Museum to close for three years
BIRMINGHAM Museum & Art Gallery is to close for at least three years while a new ‘worldclass’ centre is being planned to house collections.
The museum, in Chamberlain Square, is due to shut in October 2019 as part of a refurbishment of the neighbouring Council House which requires a major overall of its electrical system.
But it is hoped that a new multimillion pound collection centre in Yardley, which would double as a new HQ for Birmingham Museums Trust, will be operational by 2020/21, providing public access to thousands of artefacts which are currently locked away in storage.
While the city centre site will still remain the flagship attraction, the earliest that some of the galleries will be able to re-open is 2022 in time for Birmingham hosting the Commonwealth Games.
The city council’s cabinet agreed for a business plan to be drawn up to develop the new centre, which would be built on the former Poolway Shopping Centre.
The site has been earmarked for housing but now a masterplan is in the works to create an ‘urban village’ featuring homes, retail, green spaces and the new centre.
While the collection facility would house around 45,000 artefacts out of the musuem’s 50,000-strong collection, they would not be displayed in traditional exhibitions but would still be more accessible to the public than they are at the moment with intentions to host guided tours, study sessions and workshops.
At the moment the museum occupies part of the main grade II*-listed Council House building and almost two-thirds of the extension to the rear linked by a bridge. Much of the collection, which boasts around one million objects in total, lies in storage at the Museum Collection Centre on Dollman Street in Nechells.
Both sets of properties are infested by rodents, suffer from water penetration and present issues around access, lack of storage, the security of the collections and moving objects around.
The plan is for the museum to relocate from the Council House to the extension for the first phase of redevelopment but an alternative storage solution is required when work starts on the extension itself.
The Museum Trust says: “Due to open in 2021, the proposed purposebuilt facility will offer a completely new type of cultural proposition to engage and inspire new audiences.
“Subsequent development of the site will create spaces that will be available for community use including a cafe, homework zone and meeting rooms.
“The building will also become Birmingham Museums’ headquarters, where the trust will relocate back office, curatorial, conservation and technical teams. The new centre at Pool Way will ensure that people in Birmingham can engage with it in new and exciting ways.”