Our first meeting as the Project Team

Over the past few months, what started as a petition and a community campaign has slowly started to grow into something much bigger. One of the most important moments so far was the first time four of us sat down together in the same room to talk about how we could actually make the Shipyard Heritage Museum happen.

Up until that point, the campaign had mostly been about raising awareness, gathering support, speaking to the media, meeting with local representatives and collecting stories from the community. But there comes a point where an idea has to move from being a campaign into becoming a project, and that meeting felt like the moment that shift started to happen.

What makes this group interesting is that we have all come into this project from completely different directions, but for very similar reasons.

Bronwyn started the campaign because of her family’s connection to the shipyards and the communities built around them that she’s part of all her life. Andy has a direct family connection to Andrew Leslie, who founded the shipyard in Hebburn that later became Hawthorn Leslie. John and Mark have spent years researching and writing about the shipbuilding and engineering industries on Tyneside and the entrepreneurs and industries that made this region one of the most important industrial areas in the world.

So in one room, we had community, family history, academic research, business experience and project thinking all coming together around the same idea - that the shipbuilding history of this region deserves a permanent place where it can be preserved, shared and used to educate future generations.

The meeting itself was more discussing everything around the long-term vision of what a Shipyard Heritage Museum could actually be.

We talked about what the museum could include, how it could be more than just a traditional museum, and how it could include education, apprenticeships, research, innovation and community space. We talked about the importance of telling not just the story of the ships and the shipyards, but the story of the people, the communities, the migration, the apprenticeships, the engineering innovation and the industries that grew up around shipbuilding.

One thing we all agreed on was that this project should not just be about looking backwards. It should also be about looking forwards and include the Tyne, Wear and Tees. It’s about education, skills, engineering, innovation and giving younger generations an understanding of what this region once was and what it could be again in the future.

We also talked about the practical side - governance, forming a charity, building a board of trustees, funding routes such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund, regeneration funding, partnerships with universities, archives and heritage organisations, and how projects like this actually move from idea to reality.

What was clear by the end of the meeting was that it is now the early stages of a proper heritage project that will take time, planning, support and a lot of work to make happen.

But every project has a moment where it stops being an idea and starts becoming something real.

This meeting felt like one of those moments.

There is still a long way to go, but what started as a petition has now become a group of people working together to try and create something that could preserve the history of the shipyards and the communities they built for generations to come.

And that feels like a very important step forward.