced online workshop in creative writing in which 7 participants chose items from the Poole Museum collection and used these as inspiration for new short stories, poems or scripts. Each participant took a very different approach to storytelling - some basing their work purely in historic research, others in personal experience or pure imagination. The workshop also offered surprising insights into people’s engagement with museum collections, such as the sorts of objects chosen and the reasons these resonated. For example, of 15 possible objects, 4 separate people were inspired in part by the collections’ Lobster Pot and 3 by the medieval gold ring! As museum workers and exhibition-makers this sort of awareness seems invaluable - both in helping understand public engagement with collections and finding effective ways to display and interpret archival artefacts. 

Our goal is to turn the making of Poole Museum inside out to engage and involve volunteers, residents, and the wider community. To do this, the Our Museum project will be full to the brim with exciting opportunities to get involved with workshops, talks and events. These activities will help us develop our new spaces as well as engage the community in new and fun ways. And we are working hard to find new and creative ways to develop our activity online and at a safe distance. 

We're grateful as always to National Lottery players, Poole Museum Society, BCP Council and, of course, our wonderful members (that’s you!) for their support of the Our Museum project.