British Motor Museums

1st July 2017

The Black Country Living Museum, on a 26 acre site in Dudley, officially opened 39 years ago, welcoming 8,800 visitors in its first year – visitors would have seen a much smaller site made up of a bridge and just a few buildings. Since then the Museum’s visitor figures have grown substantially, and in 2016 the Museum welcomed 308,457 visitors through its doors. It also recently celebrated one of its best Easter holiday periods in over a decade, welcoming 24,000 visitors – an increase of 5% on 2016.

The Black Country Living Museum recently announced that they have been awarded £9.8million from the National Lottery towards their £21.7m project BCLM: Forging Ahead giving them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save landmark community and commercial buildings from demolition and rebuild them at the Museum.

This endorsement from the Heritage Lottery Fund means that they have the go-ahead to begin important planning and research. This will be for the creation of: new learning facilities; a new visitor centre and car park; and several 1940s -1960s historic developments which would see the Museum expand by up to a third.

A few buildings across the region that the museum would like to translocate, recreate or replicate at the Museum include a pub, shops, a hairdressers and an NHS clinic. All of these developments will represent what it was like to live and work in the Black Country in the 1940s-60s, and they will preserve an important period of history for generations to come.

In October 2018 the Museum will be submitting a second-round application to the Heritage Lottery Fund to unlock the rest of this funding so that they can start building, with a view to completing it in 2022.

1st July 2017

One of the many transprt exhibits

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