Congratulations to the Museums Essex grant recipients. Hear about the positive impact the scheme has had for our members in their own words.
Frinton and Walton Heritage Trust
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Promoting the Trust and Its Museums
A new informative leaflet about the Trust and its three museums (Crossing Cottage & Community Garden, The Trevor Bright Railway Museum and the new Museum and Heritage Centre, Pole Barn Lane) was designed and printed to promote and encourage increased interest and footfall to our venues and, in the case of local families new to the area, awareness of the Trust and its aims. This will be widely distributed not only in the local area but the intention is to also distribute it to other museums in Essex.
We have also installed a contactless donation point at Pole Barn Lane which we hope will encourage visitors to donate to the new museum. At present there is no admission charge.
Southend Pier Museum
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Contactless Donations
We applied for funding to purchase, install, connect and run a Collectin contactless donation device. The device was installed in time for our public opening season at Easter. The target was to achieve a return on investment within 6 months of device installation and to reach £1,000 income within the first year. Both those targets were achieved within four months and a second device has been purchased. No appreciable loss of income from other sources has been noticed.
All in all, one of the most successful projects and best uses of grant funding we have ever had. Many thanks for your support.
Harwich Museum
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Donation Box
We have spent the £475 grant on a donation box for Harwich Museum. We have found this donation box to be a huge success and our donations have increased by 55% on last year. The design is eye catching and it is placed at the end of the museum before guests enter the tea room and gift shop. All at Harwich Museum thank Museums Essex for their support.
Brightlingsea Museum
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Audio Tour Guide System
Brightlingsea Museum is very grateful to have received a grant of £450 towards the acquisition of an audio tour guide system to be used on our guided walks. The system provides the guide with a transmitter and individual receivers and headpieces for each walker.
The system is being used on the two guided walks offered by the Museum. A Town
Stroll featuring places and events in Brightlingsea’s intriguing history and a Waterside Wander which focuses on Brightlingsea’s maritime history. The Museum has also partnered with Brightlingsea Harbour to offer a Historic Land and Sea Tour guided by one of the Museum volunteers. Users have given positive feedback about the system.
Southend Museums
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Gazebo for outdoor events
The grant was used to purchase one large 3x6m gazebo and three smaller 3x3m gazebos to expand the delivery of our outdoor events in the museum service.
For many years we have had a programme of outdoor events such as our Anglo-Saxon Weekend, Prittlewell Pumpkin Patch and more recently a Wildlife Weekend, and often in the past we had to rely on borrowing gazebos from other Southend Council teams, or other external organisations. This proved to be unreliable on a few occasions, when these gazebos were used elsewhere instead and we were left without gazebos to use at short notice. We therefore decided to apply for this grant to allow us to ensure we always had some we could use. We used these for our Wildlife Weekend in April 2025, as well as Southend City Day in March 2025, and some pop-up gardening events at Central Museum throughout the year since acquiring them. All of these brought in substantial amounts of income and new visitors to our service, and none of these events would have been possible in the format we ran them in without the shelter provided by the gazebos.
Maldon Museum in the Park
Funding Round 12, 2024-2025: Cashless Donation Station
Maldon Museum in the Park was awarded a grant of £200 to purchase equipment for a Cashless Donation Station.
We had been finding that many visitors wanted to donate but no longer carried cash. Maldon Museum in the Park does not charge an entry fee and so donations are our main source of income. We had trialled a system with old equipment in 2024, which was beneficial when it worked, but was very unreliable.
Using the Museum Essex grant we purchased the new equipment and have been successfully collecting cashless donations since opening at Easter 2025.
It is early days yet, but in two months we have already collected nearly half what we took in six months last year. The average donation has also increased from £3.80 last year to £4.06 this year.
Visitors and volunteers have found the system simple and easy to operate.
The Ongar Millennium History Society
Funding Round 11, 2023-2024
The Ongar Millennium History Society is very happy to have received a £500 grant towards our timeline, which has been greatly appreciated by both local people and visitors to the town.
