The Business Clinic

Today was a very important day for the Shipyard Heritage Museum.

After more than 14 weeks of work, we received the presentation of the business plan and feasibility work developed through Northumbria University Business School.

For those supporting this journey, we want to explain just how important this piece of work is - because what has been happening behind the scenes over the past few months has been enormous.

When we first began campaigning for a permanent museum celebrating the shipbuilding heritage of the North East, we knew the strength of feeling within our community was there. Thousands of people have supported the campaign, shared memories, opened family photograph albums, told us stories and helped demonstrate just how much this history still matters.

But turning that passion into a real museum requires much more.

It requires research. Evidence. Numbers. Planning. Understanding audiences, costs, income, tourism, education, partnerships and what it would actually take to create something that can survive and thrive for generations.

And now, we have that.

Over 200 pages of work

Over the past 14 weeks, the team from BluePrint Consultancy have undertaken an extraordinary amount of work on our behalf.

The final body of work runs to more than 200 pages.

Behind those pages are months of research, analysis, meetings, community engagement and conversations with people who could help shape the future of the museum.

They haven’t simply taken our idea and written a document around it. They have tested it.

The work looks at the museum from every angle - the opportunity, the market, potential audiences, competitors and comparable attractions, tourism, education, community engagement, operations, marketing, income opportunities, costs, risks, funding and the long-term sustainability of the project.

And now we know that this is feasible.

And that is huge.

None of this would have happened without Professor John Wilson, part of our working group, who recognised the potential of the Shipyard Heritage Museum and worked to bring it into Northumbria University as a live project for students.

John has been instrumental in connecting the campaign with the expertise of the University and helping us move from an ambitious community vision towards something that can be properly researched, evidenced and delivered.

We are incredibly grateful to him.

We also want to recognise the support this project has received from Northumbria University Business School.

Having a university of this calibre put its expertise, resources and students behind a community-led project like ours has given us something incredibly valuable: independent research and a fresh examination of whether our ambition actually stacks up.

And the quality of what has been produced has genuinely exceeded our expectations.

A huge thank you must also go to Rachel, Phoebe, Anna and Tom, who have immersed themselves in this project for more than three months.

They’ve met members of our community, listened to people’s experiences, researched the industry and the region, examined the practical realities of creating a museum and taken an enormous amount of information and turned it into something we can now use to move forward.

They understood very quickly that this wasn’t simply an academic exercise.

It matters to people.

Perhaps the biggest thing we want our community to understand is that the Shipyard Heritage Museum is no longer simply a petition or a campaign asking for somebody, somewhere, to preserve this history.

This is a real, living project.

We are setting ourselves up as a charity with a board behind it. We have historians, academics, community members and organisations contributing their expertise. We are building relationships across heritage, education and the wider region. And we now have more than 200 pages of serious research examining how this could actually work.

Every stage makes the foundations stronger.

Our ambition remains much bigger than simply displaying objects from the past.

We want to create somewhere worthy of an industry that changed the North East and helped shape the world: a major heritage attraction that tells the stories of the ships, the yards, the workers and the communities around them, while creating opportunities for education, skills and future generations.

And importantly, the research tells us that ambition has real potential.

So, what happens next?

The business plan isn’t the end of this piece of work.

In many ways, it’s the beginning.

We will now take the research and use it to inform the next stage of the project - developing the proposition further, strengthening partnerships, exploring potential sites and progressing conversations around investment and funding.

There is still an enormous amount of work ahead of us. Projects of this scale aren’t built overnight.

But every serious project needs to move from “wouldn’t it be amazing if…” to “here is how we can do it.”

Today, we moved much further into that second sentence.

To Professor John Wilson, Northumbria University Business School, Rachel, Phoebe, Anna and Tom: thank you.

And to the hundreds and thousands of people who have supported us, shared our work, attended our events, told us their stories and believed that the North East’s shipbuilding history deserves something more - thank you too.

The community started this.

Now we’re building the evidence, partnerships and plans needed to turn that belief into something permanent.