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£1 MILLION LOTTERY GRANT FOR NEW LEARNING CENTRE

Crich Tramway Village, home of the National Tramway Museum, has been awarded funding for a £1 million project to create an Exhibition and Learning Centre in a currently disused stone workshop that once served George Stephenson’s Railway.

Approximately £900,000 of the money will come from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), with the balance coming from the Museum’s own resources.

Glynn Wilton, Museum Curator said, “The new Stone Workshop Exhibition and Learning Centre will not only preserve a unique, historically important building but it will also create a visitor hub and exhibition space and provide a valuable new learning facility.”

Built in 1841, the two-storey building stands in the heart of the Tramway Museum site. It was originally used as a smithy and wagon works for Stephenson’s one-metre gauge mineral railway to transport limestone from what was then Crich Cliff Quarry to kilns at Ambergate.

The newly restored building will link to the existing Workshop Viewing Gallery via an enclosed walkway to provide a much needed visitor ‘welcome’ and exhibition space at the heart of Crich Tramway Village which will tell the story of the earliest tramways and link the site at Crich to George Stephenson and his mineral railway.

Christopher Pennell, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund East Midlands Committee said: “The creation of a new exhibition and learning centre has the potential to inspire a new generation to explore the industrial heritage of the East Midlands starting with the story of the development of public transport in the Museum on the hill and continuing in the Lower Derwent Valley a mile below, a World Heritage Site focussing on the early creation of the factory system.”

News of the successful bid comes as another major project at the Museum opens to visitors. The Great Exhibition Hall has been completely re-displayed with a new ‘Century of Trams’ exhibition charting the history of trams from 1860 to 1960.

Building work on the Stone Workshop project will start this summer and is expected to be completed in time for Easter 2011.

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Editors Notes:

1.George Stephenson chose Crich Cliff Quarry to supply limestone for his iron smelting businesses. The stone was transported via his narrow gauge railway to kilns at Ambergate alongside the North Midland Railway that Stephenson was building from Derby to Rotherham and Leeds. The building housed a forge for the use of a blacksmith, who’s job it would be to keep the tools and wagons for the quarry and its railway in good working order.

2.This is not the first Heritage Lottery Fund grant the Museum has been awarded.
Over the past 12 years the HLF have funded a workshop viewing gallery, library and archive extension and also contributed towards the cost of restoring a vintage tram which originally ran in Oporto, Portugal, and funding towards the cost of running the Education Department.