We now have our cabinet and are preparing our first exhibition which will be on the Budworth Hall itself so it will include drawings/photos and the story of how the building came to be built in the first place!
The timeline shows aspects of the town’s history starting from Roman times up to 2023.
Everyone who has hired the hall or entered for one of the many events held there have favourably commented on both these welcome additions to the town.
Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome
Funding round 10, 2022-2023
Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome applied for a grant of £500.00 to install some Humidity/Temperature Data Loggers in the exhibition buildings to assist with the care, conservation and preservation of the collections. The Grade II* listed buildings on site were fitted with very rudimentary climate control mechanisms that were not suitable, nor easy to monitor.
The award received purchased 4 Data Logger units, the Data logger software and relevant fixings. This has enabled the Objects team to monitor and record monthly temperature and humidity readings four of the exhibitions. The results obtained will identify any areas where remedial work is required to improve conservation of the collections.
Essex Police Museum
The Essex Police Museum applied for a grant for £380 to help with the preservation and care of our paper collection in storage. Our original storage boxes were just standard office boxes, they were overfilled, heavy and a health and safety risk to the team.
We spent the £380 on 32 new acid free storage boxes. They are smaller in height than the previous boxes, so they contain less material, making them lighter to carry which is a huge improvement for the museum staff. This also benefits the documents, giving them less room to move and fewer items stacked within the box, therefore preventing any damage.
Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome
We were awarded a Small Grant from Museums Essex to clean and restore a sword belonging to one of the Pilots that was based at Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome in 1916. The sword and the scabbard will be displayed in our Claude Ridley room, which tells the fascinating story of Ridley’s time in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force.
Chelmsford Museum
We purchased a mount cutter and mounting board with our Small Grant. We have a museum assistant who is trained in mount cutting and he has put it to immediate use. Since then we have been able to mount new acquisitions and older items that we were not previously able to mount. The result being that the items are better preserved and presented. Mounted items have included social history posters, works of art on paper and items from the Essex Regiment Museum collection.
Mersea Island Museum
The museum has a collection of maps and plans including old ordnance survey maps, local tithe maps, maritime charts and some very interesting speculative plans from the early 1900s when some developers hoped to turn West Mersea into a fashionable seaside resort. They were kept in a map chest in an upstairs store, due to lack of suitable space elsewhere. This made it difficult to carry items down without subjecting them to excessive handling. Since the building of our Resource Centre four years ago we have seen a considerable increase in the number of people wanting to use the facilities for research and one popular request is to see our map collection. In order to facilitate this, the museum applied for a grant from the Museums Essex Small Grants Scheme to purchase acid-free folders to store and transport the maps. Thanks for the grant, we were able to use these maps in our summer exhibition titled ‘Mersea in 1914 – the end of an era’.
The outbreak of war put an end to the rather grandiose plans, previously mentioned, to develop a resort with large areas of housing, tennis courts, concert halls and a light railway from Colchester to connect with a pier and steamers to Bradwell and Tollesbury. Some of the most interesting and colourful of these schemes were displayed to illustrate how Mersea could have looked if the plans had come to fruition.
Little Baddow History Centre
Our sound archive covering several decades of our villagers speaking about their memories of our village past was originally recorded on tape cassettes. This format was difficult to use and not very accessible. Thanks to the benefit of the Small Grant they have all been rerecorded.
We decided that the most effective way for visitors to access the archive was to arrange our centre so that our visitors can enjoy listening to our sound archive and DVD collection in a dedicated corner with seating. All the titles together with subtitles have now been loaded onto an Ipad enabling the visitor to search the archive. We have also purchased a DVD player which enables easy access for listening to them together with sets of earphones that can be purchased cheaply should they prefer to listen privately.
We now have a volunteer who is transcribing the CDs so that we can load these details onto our computer for a more detailed search of the subjects covered.
This has proved very popular and has given the Centre a further facility, which we feel gives our visitors more value and interest to their visit.
Museums Essex 