Royal Armouries: UK's oldest museum sets out plan after £11m deal
The Royal Armouries principal function is to maintain the national collection of arms and armour.Mr Edwards said that meant "making it accessible to everybody, for free and forever".He said the museum had been good at building commercial relationships on the land it currently occupies and has created a major conference and meetings business.Alongside special exhibitions and its jousting displays, he said these helped to generate income to support its work.
In terms of the wider site the museum has acquired around Leeds Dock, Mr Edwards said they had been approached about "straightforward housing developments"."We are keen to support wider housing development in the south side of Leeds, but we think of the area around the Armouries as such an important public space we are keen to develop it very much with the public in mind."He said that would include an extended Armouries Square and a multi-purpose building on the tiltyard site with a flexible events space.They are also looking at creating immersive spaces to help improve the educational experiences they offer to help students learn about life during conflicts."Imagine doing that in a space where you can recreate, using immersive technology, a battlefield experience and how much that could bring history to life," he said."That goes right through to the kind of work we are doing with the Ministry of Defence to help new recruits into the army better understand the realities of war."
The Royal Armouries also works with the Border Force, the police and various intelligence services, some of which involves training AI systems to detect weapons in suitcase and working with the police to help mitigate the effects of 3D printed weapons.Mr Edwards said the key to the museum's continuing success was developing these partnerships and creating the spaces and tools to collaborate on telling the story of "hundreds of years of human conflict.""[It is] a really important story that touches every life and we know we can't tell that story on our own."He said in the collection, as an example, were items which detail British colonial history in East Africa which, he said, can be displayed and tell a very interesting and educational story."But right now in the city we have people who have come from Sudan and have direct, lived experience of religious conflict and civil war and have a completely different perspective of those items."Mr Edwards said if you put those together you can tell a story which is "10 times more informative, ten times more powerful and has ten times the chance of perhaps helping people avoid conflict in the future."That's really what we are about."
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