Village museum awarded £241k of lottery funding

A heritage museum in the "most documented village in England" has been awarded £241,000 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The Earls Colne Heritage Museum is located inside a Grade II listed Victorian water tower on the site of the former Atlas Works, a 19th Century iron foundry.

Chairman Gordon Brown said it had been 25 years since the museum first opened and the money would be used to purchase the building, renovate and modernise it.

He said: "We're very grateful to National Lottery Heritage Fund for understanding the need, otherwise it would be a loss of the museum to the community which it served for 20-plus years."

The Atlas Works closed in 1988 and was left "derelict" for more than a decade until it was bought.

It was then decided that the interior of the water tower be converted into the museum.

The building was then run by volunteers before the lease expired in 2024 and Earls Colne Parish Council was unable to purchase it.

Brown - who has lived in the village for six years - said it was "fortuitous" that he stumbled across the issue when he did.

He said one job would be turning "cluttered" artifacts and material into an improved experience for visitors befitting the 21st Century, such as organising more than 100 years of newspaper cuttings.

"They were presented to us in 25 volumes but those are deteriorating," he said.

"So we have now scanned them, digitised them, we can do keyword searching on it."

Earls Colne takes its name from land granted to the Earls by William the Conqueror, and the village sits beside the River Colne.

Brown said the village's accolade was "academically recognised as the most documented village in England" due to the work of a resident vicar in the 1600s.

"Reverend Ralph Josselin, who was here for 30-odd years, wrote a daily diary," he said.

"This diary has been academically researched, a professor in the 1970s from Cambridge researched it and used it to build up a complete social picture of Earl's Colne in the 17th Century."

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