The Story Museum’s application for £2m to the Arts Council’s large capital funding programme has been progressed to the 2nd and final stage, making it one of only 16 organisations across England to have been taken forward in this round. This announcement includes an initial award of £199,648 to support development of detailed plans to complete the transformation of its site on Pembroke Street, Oxford.

This is wonderful news and a major step forward in our plans to significantly improve the visitor experience and dramatically increase the range of activities we can offer. Using our rough spaces has taught us a lot about how we wish to develop the Museum and this news provides real impetus to our fundraising efforts to secure the remaining match funding so that we can bring our whole building into use by 2018.

Having completed redevelopment of the South Wing by 2014 and further improvement works to the East Wing in 2015/16, the next phase of capital works will be to the large North Wing of the Museum’s site bringing the remaining two-thirds of the building into full use. Plans include the creation of six additional spaces (bringing the total number of creative and heritage spaces in the Museum to nine) including a 140-seater performance space, a dedicated early-years story-play space, a learning studio and resource room, an interactive multi-media space, an immersive ‘Enchanted Library’ and a climate-controlled Treasure chamber for the display of fragile and heritage items. External walkways and a new external lift in the courtyard will connect the three wings of the site and make the whole building wheelchair accessible for the first time.

The cost of the next and largest phase of the Story Museum’s ongoing redevelopment is estimated to be just under £6m and this will be raised from a combination of public and private sources over the next 3 years. Following the Arts Council’s announcement today, the campaign to complete the Museum is now truly underway.

Completing the redevelopment of its buildings will allow The Story Museum to more than triple its annual visitor numbers to over 100,000 a year, including three times as many school and group bookings and expanded outreach work in the community.  Developing the building in this way will also extend The Story Museum’s role as a hub for young people’s creative writing, reading and storytelling in the South East and nationally, as well as providing an accessible portal into the many rich cultural experiences available elsewhere in the city.