The UK’s industrial and working class heritage is celebrated in the shortlist for Britain’s biggest single arts prize, The Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year, announced today, Friday 14 January.

The Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year, the largest single arts prize in the UK, is a £100,000 award given annually to one museum or gallery, large or small, anywhere in the UK. The only Scottish museum to be shortlisted this year is Taigh Chearsabhagh on the recently storm-swept island of North Uist for its community project Carn Chearsabhagh. This museum is shortlisted along with a restored pit in south Wales, where visitors can visit the coalface 300 feet underground, newly-opened galleries at Compton Verney in Warwickshire and The Foundling Hospital in London, two transport museums - the National Railway Museum at Shildon and Coventry Transport Museum and local museums in Devon and Norfolk.

Nine of the ten projects have been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, demonstrating how additional funding can transform the UK’s museums and galleries.

Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Art Gallery, Lochmaddy, North Uist for its Carn Chearsabhagh Project  A stone cairn – ‘carn’ in Gaelic – is a marker in the landscape which, in this museum project developed by the North Uist Historical Society, symbolises the involvement of the whole island community in building up knowledge over time to create a marker for future generations. 

The rest of the shortlist (in alphabetical order by city/town) is as follows:

• Museum of Barnstaple & North Devon for Shapland & Petter of Barnstaple: 150 years, a research and community access project that is enabling this small local authority museum to enhance and present an important furniture-manufacturing archive with the support and involvement of members of the local community.
  
• Big Pit, National Mining Museum of Wales, Blaenafon – the £7 million redevelopment of a former colliery which forms a key part of the industrial history of Wales.  Formerly employing 1300 people, it offers visitors the chance to descend 300 feet to the very depths of the mine and experience something of the reality of daily work underground.
  
• National Trust West Midlands for Back to Backs, Birmingham – the very last surviving courtyard of Back to Back houses in Birmingham.  Visitors move through interiors furnished to reflect the varied cultures, religions and professions of the families who lived here from 1840 to 1977.
  
• The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge for its Courtyard Development, a £12 million building programme, which has provided new space and facilities, fresh educational opportunities and a contemporary dimension to one of England’s major regional museums.
  
• Compton Verney, Warwickshire - for the transformation over ten years of a derelict Robert Adam mansion, set in over 120 acres of classical landscape designed by ‘Capability’ Brown, into a new art gallery of international standing.
  
• Coventry Transport Museum – the culmination of a £7.5 million redevelopment that houses the largest British road transport collection in the world.   Its new look has captured the imagination of young and old and put the Museum firmly on the national and international map.
  
• Time and Tide, Museum of Great Yarmouth Life, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk    Set in a restored herring curing factory, every aspect of this new museum – from its name to the stories it tells – is the result of a unique collaboration with the local community.
  
• The Foundling Museum, London tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, London’s first home for abandoned children and Britain’s first ever public art gallery, its campaigning founder, Thomas Coram, William Hogarth and its benefactor, George Frederic Handel.
  
• Locomotion: the National Railway Museum at Shildon, Co Durham - this new £11m railway museum celebrates Shildon's history as one of the world's oldest railway towns and is the first national museum in the north east of England.  As well as providing public access to 70 vehicles from the National collection, many of which were formerly inaccessible, the new museum is a centre for community activity and training, and a key element in the economic regeneration of Shildon.
   

Chair of Judges and Rector of Imperial College London, Sir Richard Sykes, comments: "This year's shortlist proves again that throughout the country, museums and galleries, both large and small, are alive and well. Not only that, they are constantly looking to innovate, with new and imaginative offerings for the visiting public."

The judging panel for the 2005 Gulbenkian Prize represents a wide range of artistic, scientific and academic interests and comprises: 

Joan Bakewell CBE, broadcaster and writer

Sir Neil Chalmers, Warden, Wadham College, Oxford and former Director of the Natural History Museum

Michael Day, Chief Executive, Historic Royal Palaces

Sokari Douglas Camp, sculptor

Victoria Hislop, journalist and novelist

Dr Elizabeth Mackenzie, Vice-Chairman, British Association of Friends of Museums

The four finalists for the 2005 prize will be announced on Friday 18th March.  The winner will be announced on Thursday 26th May in London during Museum and Galleries Month 2005.  

Last year’s winner was the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh for its dramatic Landform by Charles Jencks – part sculpture, part garden, part land-art.

The winner of the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize in 2003 was The National Centre for Citizenship and the Law housed in the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham.

To help the chances of actually winning the prize, supporters of Taigh Chearsabhagh are encouraged to send a comment to the organisers via the the link below.
 
http://www.thegulbenkianprize.org.uk/add-comment.htm