Museum gains funding ahead of 30th anniversary

A medical museum in Leeds has secured £420,000 in funding ahead of its 30th anniversary next year.

Thackray Museum of Medicine has been awarded the money from grant organisations led by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The money will be spent on protecting the Grade II listed building and a new exhibition, which is due to open in February.

Edward Appleyard, from the museum, said he hoped the funding would enable them to have the "time and space to make Thackray even braver, more accessible and more sustainable for the future".

The museum opened in 1997 and is housed in a former Leeds Union Workhouse building next to St James's University Hospital.

It is is named after Charles Thackray, who developed his family-run chemist in Great George Street into a medical supply firm.

Since it reopened after a refit in 2021, the museum has been a finalist for Art Fund Museum of the Year and was awarded a special commendation at the 2023 European Museum of the Year Awards for its work with the local community.

The funding would allow it to consider upgrading and replacing the roof of the building and potentially adding another floor to support "future programmes and partnerships", the museum said.

"We have such a good partnership with the NHS and the University of Leeds and I also want to make this a place that's for the people of Harehills," Appleyard said.

He said that when communities are suffering economic hardship they "need places like museums more than ever before".

"Yes, we hold amazing collections, but it's the stories we can tell through the people who we speak to that are so important - and that has changed so much since we opened these doors in 1997," he concluded.

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