Popular military museum set to relocate its collection to Sheffield

The Ashworth Barracks Museum, set up in Doncaster in 2014 by the Victoria Cross Trust to show its collection of militiary memorabilia, will close for the final time on April 19.

It will continue to own its collection of items largely dating back from World War One and World War Two, but they look set to be loaned out to visitor attractions in Sheffield and the North East of England. The precise venues have not yet been named.

A farewell event will be held on April 19 which will see the collection on show in Doncaster for the final time, as well as a number of supercars visiting the museum’s site, the former Cedar School site on Cedar Road in Balby.

Trustee Guy Aston said: “The museum will be closing and the collection moving away from Doncaster. There has been great interest shown in Sheffield and Stockton on Tees, and the bulk of the collection will be going to Sheffield.

“The museum will leave Doncaster, which I think is a tragedy – people came here and loved it. But we have not really been offered any help finding another site, and we have had to do the best we can.

“But from the trust’s point of view, we were set up with two objectives. They were restoring, cleaning and maintaining the graves of Victoria Cross winners, and to educate people about the Victoria Cross and its history. So running a museum was not the mainstay of the trust.”

The trust will still be based in Doncaster, and will move to a business park at West Moor Park, in Armthorpe, from where it will run its grave cleaning work. It will also send representatives to give talks in the borough and beyond, and do outreach work and public events, taking military equipment to show.

The Doncaster museum was run by volunteers, mostly from military backgrounds, who took guided tours around the premises. It was a hands on experience, with visitors able to pick up rifles and items of uniform.

Its military vehicles were sold after it hit financial problems last year.