St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery

Friends Membership

Becoming a member of the Friends of St Barbe (FoSB) means more than just free entry every time you visit. You are also helping the museum to care for, build, and display its unique collection, and stage highly-regarded, thoughtful art exhibitions.

If you would like to support the museum and its work, become a member of the Friends of the Museum.

Annual Friends membership privileges enable you to benefit from:

• Free annual admission to the Museum
• Free annual admission to all Gallery exhibitions
• Entrance to Friends events and talks
• Friends newsletters
• A special Friends Private View
• Discounted admission to The New Forest Museum and Buckler's Hard Maritime Museum

Gold membership includes all of the above plus invitations to ALL private views, and free access to all Gallery talks and events, for member and one guest.

Joint Gold membership gives a second household member the same benefits too.

Membership Donations

Your help will be of great benefit to St Barbe and enable the museum to continue to tell the unique story of Lymington and the surrounding areas, while preserving the fascinating local history of the town, and providing a highly-regarded art gallery.

Annual membership is for a rolling 12 months period from the date of your application to join.

To join the Friends, please download and return an application form

The Friends were founded in 1988 as the Friends of Lymington Museum to campaign for a museum for the town. When the Lymington Museum Trust was set up in 1992 the Friends played a major part in helping to develop the museum. Today the Friends help to support many aspects of the museum’s work. They do this in a number of ways:

Membership subscriptions - funds raised are used by the Friends to help the Trust. For example, over the last few years the Friends have bought computers, a digital camera, a digital projector and have funded several exhibition catalogues.

Volunteers - many members of the Friends act as volunteers in the museum, working in the shop, stewarding in the galleries, helping with research, hanging exhibitions and cataloguing the collections. Without this contribution the museum could not function.

Events - the Friends organise a number of fund raising events and social activities. See here.

Talks, concerts and visits - the Friends also organise a series of talks on topics of interest such as local history, art, collecting and natural history. Many of these are free to members, others are specific fund raising events.

Newsletter and Programme - all of the Friends activities and events are featured in a regular FoSB e-newsletter -  Subscribe to FoSB Newsletter. In addition all Friends receive a copy of the museum’s annual exhibition programme leaflet, which includes the Friends events programme.