Silk Mill museum could close for two years

A multi-million pound redesign could close Derby’s Silk Mill museum for two years, according to a report in the Derby Evening Telegraph (8 Jan 2008)

The ambitious £13.3m overhaul of the museum, which celebrates Derby’s industrial heritage, would open up two more floors, create a cafe area, move the entrance and use biomass boilers to make the building carbon-neutral.

The museum has put together a bid for £4.95m from the Heritage Lottery Fund and hopes to secure the rest of the money from other agencies.

Roger Shelley, principal keeper of the Silk Mill , said: “We want to make the museum more about people. We want to increase the amount of material we have on display and present it in an innovative way.”

The Heritage Lottery Fund board is expected to make a decision on whether to approve the scheme in principle within the next six months. If it says yes, work is expected to start in 2010.

The work would be so extensive that the museum would have to close for two years from 2010 while it was carried out. The new-look museum would reopen in 2013.

Storage space would have to be found to house the collections during the closure.

At the moment, the museum only uses two floors because some of the building cannot be used under fire regulations.

The plans include safety work to enable displays to be spread across four floors, with more storage in the attic space.

The entrance would be on the side of the building, through gates where the original mill entrance used to be.

Project leaders are considering putting a piece of artwork outside the building and there are plans to replicate the old mill wheel in some form.

Inside, displays using different types of mood lighting, sound effects and plasma screens would be installed. On key dates, such as Bank Holidays, actors would be employed to bring parts of Derby’s history and characters such as John Whitehurst, Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Wright to life.

The museum’s new theme – Big ideas that changed the world – aims to tell how key people and innovations in Derby shaped not only the city and country but also the world.

The mill was the first modern water-powered factory to be built in England and was founded by brothers John and Thomas Lombe after John travelled to Italy to find out about the secret Italian process of spinning silk thread. He returned to England with a number of Italian workmen and made detailed drawings of the throwing machines which were used to spin the silk into thread.

In 1719, Thomas Lombe was granted a 14-year patent on the process and, in 1721, he and his brother began to build a mill next to the Derwent.

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