Beaminster Museum started life 25 years ago as a group of volunteers who wanted to boost tourism and tell the story of their town and surrounding villages. A quarter of a century on, it’s so successful that plans are in place to expand the building. Rachel Stretton finds out what’s in store for 2018.

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From fossils to flax, Beaminster Museum is bursting at the seams with artefacts painstakingly collected by volunteers over the last two decades.

It’s a place schoolchildren can go to learn about their home, a draw for tourists and a haven for travellers who want to find out about the town their ancestors left.

Now, planning applications have been lodged with West Dorset District Council to expand the building that houses countless collections.

Colin Bowditch, from the museum, said it was the ‘right time’ to look at expanding the building.

“The museum started around 25 years ago and a lot of the same people are still involved. Over 20 years we have collected a lot of material, some of which is on display, and some which is in storage.

“What we lack is space for someone to sit down and interact with people. If we have a group of 20 or 30 schoolchildren, there is just no room at present.”

The museum has asked for permission to remove the roof of the building annex and build a two-storey extension over the annex and in the whole of the yard behind the museum. A doorway will be cut into the north wall of the annex and two windows of the first floor will be modified to become entrance doorways into the first floor of the new extension.

This will allow the yard at the back of the building, currently unused, to become a useful space for exhibitions, study and storage.

People are being invited to comment on the proposals. West Dorset District Council’s planning committee will meet at a date to be confirmed to decide whether to grant approval.

Mr Bowditch said the team is ‘fairly hopeful’ the plans will be approved.

“That is the first stage, to get planning permission, and then we will be looking to secure funding for the work,” he added.

“What we want to achieve is to display the heritage of Beaminster – and the neighbouring villages, Netherbury, Broadwindsor, Stoke Abbott and Thorncombe – and we want to show the artefacts, the stories, the history of our town and villages, and to do that properly, we do need the extra space.”

The museum has a number of permanent exhibitions with other collections being featured in new exhibitions each year to keep the offering fresh. All have a focus on local history.

Mr Bowditch said: “Our permanent collections include a small agricultural exhibit, there’s a relatively new one on the flax industry, which was a huge source of work for the area, both in terms of growing it and processing it in the many factories in the town and villages, for 200 years. It all fell apart in the late 1800s because it was mainly produced for sailing ships. When Nelson was active, some of the thread that made up his sails would have come from this area.”

The First World War has also been extensively covered, as have pubs, schools, the Roman Villa at Halstock and the fascinating discoveries of the nearby Horn Park Quarry, where a number of fossils have been unearthed.

Mr Bowditch added: “This summer is an exhibition called Hatch, Match and Dispatch, which is all about local births, marriages and deaths starting right from the Bronze Age.”

The museum’s visitors book reveals the level of interest from all over the world.

“We will often see people here with past connections to Beaminster,” Mr Bowditch said. “Their great-grandparents were born and brought up here, and moved away because of agricultural depression, and they come back to discover their roots.”

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A design and access statement in the plans states that the extension will be completed ‘with respect’ to the building’s Class II listed status.

It adds: “To prevent the two storey extension covering the rather handsome façade of the rear of the museum building, it is proposed to have a glass section over the existing annex, so the whole of the back façade of the museum building will be visible to all visitors from the new extension. This glass section does separate the new build from the listed building, and this gives more freedom in choice to contemporary materials.”

The museum is open to the public from April. Visit beaminstermuseum.wordpress.com for more information. People have until February 23 to comment on the plans.