UK’s industrial heritage honoured in arts prize
Museums commemorating Britain’s industrial heritage dominate the shortlist for the prestigious Gulbenkian Museum of the Year competition.
Six of the ten shortlisted museums showcase heavy industry or the culture of industrial Britain.
They include a fishing museum in Great Yarmouth, a restored pit in Wales and the National Railway Museum in Durham.
High art is represented too, with new galleries at Compton Verney and a multi-million pound extension to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge making the shortlist.
Nine out of the ten museums shortlisted have received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which the organisers say shows the difference extra funding can make.
The Gulbenkian prize is worth £100,000 to the winner, and was created by National Heritage, the Museums Association, the National Art Collections Fund and the Campaign for Museums in 2001. All of the bodies agreed to stop separate award schemes they had previously run and focus on one big competition. It is funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
The four finalists will be announced on Friday 18 May, with the winner revealed on Thursday 26 May.
Last year’s winner was the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
The chairman of the judging panel, Sir Richard Sykes, said: “This year’s shortlist proves again that throughout the country, museums and galleries, both large and small, are alive and well. Not only that, they are constantly looking to innovate, with new and imaginative offerings for the visiting public.”
The full shortlist (in alphabetical order by location) is:
Museum of Barnstaple & North Devon for Shapland & Petter of Barnstaple: 150 years
Big Pit, National Mining Museum of Wales, Blaenafon
National Trust West Midlands for Back to Backs, Birmingham
The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge for its Courtyard Development
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
Coventry Transport Museum
Time and Tide, Museum of Great Yarmouth Life, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk .
Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Art Gallery, Lochmaddy, North Uist for its Carn Chearsabhagh Project
The Foundling Museum, London
Locomotion: the National Railway Museum at Shildon, Co Durham
