A WINCHESTER museum has begun huge refurbishment plans with the hope of re-opening by August 2025.
The Gurkha Museum will make its first bid for funding to the National Lottery in November and is expecting to hear whether it’s been successful in March 2023.
The museum in the Peninsula Barracks has been open in its current form for 32 years, with the Gurkha story told predominantly through white British officers. To update the attraction and better reflect Gurkha voices and their stories the museum is proposing a £3.7m plan to the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The museum hopes to receive £2m from the National Lottery and make the rest of costs up through fundraising via corporate sponsors, donations and other trusts. Although early days, the plan is to start work by Spring 2024 and be fully refurbished by the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day) in August 2025.
Thirty years ago there was only one Gurkha battalion on rotation based in the UK meaning very few Gurkhas and ex-Gurkhas were living here. Now, the brigade is based almost entirely in Britain.
Director Daren Bowyer said: “We want a much more interactive museum, more voices telling the narrative and one where it’s not quite so much a curator or an expert writing a book and leaving it on the wall for people to read.
“We’re not telling the whole story or engaging the Nepali community to the extent we would like to. There are still people alive who served in the 1950s and 60s but they’re getting older. We want to capture their oral histories and include it in a renovated museum while we still have the opportunity to.
"The main thing is that we want more people engaged whether that’s visiting, engaging with our digital content or actually working with us as volunteers and co-creators.
“The National Lottery is very demanding, they don’t just hand out money, they want to see a very detailed plan that hits some very particular objectives. A key part is having more and a wider range of people involved with heritage.”
As well as modernising content, the museum plans to update is space to be more family friendly. This would mean moving away from the one-way system that takes visitors through the Gurkha timeline from the Anglo-Nepal war through to post second world war conflict and towards a more open plan space.
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Mr Bowyer continued: “What people expect of the museum today is rather different to what they expected 30 years ago. We’d like to see more families and we find that families prefer a more open plan layout as you can keep an eye on everyone but still spread out.”
As a listed and ministry of defence owned building, the museum is constrained to what it can develop and the exterior will remain unchanged. During refurbishment, the director remains confident that at a least a part of the museum can remain open, particularly within the gallery and library area where pop-up exhibitions can be placed.
The library will have to close for a time while it is converted into a multi-purpose, education and research space. For more on the Gurkha Museum go to thegurkhamuseum.co.uk/.
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