Kendal Museum wins £100,000 to work with Kenya's Nandi

Kendal Museum takes £100,000 from the Esmée Fairbairn fund, joint-largest of six June awards, for a two-year project on the collection in its closed gallery.

Kendal Museum has been awarded £100,000 for a two-year project with Cumbria Development Education Centre and the Nandi-Kendal Association, exploring what the funder calls connected histories and shared heritage.

The money comes from the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund, which is run by the Museums Association. Kendal was one of six projects funded in the June 2026 round, and its award was the joint-largest of the six.

The grant has been sitting in a council report rather than in any announcement. It appears in Westmorland and Furness Council’s Quarter 1 corporate performance report, which goes to Cabinet on Tuesday 8 September. At paragraph 3.121 the council records securing the grant “for Kendal Museum to deliver a two-year partnership project with Cumbria Development Education Centre and the Nandi-Kendal Association, exploring connected histories and shared heritage”.

Neither the museum nor Cumbria Development Education Centre has published anything about it. The museum’s most recent news post is an exhibition listing, and CDEC’s news page stops in 2019.

The six projects funded in June

The Museums Association named the awardees as:

Kendal Museum, Cumbria Development Education Centre and the Nandi-Kendal Association, £100,000
The People’s Palace and West of Scotland Regional Equality Council, £100,000
The Wallich and Amgueddfa Cymru, £99,536, for a first Welsh collection on homelessness
Pitt Rivers Museum and partners, £99,315, for “Curate Your Future”
Ulster Folk Museum and Nerve Centre, £98,463, for the “We are Here” project
Bradford District Museums & Galleries and Summat Creative, £89,121, for “Re:View”

The fund exists to support projects that use museum collections to improve inclusion and to work more equitably with community partners. The full list is in the Museums Association’s record of successful awards.

Why Nandi, and why Kendal

The connection is the museum’s World Wildlife Gallery, and it is not a comfortable one.

The gallery was built in 1939 and paid for by E.G. Harrison to house his collection, which was mainly animal skins and heads taken from eastern Africa between 1895 and 1905. That account comes from a peer-reviewed article on the museum’s earlier “Reimagining the World Wildlife Gallery” project, published in Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals in 2025 by Joseph Rigby, Lavinia Haslam, Ila Colley and Peter Lincoln (full text).

Writing in that article, Rigby describes finding an issue of the London Gazette from 1905 in which Harrison was commended for leading operations against the Nandi people, who had opposed the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway and British settlement on their land. He then found contemporary reports of calls from members of the Nandi community, including descendants of those directly affected, for reparations and an apology from the British government.

The earlier project put that history on the wall. It added the story of Nandi resistance to Harrison’s interpretation panel, and Haslam created a memorial piece acknowledging the Nandi political and spiritual leader Koitalel arap Samoei. The new grant is the next step: two years of work with the Nandi-Kendal Association itself, rather than about it.

We could not find a website for the Nandi-Kendal Association, and there is no organisation of that name on the Charity Commission’s register for England and Wales. The Museums Association names it as a full partner in the award.

The gallery at the centre of it is shut

Anyone who reads this and decides to go and look at the collection will be disappointed. Kendal Museum’s own page for the gallery carries a notice:

Our World Wildlife Gallery is currently closed for ongoing conservation work. We will announce on the website and our social media when we have a date for reopening.

There is no reopening date. The rest of the museum is open, but on temporary hours: Fridays and Saturdays only, 9am to 5pm. Admission is £5 for adults, £2 for 5 to 18 year olds, and free for under-fives. The museum is run by Kendal College.

Source: Museums Association, June 2026 Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund awardees. Bars are drawn from zero.

What it means for you

If you want to see the taxidermy, check before you travel. The World Wildlife Gallery is closed and the museum has not given a reopening date. The rest of the museum is open Fridays and Saturdays, 9am to 5pm.
If you want to take part, the partners are the way in. The project runs for two years with Cumbria Development Education Centre and the Nandi-Kendal Association. Neither has published a call for participants yet, so there is nothing to sign up to today.
If you want the council’s version in full, the corporate performance report is a public document and Cabinet takes it on Tuesday 8 September. Museums are at paragraph 3.121.
This is money into Kendal, not out of the council. The £100,000 is grant funding from a national foundation, awarded through the Museums Association, not a call on the council’s own budget.