In October 2025, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens was awarded £102280 from the Museum Renewal Fund (MRF) by Arts Council England.
The MRF is a programme of funding delivered by Arts Council England for museums to maintain visitor numbers and public access to museums in 2025-26. The Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens project will improve access to our collections, tell fascinating stories of collection items and address urgent collection storage issues.
Find out more about the Museum Renewal Fund
The MRF project is also great opportunity to boost the capabilities and responsibilities of front-of-house staff at the Museum in line with the inclusivity principles of the Museum Association’s Front-of-House Charter for Change.
Through the MRF, Visitor Services staff have introductions to hands on collections-based work, becoming champions of the collections they represent to a greater extent.
The grant announcement follows on the heels of the Museum’s recent announcement of a £5.2m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the redevelopment. The MRF funding is ensuring vital collections management work can occur in the lead up to that wider redevelopment, cataloguing the collections and improving its storerooms.
The funding will also allow the Museum team to begin offering public tours of these rarely seen storerooms and handling sessions of some of the fascinating objects they are rediscovering.
Find out more about the Museum Redevelopment
Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens is part of the Sunderland Heritage Partnership, a collection of over 30 organisations, venues, community groups, societies and individuals working in heritage across Sunderland, Washington and the Coalfields.
To help promote the work undertaken through this grant award, the Museum and Sunderland Heritage are collaborating to tell stories of objects and artefacts and promote unique collection experiences. From now until Spring 2026, discover interesting stories about objects and artefacts on the Sunderland Heritage Partnership website and have the opportunity to take part in unique collection experiences.
Anneke Hackenbroich, the Museum’s Collections Care Development Manager said “We are so excited for the opportunity to tell insightful stories of objects which are being checked and carefully catalogued through this funding. More and more museums are opening up their deeper collections to give the public access to items which may not have been on display for some time so the chance to run object activities and to tell collection stories through our Sunderland Heritage Partnership connection is extremely valuable.”
The funding has also made it possible for the upper floors of the Museum to remain open until 5pm from Monday to Friday, previously closed off at 4pm.
