Reawakening FAQs

Answering your questions about the Reawakening project.

A bunch of hammers dangle in a row on a bench.

Reawakening means investing in the Ulster Folk Museum to keep our heritage alive for future generations. The project is a pivotal
opportunity to improve facilities, open up the collections and strengthen the museum’s role in helping people connect with their heritage. The project will transform access to the museum’s collection and make it easier for more people to connect with it in new ways.

The Ulster Folk Museum was founded in the 1950s to preserve knowledge of ways of life that had altered little for centuries, but was fast disappearing in a changing world. It represents the story of the ‘ploughed field’, not the ‘battlefield’. With a dedicated team and an enthusiastic public, the early years of the museum were spent collecting oral histories and cataloguing donated objects. The founders of the museum believed that it could provide a sense of meaning in a world that was undergoing fast and dramatic societal and technological change.

We believe that today, more than ever, the Ulster Folk Museum is a vital heritage and environmental resource that can support inclusivity, community cohesion, better wellbeing, skills development, and new sustainable thinking.

The Ulster Folk Museum has had limited investment for decades, and some of its facilities are no longer fit for purpose. If we do nothing, the museum and the heritage it preserves is at serious risk. At the same time, people are looking for places that help them connect with heritage and the natural environment. Reawakening is an opportunity to invest now so the museum can meet those needs and keep our heritage alive for future generations.

The £50 million Reawakening project will create new buildings and spaces that open up the museum’s collection and make it easier for more people to connect with it in new ways. This includes a new building to improve welcome and orientation, a new gallery to display the industrial collection, and new making spaces where school children and adult learners can learn skills and get hands-on with heritage and our natural environment.

These proposed buildings would be built using local, renewable resources, and would take into account the surrounding environment both in aesthetic and physical design – with aspects of the building consciously designed to allow bats, birds and bees to live in harmony with humans.

But we have been reawakening all this time.

Over the past few years, we have consciously created engagement opportunities to position the Ulster Folk Museum as a key heritage and environmental resource. Through engagement and events, we have already begun offering new, deeper ways to engage with the museum and share in the past. We have been building relationships, partnerships, programming and volunteer initiatives that prove that the Ulster Folk Museum and the history we share, has immense relevance to life today. 

As part of our ongoing work, we will be piloting new ways to get involved to help the museum express its newly reimagined personality and purposes. We will be designing opportunities for people to get closer to the museum's heritage assets than ever before; get hands-on with heritage skills and craft making; see heritage conservation in action; roll up their sleeves and volunteer at the museum; and take home new ideas about the environment and sustainable living.

Get involved! Your input and feedback into these initiatives will help move the project forward.

 

The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded a £10 million grant and the Department for Communities is supporting the project with £40m as it moves forward through its next stages.

Full planning permission has been secured and the first phase is commencing in Spring 2026 when the Pavilion project breaks ground. The full capital project is estimated for completion in 2029.

Yes! There are many ways to get involved in the Reawakening.