Planning granted for Mary Rose museum

The £35 million project to build a new museum for the Tudor warship Mary Rose in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard took significant steps forward today with the news that the planning application has been approved by Portsmouth City Council.

The announcement coincides with confirmation from the Mary Rose Trust that they have raised over half of the £14million required to match the £21 million earmarked for the project by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in January 2008. The Mary Rose Trust can now progress to stage two and submit a further, fully developed application to the HLF to secure the full grant.

The museum, designed by a team comprising Wilkinson Eyre Architects (architect), Pringle Brandon (interior architect) and Land Design Studio (exhibition design and interpretation), in collaboration with Gifford (structural and M&E engineer), will reunite the ship’s preserved hull with many thousands of unseen artefacts for the first time in 500 years.

The museum building will resemble a finely crafted, wooden jewellery box, clad in timber planks invoking both the structure of the original ship and its immediate neighbour HMS Victory. The timber will be painted black, reflecting England’s traditional boat shed architecture, and the exterior will feature inscriptions drawn from the carved symbols used by the crew of the Mary Rose to identify their personal belongings. Over 19,000 artefacts were raised from within her but only 6% of these are currently on display in a temporary museum a short walk away from the hull. The well-known Tudor historian Dr David Starkey describes the collection as: “This country’s Pompeii, painting the finest picture of the world of sixteenth-century life”.

The Mary Rose Trust’s Chief Executive John Lippiett welcomed the good news: “We have reached a real milestone in the project and taken another step in the fascinating journey of the Mary Rose.”

“We can now submit our stage 2 application with real confidence. We have the planning approval; we have demonstrated considerable success in raising half the money required and are buoyant that we can raise the remainder.”

The hull of the Mary Rose will be withdrawn from public view later this year as the new museum is built around her. It will continue to be interpreted in imaginative ways in the existing museum, which will remain open throughout.

She will continue to be sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a water-based wax solution, until 2011. The hull will be carefully dried within the new museum until she can be displayed fully in 2016.