Friends of Shoreham Fort chairman Gary Baines explains the vision for the future

Transcript

00:00I've been doing this for 30 years now. I had the dream of what this place could be

00:06and I'm hoping now that I can show you what the future is.

00:16So the idea is now that we are going to rebuild all of the barrack block that was out the back

00:21of Shoreham Fort. By rebuilding that we're going to have a perimeter back which will give us back

00:26our security. It will allow proper CCTV cameras. It will be a much better place and if we've got

00:33the perimeter back, the Royal Armouries actually have two of the cannons at the Tower of London

00:43ready to come back and they'll be fully firing. So I'll be going back to Joe to get him to put

00:48my firearms down. So the idea is that we're going to become a resource centre. So we've

01:02got over 3,000 books of military history ready to go back in this area. You can have find my past,

01:08ancestry, all those things on terminals that people could use for free. And then we have

01:13the museum area which I want to get together with local regiments because they haven't got

01:19their own museum anymore but it would be on the foresight that if they have one of our cabinets

01:24they have to change it every six weeks because then they get more of their collection viewed

01:29and we don't have a static collection. And then this main chamber in the middle you can see that

01:35we've mapped out where all of the walls would have been so I can still do a tour and say that

01:41this is a cell. And then with the stage at the back that means you can have weddings,

01:50you can have Zumba classes which of course means that the day goes from nine till five to actually

01:56probably eight till ten o'clock at night. With a cafe in there we've been approached by people

02:02like Fish Factory to potentially have a restaurant in there and by having the fold-out walls it means

02:08on a day like today where it's a bit cloudy we could make the cafe a bit bigger but on a sunny

02:12day we can make it smaller and have more activities in there. The cook house is actually built exactly

02:18where the cook house was for the soldiers. And then you'll now see that around the back you've

02:24got the trench coming around now. As I said we're very much about teaching through experience so we

02:30have built a trench that I will show you in a minute. It's 2,800 sandbags all filled with sand

02:37and cement in two weeks. Amazing work during Covid as well. As I say we're very much about

02:46living history so we want to return some of the rooms. This room we have now got back exactly as

02:51it was in 1857 so I'll show you that in a minute. But these are the magazines where all the gun

02:56powder was stored. And with my huge gun collection which is potentially the biggest on the south

03:02coast we have got this smaller room which we can then make armour plated to make it a gun cabinet

03:08rather than doing the whole room. The South Caponia, you have to go down a tunnel for that so I'll take

03:14you down there a little bit later. That's going to become an experience room with a ghostly soldier

03:20that will tell you what it was like to be down there. And then the Ayr Road Shelter Experience,

03:25this is what we're working on at the moment so I'll show you that in a minute as well.

03:30Now people say to us we've got these lovely flat roofs, wouldn't it be nice if we could get the

03:35telescopes up there, all the local astronomy groups so they can get the telescopes up the top.

03:40Worthing astronomy group at the moment have to cancel all of their events if there's clouds in

03:45the sky but of course we have that massive room with the pull down screen so they can then tell

03:51people how to find the stars so they don't have to cancel their events. So it's all multi-purpose.

03:57And then with the Nissen Hut down here as well it means that if we are closed for private functions

04:02such as weddings then the public can still see our history in the Nissen Hut as well.

04:09You're going to still use this isn't it? Yeah. That's good I think that's very up to date.

04:13Yeah definitely.