Preston Park museum extension unveiled
A “transformational” multi-million-pound extension to the Preston Park Museum will open with three exhibitions focusing on the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
The new Spence Building includes a exhibition space as well as large open stores, a new cafe and shop alongside the museum’s existing Victorian street and old hall. Council bosses say it will allow the museum to show national collections and touring exhibitions it could never host before, as well as show off much more of the museum’s own extensive collection of artefacts.
The exhibition space is being launched with ‘Tracks Of Change’, a trio of exhibitions which celebrate how the railways changed the world. Gateway To The World showcases three iconic paintings about the impact of railways by Victorian artist William Powell Frith, on loan from the King from the Royal Collection and Manchester City Galleries, displayed as a group for the first time.
‘Corridors’, an installation from international artist Rebecca Louise Law, features thousands of dried flowers, seedheads and grasses suspended from the ceiling, a “poetic reflection” of green corridors created by the railways. And All Aboard! is an interactive, family-friendly play space with a Locomotion replica featuring a ringing bell and pumps to produce steam from its chimney, set a firebox aglow and make water bubble in a colourful display.
In the original hall a goods wagon has been transformed into a giant woodcut depicts women who played “significant and often untold roles in the evolution of the railways”. And the music room contains more than 3,500 peg dolls, made by the members of some 70 community groups and schools to reflect railway memories, makes one of the museum’s quirkiest exhibits.
Reuben Kench, the council’s director of community services, environment and culture, said: “Here we’ve got a space that’s bespoke, 500sqm of exhibition space with the characteristics that enable us to borrow items from national collections. That enables us to do things here that we’ve never been able to do before, and that we’re really looking forward to doing on an ongoing basis, bringing objects and exhibitions to the people of Stockton and the Tees Valley that they previously would have had to go to London or other major cities to see.
“And I think that’s going to be transformational.”
Councillor Nigel Cooke, cabinet member for environment, leisure and culture, said he was amazed by the new building, funded by £20million from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, formerly the Levelling Up Fund. he said: “It’s going to attract people here who haven’t been here before because of the some of the installations and displays we can put on.
“Now in our region in the Tees Valley and the North-east we’ve got this amazing space so people won’t have to travel. I’m absolutely pleased with it.”