Bristol, UK — A museum, visitor centre and home for the last Concorde to fly is expected to open in two and half years after the project was awarded a grant of £4.7 million by the National Lottery.
The funding is the final piece in a £16 million jigsaw and it means that a museum and heritage centre celebrating Bristol’s aviation past is now almost certain to go ahead.
Fittingly the visitor centre will be built on the former airfield at Filton – the birthplace of the aviation industry and the site where much of the research and development work on the supersonic plane was carried out in the 1960s.
The Bristol Aero Collection Trust has been working on the project for the last four years and has finally landed almost all of the funding needed for the museum to go ahead.
Work on the site, which includes two aircraft hangars built at the height of World War I, is expected to start next autumn and will be completed by late spring of 2017. The organisers say they hope to attract around 120,000 visitors a year.
One of the hangars will be used to house a collection of planes, aircraft and memorabilia connected to Bristol’s aviation industry along with a shop, cafe and visitor centre.
The new centre will tell the story of Bristol’s aerospace industry from its birth in 1910 to the present day and into the future, displaying several important heritage collections.
The second hangar will house workshops and conservation projects which will be partially open to the public.
Finally a brand new building will be constructed to house Concorde 216 – the last of the iconic supersonic jets to fly.
People who visit the centre will be able to walk through the cabin of the record breaking plane as well as view a state of the art exhibition on the ground breaking engineering behind the plane.
Read more: http://www.bristolpost.co.uk