Welcome to the Industrial Heritage Networks and Support website. This site is maintained and updated by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust who run the project and the networks. We aim to support industrial heritage in England through networking, information exchange, guidance, and training. Please explore the website and please contribute! For more information you can … Read more Welcome to the IHNs website!
AIM (the Association of Independent Museums) has announced (December 2024) the latest recipients of their collections care and conservation grants, funded by the Pilgrim Trust. 20 organisations were offered grant funding totalling £63,750.50.
The Peak District Mining Museum has been offered funding for a conservator-led collections care audit to provide a report on the display and store environment and offer recommendations on how to improve collections care.
The Museum of Rail Travel/ Vintage Carriages Trust has been awarded £3,000.00 for conserving and making publicly accessible the Bradshaw map, whilst the Port Sunlight Village Trust has been awarded a grant of £7,325 for theConservation of the Gladstone Theatre Plaque.
In 2025 AIM will be offering a new grant called ‘Museum Fundamentals’, combining the familiar conservator support offered by the Pilgrim Trust funded grants, with new funding to support back of house activity and mentoring for larger projects. To hear about the forthcoming AIM Museum Fundamentals grant application process, and news on all other AIM activity, sign up for their newsletter here: weekly eNews.
Applications are now open for the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s 2025 round of restoration, research, and other awards (including community, dissertaton, publication, and travel bursary). The deadline for most of these awards is the 31st Janaury 2025, although the deadline for the Restoration Grants is the 31st March 2025. Details and links can be found below.
Restoration Grants
The first of these grants were made in 2009, and from the initial modest beginnings we have, by 2024, been able to allocate nearly £1,500,000 since the scheme began. The industrial heritage sector, despite difficulties with volunteer projects during the Pandemic, has continued to be increasingly appreciative of this source of aid. A source which is entirely thanks to the continuing support of our anonymous donors. A brief history of the scheme and details of many of those projects can be found below. Regular updates on progress with these projects appear in I A News, our quarterly bulletin. From 2020 onwards the available Grants pot is divided into two categories:
Major projects where the maximum grant that can be awarded is £30,000. The grant from the AIA must be a significant part of the total project cost, not just a small contribution to a very large project, so that the AIA grant has real impact. The AIA would not normally fund projects where their grant represents less than 20% of the total project costs. Small projects where the grant limit is £10,000, for which the total cost of the project, excluding the value of volunteer labour, must not exceed £12,500.
The AIA research grant scheme underpins the study aim of the Association. It does that by:
Encouraging individual researchers to study industrial archaeology subjects
Encouraging the development of industrial archaeology skills within commercial units, the main repository of professional skills in the subject
Supporting local industrial archaeology and industrial heritage societies in exploring and understanding their local areas
Helping to develop the next generation of industrial archaeologists
The total fund available in any single year is £1,500 and multiple grants may be given up to this maximum in a single year. The AIA may consider part-funding a wider grant application or project as long as the AIA grant is a significant part of the larger application / project.
Click to download full details and an application form: (.pdf)(.docx)
In 2024 Claymills Pumping Station received a major grant for the restoration of boiler No 1 to fully working condition. Image courtesy of Claymills Pumping Station Trust.
Historic England has announced (November 2024) new funding for 21 creative, youth-led, place-marking projects across England. The ‘History in the Making’ programme empowers under-represented young people to explore and celebrate their local hidden histories, finding original ways to commemorate them, helping to improve young people’s wellbeing, and increase pride in their local area.Amongst the 21 grants are several to industrial heritage themed projects.
‘Summat Creative’, in Bradford, focusses on the overlooked history of people with Learning Disabilities who worked in Bradford’s mills in the 1800s and 1900s. After historical research and creative exploration, Learning Disabled young people will help create a model of a mill and fill it with their own creative responses to the stories they’ve unearthed.
The ‘Multi-sensory accessible place marker for the Shipley Glen Tramway – Moor Time’ project will see young people with additional needs from across the Bradford district explore the social history around the oldest cable tramway in Britain, which still takes passengers from Saltaire/Baildon to Shipley Glen. Their findings will create a full accessible, multi-sensory, place marker to celebrate these histories.
‘Canal to Garden: Unearthing Greater Mamnchester’s Green Heritage’ project will engage young people in Greater Manchester to uncover and celebrate the hidden history of local canals and flora through hands-on gardening, historical research, and creative expression. It will result in a heritage garden that tells the story of our local environment.
A new piece of research has been launched by the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) to better understand how museums and heritage venues with outdoor space of any size are approaching land management in order to diversify their income streams, broaden their audiences, and contribute to sustainability goals.
The research will explore how museums and heritage organisations (including industrial heritage sites) with outdoor space of any size, from rooftop terraces to those with thousands of acres, are using these spaces. The research will also consider the appetite for further support and funding for developing such outdoor spaces. The intended outcome is to compile some broad data about land ownership in the sector along with a set of robust case studies that can exemplify how organisations of varied size and resource are approaching land management.
A core element is an online survey, which is open to those in the museums and heritage sector with experience managing land or owning land. The survey is being carried out by marketing research company M·E·L Research for the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), National Museum Directors’ Council, Arts Council England, and the Welsh Government.
The Catalyst Science Discovery Centre and Museum in Widnes has been awarded a £1 million grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. This is to help it educate and excite an even wider audience about the relevance of chemistry, the town’s chemical heritage, and how this has shaped modern life today.
Delegates catching up at the North West IHN, October 2024. Copyright: Dr Michael Nevell
Half of the £1,009,930 National Lottery Heritage Fund grant will be used to refurbish two floors of the museum in order to showcase the history and heritage of the chemical industry from the 1800s to the present in a fresher, more engaging, and more accessible way. This includes the top floor Observation Gallery with its 360° views of the surrounding area including the River Mersey and two Halton bridges, which will be revamped with brand new interactive exhibitsd and audio handsets.
