24th August 2020
Work has taken place to ensure the Hull Maritime Museum is Covid-19 compliant.
This is to enable contractors, staff and volunteers to return to the building.
Since March, it been limited to safety checks and essential maintenance only, carried out by dedicated members of our Front of House team who know the museum from top to bottom.
The biggest challenge is ventilation as the mechanical extraction system is limited and dates from the 1970’s. In the museum world windows are not usually opened and ours have been sealed shut for decades.
Working to a ventilation strategy put together by NPS Humber, we are carefully freeing key windows and doors on all four levels of our site. It has given an insight into the skills used to construct the building including the round windows on the top floor. We’d assumed they were metal but discovered they were constructed from individually shaped sections of wood, each held together with finger joints.
It also gave us a chance to crawl around in the basement which is always fun!
The work is expected to be completed in time to start our first major step to clear the museum, which is removal of the whale skeletons by specialist contractors.
