SALISBURY Museum has been given additional funding for its Look Again Project.

Over the past 18 months young people have been working hard at the museum to reinterpret and redisplay its nationally significant collection of costume and textiles as part of Look Again: Discovering Centuries of Fashion.

The museum says it is “thrilled” to announce that it has been awarded funds from The Arts Society Sarum to fund an additional strand to the project.

It says the award will help “realise some of the young people’s wider interior design ideas for the redisplayed fashion gallery” at the museum – including a new colour scheme and updating the flooring. The effect will be to revitalise the displays.

One of the Duke of Edinburgh students who has been working on the project since the beginning, said: “It is so exciting and cool that we will be able to change the colour scheme in the gallery and put new flooring in. I can’t wait to see it.”

This work is linked to the wider Look Again project, which was originally made possible by a grant of £115,360 from the Museums Association Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.

The Look Again: Discovering Centuries of Fashion project started in March 2018 and has included working with many different groups of young people including students from St Joseph’s Catholic School, Wiltshire College and Bournemouth Arts University as well as young people attending an afterschool club at the museum.

The young people have worked alongside Arts Society heritage volunteers, who are currently working to re-catalogue the costume collection. It is this work that has made it possible to find many forgotten gems, and some of these will go on show later this year.

The collection itself contains more than 5,000 individual items including fashion and military dress from the 18th and 19th centuries.; samplers, quilts and accessories including gloves, shoes, sunbonnets and buttons. The museum also has one of the largest collections of smocks in the UK.