The Brunel Museum is delighted to be taking part in this year’s Christmas Challenge with The Big Give!
Double the difference you can make this Christmas. Between 12pm (midday) 3rd December and 12pm (midday) 10th December, donate whatever you can to our fundraising campaign, and thanks to The Big Give your donation will be doubled – magic!
Help us sail past our first target of £5000 – please donate if you can, and share our campaign page with your friends as soon as we go live.
What’s happening?
At the Brunel Museum, we tell the story of how the Brunel family transformed London by designing the world’s first successful tunnel under the Thames. Our story has the potential to inspire the next generation of engineers, especially among our local community. However, like any Museum without regular funding, our displays have developed in an erratic and piecemeal fashion, and do not represent up to date exhibition design.
We are now approaching a major opportunity for the Museum, and in 2025 we will break ground on the Brunel Museum Reinvented project – a once in a generation opportunity to reimagine and reinvent our exhibition spaces.
We know that families have been among the hardest hit by the cost of living crisis, especially in Southwark, so we’re also planning new community engagement projects – and our residents’ ticket scheme will enable local families to visit for a reduced or free price to make sure we’re reaching more people.
But we want to make sure we have the kind of family-friendly exhibits that help bring our story to life for them.
The Big Give: a brand-new Caisson exhibit
As part of our major upcoming project, the Brunel Museum Reinvented, we want to include an interactive family-friendly exhibit, to help families and young people engage with the pioneering engineering techniques behind the sinking of the Tunnel Shaft.
The Brunel Museum tells the story of the Thames Tunnel, the world’s first successful tunnel under a river. The Thames Tunnel project was where celebrated British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel first learnt his trade, helping his father Marc, honing his engineering skills.
Before any work could be done on digging the Thames Tunnel itself, the tunnel shaft was sunk into the ground – which visitors can still explore as part of our museum. It was the very first example of what was called the Caisson method being used.
Help us inspire the next generation of engineers to think outside the box and find their own innovative solutions.
The Big Give: conserving paper peepshows
Amazingly, when we launched our campaign we hit our initial target in an incredible nine hours! So having reached our first £5000, we shared our next plan.
As part of that same interactive caisson exhibit, visitors to the museum will also have the opportunity to see three stunning original Thames Tunnel paper peepshows. These will be safely mounted in new cases on the reverse of the new exhibit – giving a truly 3D experience of the impressive ambition behind the Thames Tunnel.
These delicate peepshows were sometimes souvenirs of visiting the Thames Tunnel site – folded up flat they are about the size of a postcard (perhaps ideal to post to a friend), but they unfold to provide a layered 3D view.
Each peepshow features beautiful illustrations of Victorian sightseers, tourists, and even horses passing through the tunnel – and in the unusual dual-layer peepshow, viewers can even see the boat and barge traffic crossing the Thames at the same time as the tunnel traffic passes underground.
We already know what a hit these are with our younger visitors – but the delicate paper peepshows are in serious need of conservation and protection so that they can be shown at their very best. Anything we raise above and beyond the initial funding target of £5000 will go towards the conservation and redisplay of these stunning paper peepshows.
How can you help?
We’re aiming to raise over £5000 between 3-10 December – so we need all hands on deck!
If you’re able to donate, we’ll be very grateful (and remember – The Big Give will double anything you donate, helping us to reach our goal twice as fast).
If you’re not able to donate, please share our campaign with your own friends and networks – we can do this together!