Decision due this week on grant for Mary Rose from the Heritage Lottery Fund
News release issued: 18th January 2008The Mary Rose Trust is due to hear in the next week whether it has secured a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The application submitted last June was for a £21 million grant to complete the conservation of the Tudor warship the Mary Rose and build a permanent museum in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard to house the hull and her artefacts.
There is fierce competition for grants from the Heritage lottery Fund, who will announce the latest round of funding on Friday 25 January. Whilst the Heritage Lottery Fund has been generous in its support of the conservation of the collection over the last 15 years, awarding almost £7 million so far, the Trust has received no government funding and has relied on visitor income and fundraising to continue the project. If the £21 million is awarded, contributing to the £35 million required for the project, the Trust will at last be able to realise their aims of preserving both the hull and artefacts and displaying them together in a permanent museum.
The museum, designed by a team comprising Wilkinson Eyre Architects (architect), Pringle Brandon (interior architect) and Land Design Studio (exhibition design and interpretation), in collaboration with Gifford (structural and M&E engineer), will reunite the ship’s preserved hull with many thousands of unseen artefacts for the first time in 500 years and enhance Portsmouth Historic Dockyard as a major visitor destination.
The hull of the Mary Rose will continue to be sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a water-based wax solution, until 2011 whilst the proposed museum, located alongside Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, is built around her. If awarded the grant, the museum is due to open in time for the Olympics and promises to boost visitor numbers to the South of England and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, one of the finest maritime attractions in the world. The hull will be carefully dried within the new museum until she can be displayed fully in 2016 when galleries will allow visitors to see both the outside and inside of the well-preserved hull.
