Thank you National Lottery Players!

The National Lottery is marking 30 years of supporting good causes this month. Since the first draw was held in 1994, over £49 billion has been awarded to projects making a real difference to local communities. 

The SS Great Britain Trust received funding in 2005 for a game-changing and eye-catching development that protects and conserves the SS Great Britain’s fragile iron hull. In this blog post we look back at that project which continues to enable new advances in conservation engineering to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. 

National Lottery Heritage Fund (then the Heritage Lottery Fund) awarded the charitable trust £9,205,000 in 2000 for a conservation project that would culminate in the addition of a “glass sea” above the Grade II listed dry dock. 

In 2005, the extraordinary conservation environment was unveiled which kept the SS Great Britain in its original Grade II listed dry dock, but with the lower portion of the iron hull protected beneath a ‘glass sea’. The ship appears to be afloat, delighting visitors today as they explore the Great Western Dockyard but also inviting them to head below the glass plates into the dry dock below. 

Pioneering a conservation solution that had never been deployed at such scale before (the SS Great Britain is 98-metres in length and has a 3,400-ton displacement), two dehumidifiers generate dry air that is circulated over the iron hull. Sensors optimise energy required to dry and recirculate the air. The dry dock’s unique conservation environment maintains relative humidity at a level similar to the Arizona Desert. 

20 years on, the ‘desert in the dry dock’ under the glass sea continues to protect Brunel’s original iron. We have continued to innovate, upgrading the sensors and control software for this system giving us access to data and insight to keep optimising its performance. Our new-generation sensors now give us more accurate readings from all corners of the ship, helping us to better understand the airflows and run the controls in a more precise and energy-efficient way. Data from the Building Management system has been used to monitor the system’s performance more closely and help us retro-fit energy efficiency improvements to the bespoke desiccant dehumidifiers, such as direct-drive fan grids and an energy recovery purge system, reducing gas and electricity consumption by 25%. Our latest research uses cutting-edge techniques to analyse both the dehumidification system and the iron that makes up the hull, developing new insight which will help us continue to conserve the ship in a sustainable way for generations to come. 

Thanks to investment in 2005 that was only possible thanks to National Lottery Players, an important heritage object has been saved for the nation.