THE new home for the Devon and Cornwall Police museum will be in West Devon. The £100,000 project will eventually see a fascinating and historical collection of police memorabilia open to the public. The Heritage and Learning Resource, its official title, will be based in a number of rooms at Okehampton police station, alongside the existing police operational team. It will contain more than 17,000 artefacts — some dating back to the early 19th century — including police uniforms, truncheons, helmets, whistles, log books, stocks, photographs as well as a fully stocked library and archive facility. Plans are in progress to open the museum to the public some time in 2008. Curator Angela Sutton-Vane said: 'My vision is of a very exciting community space with an exhibition, "shop of crime," bookshop, café and very much accessible to the public.' Angela has the huge task of cataloguing and preserving the thousands of items as well as more than 6,000 police records. They have already been sorted out but there are still a further 6,000 to be properly archived. She is appealing for volunteers. These are exciting times for the museum as they have also attracted a £50,000 grant to take a 'mobile museum' out into the community through the work of its education officer Kirsty Woods. Thanks to a £50,000 Heritage Lottery grant, which will be topped up by the police authority, Kirsty will have a van to take museum items to schools all over Devon and Cornwall to conduct educational workshops on policing history and citizenship. l See pages 16 & 41
