Do you remember the Mary Rose being raised out of the water in the 1980s? It’s taken the conservators at the Mary Rose Trust quite a while to get their heads around exactly how to treat and preserve the wooden hull of the ship, which had lain undisturbed for over 500 years, and what sort of structure they want to keep it in on a long-term basis.

But now work is underway at the site in Portsmouth, near the HMS Victory, where the Mary Rose will reside in a purpose-built museum. They’re still working on the hull, spraying it almost continually with chemicals to prevent it from cracking. Once it’s installed in the new museum – shaped like a boat – it’ll need to be dried out very slowly, over a period of years, and should be completely ready by 2016. The museum opens before that though.

It’s reminiscent of the excellent Vasa Museum in Stockholm, one of my favourite museums in the world, where visitors can get up close and personal with the ship on display there and also learn about the lives of the people who lived and worked on board.

There’s a new article about the Mary Rose on Museum [Insider]. This is one of the articles that will be making it into Museum [Insider]‘s first e-book, penned by yours truly, which we’re expecting to launch in about a month. Plenty more coming on that soon…