We are so pleased to announce that our beloved Yorkshire Air Museum has been awarded £312,531 under the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund.

Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England, said:

“Theatres, museums, galleries, dance companies and music venues bring joy to people and life to our cities, towns and villages. This is a difficult time for us all, but this first round of funding from the Culture Recovery Fund will help sustain hundreds of cultural spaces and organisations that are loved and admired by local communities and international audiences”.

Barbara George, Museum Director, said:

“We are so grateful for the support provided by DCMS under the Culture Recovery Fund. This award will allow us to face with further strength the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and ensure that we can remain open successfully and sustainably in the future. Importantly, we are delighted by the Government’s decisions which validates our site’s historical significance in this country.

After three and a half months of lockdown, the museum lost a significant amount of income difficult to recover while also bearing the additional weight of managing covid and keeping visitors and staff safe. The museum reopened to the public on 4th July and we received very positive support from visitors, members, staff and volunteers. The DCMS Culture Recovery Fund announced today will secure our much loved museum’s viability and bridge the funding gap required to operate sustainably in a covid-secure way.”

We will be writing more soon about how this vital funding is to be applied and the areas of the museum that it will help to secure for the future.

Interested parties who may wish to know more about the museum and our work – to honour, educate and inspire – can download the full press release here.