SALISBURY Museum is to benefit from a major Arts Council funding award.

The museum as part of the Wessex Museums Partnership were successful in their application to become one of the Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations.

The four partner museums - Poole Museums, Dorset County Museum, Salisbury Museum and Wiltshire Museum - will receive £1.3m over four years from 2018 to support a range of innovative projects delivered by the partnership to enhance their collections and programming, including major exhibitions, digital collections initiatives and community learning and outreach programmes.

Director of Salisbury Museum, Adrian Green, said: "This funding cements a partnership that has been developing for the past two years with the support of the Arts Council. We will now be able to take this relationship further through a collaborative approach to our major exhibitions, collections development and working with the local community in both Wiltshire and Dorset.’

The announcement of the Arts Council funding award for the partnership comes just a few months after the museums formed a charity, the Wessex Museums Trust.

The chairman of the Wessex Museums Trust, Clare Conybeare, said: "The Wessex Museum Trust is delighted that its pioneering partnership has been awarded National Portfolio status by the Arts Council. The four partner museums hold collections of international importance and this funding will allow us to continue to work together to achieve excellence in collections care and reach even more people with the story of our shared heritage."

The Wessex Museums Trust will start a period of preparation for National Portfolio status from April 2018, and says it will continue to deliver existing partnership work, including the Spotlight Loans programme, which sees objects from each museum tour across the partnership venues over 2017/2018.