The Polar Museum at Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute is one of ten museums long listed for this year’s £100,000 Art Fund Prize, the UK’s largest arts prize.

Home to the last letters of Captain Scott and his companions, the Polar Museum reopened last year to great acclaim and dramatically increased visitor figures after a £1.75m redevelopment scheme made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Captain Oates’s sleeping bag and the iconic Antarctic photographs of Herbert Ponting are displayed alongside exhibits on Arctic peoples and British attempts on the Northwest Passage and the North Pole. The Ice and Climate gallery examines how science is undertaken in the extreme conditions of the polar regions.

The Art Fund Prize 2011 rewards excellence and innovation in museums and galleries in the UK for a project completed or undertaken in 2010. Following a short list of four museums to be announced on 19 May, the £100,000 cash prize will be awarded to the ‘Museum of the Year’ at a ceremony on 15 June.

The Prize is selected by an expert panel of judges, chaired this year by Michael Portillo, who announced the long list last night on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row

The short list of four museums will be announced on 19 May 2011 and the winner on 15 June 2011.

Heather Lane, Keeper of Collections at The Polar Museum, said: “We are absolutely delighted to hear that we have been long listed. It means a great deal to the very small team here which has worked so hard over the past three years to reinvigorate The Polar Museum and make its stories of exploration and science relevant to today's audience.

“Since we reopened, we have been overwhelmed by the public's response to the new museum. It gives us great pleasure to see so many people sharing our own sense of excitement about polar history and learning about the importance of the polar regions in the global environment.

“After decades of being known as a specialist collection with little focus on the general visitor feedback from the public on the redeveloped museum has been overwhelmingly positive.”

In the six months since the opening by TRH The Earl and Countess of Wessex on 8 June 2010, visitor numbers have tripled.

The development has been timely, following the rise in public interest driven by the International Polar Year 2007–08, increased awareness of the environment and the role of science and the forthcoming centenaries of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, 1910–13 and Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic (Endurance) Expedition, 1914–17. The museum now provides a fitting commemoration of those events and a lasting legacy.
 

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