County Durham museum gets share of £4m funding pot to…

County Durham museum gets share of £4m funding pot to develop four new gallery spaces

A County Durham museum has received a grant of more than £250,000 which it will use to develop new gallery spaces.

The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle is one of 33 museums and galleries in England which has received a share of the £4 million pot from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Wolfson Foundation. The museum, which has been open to the public since 1892, is packed with art, fashion and design exhibits, with one of the best known the Silver Swan automaton which contains more than 2,000 moving parts and dates back almost quarter of a century.

The museum is expected to use its £254,900 grant to develop four new gallery spaces in order to bring more of its collections to the public. In 2019, conservators at the museum discovered a 16th century painting of a nativity scene hidden beneath a 400-year-old painting depicting the beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

Northumbria University experts carried out X-ray analysis, where they found another image underneath with a baby in a manger, angels with halos, and the outline of what appears to be stables.

Hannah Fox, Director of the Bowes Museum said: "This level of investment is fantastic recognition of our ambitions here at the Bowes Museum. It means we're able to take forward some redevelopment of gallery spaces and unlock some currently unavailable space for public use, and that's a big plus for us."

It hasn't yet been decided what will go into the new gallery spaces, but Hannah says that's the "exciting" part of the investment. She continued: "I think it will be a cross section of our collections because we have quite a breadth of elements in there.

"What we want to do is support conversations around these and what they meant to people and how we might display and interpret them. That way, we can make them accessible, interesting and engaging in a way that relates to our communities and visitors."

Other museums which received grants from the DCMS include The National Motor Museum in Hampshire, Hampton Court Palace in Richmond upon Thames, and Temple Newsam in Leeds. The National History Museum in London also received £100,000 for its Mammals Galleries Project.

Lord Stephen Parkinson, Arts Minister, said funding contributes to the "government's commitment to levelling up" agenda, as 80% of it goes to 26 museums outside the capital.