MUSEUMS in a North Yorkshire coastal town have formed a new partnership to enable them to work more closely together.

The six museums, which have come together under the title ‘Museums of Whitby’, include Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby Museum, English Heritage Whitby Abbey Museum, Museum of Whitby Jet, RNLI Museum and Pannett Art Gallery.

The chairman of the new partnership is Rebecca Tucker, who is also the curator of the Museum of Whitby Jet, a volunteer at Whitby Museum and is also a member of the Whitby Civic Society.

She said: “We all have so many genuine artefacts held in our museums in trust for society, and which are so professionally managed by our many volunteer curators.

“A key objective of our new group is to jointly market our six Whitby museums to a wide variety of local, regional and national audiences, and to promote a family friendly environment with attractions which are beyond ‘sand and sea’ for entertainment.

“We want to encourage and promote school visits since Whitby has pre-history and 2,000 years of history with nearly every period represented.

“We also intend to form a strong and coherent lobby group for the Whitby museums and to support and promote each other through joint working and sharing expertise.”

She added: “It is also really important that whenever possible we give positive support to the region’s tourism agencies and importantly, in the current uncertain visitor attraction climate, that we take advantage of and adapt to this post Covid-19 environment.”

“We have six amazingly varied museums in Whitby which so brilliantly reflect and interpret the rich heritage of our town, and we are thrilled to be working so closely together in this new partnership.

“We are already jointly working together on many exciting new joint projects which will all help to realise and to strengthen our objectives.”