St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery

The Future for St Barbe: Innovative; Inclusive; Resilient

After beginning life as a ‘museum in a room’ with no pre-existing collection, St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery quickly built a reputation that belied its size and location.

For 15 years, St Barbe gathered a collection of more than 18,000 local history objects, and a gained a reputation as one of the finest art galleries on the South coast.

In 2015 it became apparent it was time to move on again – and we embarked on an ambitious £2 million project to transform St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery.
The vision was simple - to build on past successes, to create a landmark cultural venue for Lymington, and to ensure the community was placed at the heart of everything we did.
Thanks to a significant financial commitment from the Heritage Lottery Fund we began the journey.
Just over two years later, we have just realised our vision - and opened the doors to the 'new look' St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery on 29 July 2017.
The £1.78 million grant from the HLF was dependant on the Museum raising an additional £525,000 from its own networks. We have now achieved that, thanks to a huge response from the community.

We now have: 

• Bigger and better galleries which will host an exclusive programme of exhibitions including works of art from the finest collections in the world;
• New museum displays using the large collections (18,000 items and counting) to tell fascinating local stories about people and places;
• A purpose designed archive and store to enable local people to research their own history as well as that of the local area;
• Larger well equipped education and activity spaces for schools and local groups;
• A much improved entrance and spacious open plan front of house area with a Museum shop, visitor information and café.

St Barbe will also remaining open for longer in the summer season - until 5pm on weekdays, and for the first time ever it will also open on a Sunday (11am – 4pm) .

We look forward to seeing you!