A popular Norfolk museum could be set for a major revamp after a bid was lodged to secure £4.3m of lottery money.
Museum bosses have put in an application for National Lottery Heritage Fund cash to make major changes to the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth.
The Changing Tides - Shaping Our Great Yarmouth project would create new spaces for visitors, including by enclosing the museum's courtyard with a glazed roof.
The idea is that by adapting and covering that open space, it would create a flexible 'indoor atrium' at the heart of the museum for use by visitors, schools and community groups.
It would also provide a space the museum could use to host larger public events.
The service made an expression of interest in bidding for the money earlier this year and was given the government green light to submit an application.
A spokesman for Norfolk Museums Service said a successful bid would mean the museum could meet increasing demand from visitors and schools - and allow it to refresh other displays.
They said: "We hope to redisplay and reinterpret many of the museum galleries, especially on the first floor, making the displays more relevant and engaging to our audiences by highlighting maritime collections and other stories.
"This would include working with artists and community groups to reinterpret the building’s industrial and maritime heritage and they would co-produce new artworks to display within the galleries.
"We are further developing our relationship with the Royal Museums Greenwich team and we will work on plans with them to create a new partnership gallery in the museum."
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The museum, in Blackfriars' Road, opened in a former Victorian herring curing works in 2004.
It is considered as the best preserved curing works on the East Coast, and among the best in the whole of the UK.
The museum has been nominated for, and received, several awards since it opened, scooping the Sandford Award for excellence in education in 2014 and making the final four in the European Museum of the Year contest in 2006.
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