New £5million ship restoration project announced for Hartlepool

And when it is completed, the 77-year-old motor rescue launch will take centre stage in a new £5m extension of the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

It is hoped the ship will form the centre-piece for a new wing of the museum and will give people the chance to learn about the experiences of people who would have been on the vessel around the Second World War.

RML 497 is lying in a berth in Southampton and officials are scrutinising the costs of shifting her more than 300 miles to Hartlepool.

She would be the centrepiece of a new exhibition where other displays will include an engine from Berlin and a galley from Malta.

The news was revealed to the Hartlepool Mail by council leader Coun Christopher Akers-Belcher and chief executive Gill Alexander, who are both trustees of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Hartlepool.

Coun Akers-Belcher said: “It will hopefully arrive in Hartlepool some time this year.”

He and Gill Alexander “worked with the combined authority to secure the funding for it and they have quite ambitious plans that they will publish this year that they want to plan towards a whole new wing for the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

“It will actually house this new rescue launch from the Second World War and it will be restored in Hartlepool.”

Gill added: “We have got to agree dates and it is quite a tricky exercise to lift it out of the water and then bring it up to Hartlepool. We are working out the best way of doing that.

“But it will be quite an exciting development, particularly to see the restoration happening.

“They are looking at ways in which people can view the engine room and see how that is constructed and ways of developing the living quarters so that they will see how sailors lived in those times.”

She described the vessel as “one of the ships which would have gone out to rescue Second World War pilots who were lost in the Channel.”

Coun Akers Belcher said: “What they want to do in the fullness of time is, they are going to cut it completely in half so anyone observing it and seeing it as a rescue launch will be able to actually see inside, the mechanics of it.”

An engine from another ship in Berlin is also coming over to Hartlepool for complete restoration to replicate a whole engine room so that “people get a sense of how things operate,” said Coun Akers-Belcher.

On top of all that, a galley from Malta is also on the way so that people can experience life inside a ship.

The new £5m exhibition space would hopefully be ready by 2021 and officials hope it would be ready around the same time as the plans to develop Hartlepool waterfront.

In another twist, museum officials are planning to run a competition next year for architects. A “quite significant” prize would await the winner of the contest to create a concept design the new museum extension.

“It is exciting to be restored in Hartlepool,” said Coun Akers-Belcher. “I would not like to see it restored anywhere else. The fact that it will come here next year and from 2018 until the exhibition hall is built, being restored and the people who have seen it being restored, it gives the people of Hartlepool that ownership and the National Museum becomes a true part of seeing it happen.”

Gill added: “There are a huge amount of skills in this area that we should be harnessing and making best use of.”

She said jobs, apprenticeships and heritage apprenticeships would all be created for the new project but the details of how many were not yet known.