Defence Online

County Durham’s popular Beamish Museum has secured almost £11m of Heritage Lottery Fund money.The open air venue takes visitors on a journey from North East life in the 1820s to the early 20th century.The £10.9m cash injection will be put towards helping the attraction create a range of new experiences as part of a wider £18m project called Remaking Beamish, and will be Beamish’s largest ever single investment.Almost 100 new jobs will be created during the development works, alongside more than 1,000 training opportunities, including 50 apprenticeships.Beamish currently attracts nearly 700,000 visitors every year, and is hoping to increase this figure by 2020.Work on the improvements will begin this winter and will take about four years to complete. More than 30 new exhibits will be created across the museum site, with the centrepiece to be a reconstructed 1950s town.Plans include a fully operational cinema being moved brick by brick from Sunderland, as well as examples of shops and housing from across the North East.Beamish will also expand the stories it already tells from the early 19th century as part of the project, including reconstructing a lost coaching inn from the Great North Road near Scotch Corner on the A1.