A proportion of the grant will be used to digitise the museum’s nationally important, and extensive, archive to both protect and make it more widely available. The remainder of the grant has been earmarked for an extensive activity plan including workshops, events, open days, and resources aimed at connecting audiences to the chemical industry in a new and meaningful way.
The Catalyst charity was launched in 1987. It celebrates the local chemical industry heritage and its influence at home and around the world with unique initiatives, hands-on experiences, and rich industrial heritage archives. The Discovery Centre and Museum welcomes visitors from the local area and beyond, with special events for schools, families, and SEN groups all year round. The museum hosted the North West Industrial Heritage Network meeting in October 2024.
Join SPAB on Saturday 30 November, 10am – 4.45pm , for a day of online talks about windmills and watermills that are currently or have been in the past listed on the Heritage at Risk Register.
What happens when a mill is added to the Heritage at Risk Register? What steps can you take to protect a mill from different risks? And why do some restored mills remain at risk? This is a unique opportunity to hear from a range of mill professionals – including volunteers and millwrights. You’ll have a chance to have your questions answered and will receive a recording of the talks after the event.
For several years Historic England has been running a very successful lunchtime learning webinar training series. The latest industrial heritage webinar case study on the work of the Canal & River Trust, held earlier this autumn, can now can be viewed online.
One example of the re-use and conservation of canal-related industrial heritage mentioned in the webinar was The Roundhouse, Sheepcote Street, Birmingham. This former horse-shoe shaped stables and stores was built as a mineral and coal wharf, around 1840. Listed Grade II* the site was removed from the Heritage at Risk Register in 2021, renovated with the help of NHLF and CRT, and is now being run as a heritage enterprise by the charity Roundhouse Birimgham providing office space, a visitor centre, and canal-related leisure and outreach activities.
The Roundhouse, Sheepcote Street, Birmingham. Image courtesy of Historic England.
The Councicl for British Archaeology (CBA), who have run the Festival of Archaeology for many years, have published an overview of results and impact for the years covering 2020 to 2024. The Impact Study represents five years of data collection and analysis drawn in large part from those who responded to the evaluation surveys over the years. It was undertaken by Resources for Change.
Over the last five years, the Festival saw over a million engagements (people directly engaging with CBA content) with a reach of 359 million (number of people exposed to a social media post). There were nearly 2,000 activities, some delivered more than once, which resulted in 3,401 individual sessions. The Feitval was also able to adapt to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To download the executive summary follow this link:
Milsl Archive Trust volunteers learning new archibing skills. Image couresy fo the Mills Archive Trust.
The Mills Archive Trust’s ‘Living Heritage’ appeal is designed to keep alive the legacy of millers and millwrights found within the Trust’s archives, sharing this knoweldge with the public and providing life-changing experiences for their volunteers.
The Mills Archive Trust is a permanent repository for the documentary and photographic records of traditional and contemporary mills and milling, as well as similar structures dependent on traditional power sources, in the UK and beyond. It makes that material freely available for public inspection and use in research and learning.
Their latest appeal is designed to help volunteers acquire the skills needed to catalogue archives relating to specific millers and wind and watermill restorers and experts, such as David Nicholls (1938-2020), and Alan Stoyel. Not only does that help to save these archives and improve public access to them, but the skills acquired help many volunteers to find work within the hertiage sector.
The Mills Archive is one of the world’s great mill collections. It has rescued over three million documents and images that might otherwise have ended up in a landfill site. It is an Aladdin’s cave filled with memories and is free to use. The collections show the rich and diverse crafts, buildings, machinery, equipment, and people involved with mills in the UK and around the world. There is an urgent need to record and make public the technical details of these crafts and the potential impact of the loss of this aspect of our shared cultural heritage.
In September the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust (IGMT) launched a recruitment drive to find new volunteers to help them complete the second phase of the project to conserve two Sentinel locomotives at Coalbrookdale. IGMT found them through a range of outlets, including the Shropshire Star, the Telford Journal, and BBC Radio Shropshire, and they started work omn 18 October.
The two Sentinel Shunting Locomotives (left), which date from the 1860s, are historically important parts of the Trust’s collection. They were used by the Coalbrookdale Company on their internal railway system. In the 1920s, to reduce running and material costs, the Sentinel Waggon Works Ltd. modernised and converted locomotives from a boiler and cylinder system to a boiler with chain drive to both axles, and the locomotives within this project are the oldest locomotive conversions by Sentinel that are known to have been preserved. They are now on permanent display beneath the arches of the viaduct that passes through Coalbrookdale for museum visitors and passersby to see.
In 2023 the Trust secured funding from the Association for Industrial Archaeology to carry out work to conserve the engines, whose condition had deteriorated over time due to weather conditions. While the engines will not run again, the aim of the project is to stabilise their condition and conserve them so they can continue to be enjoyed by future visitors to the Ironbridge Gorge and its museums.
Under the guidance of Trevor Barraclough, the team began work on this second phase in October 2024. The work will involve wet and dry cleaning; priming bare iron; painting; and if appropriate carrying out some minor repairs. Volunteers also regularly receive questions from members of the public interested in their work and will be asked to take photographs to help record the progress of the project. The hope is to complete the project by Christmas, but this is dependent on the weather.
Picture shows volunteers Peter Taylor, Matthew Fletcher, Alan Watson, Steven Downton, Phil Garbett and Mike Sprason with Trevor Barraclough (centre). Image courtesy of IGMT.
Industrial Heritage Networks 