Trinity House National Lighthouse Museum

The National Lighthouse Centre was a museum opened by Trinity House, an organisation with a history of building and maintaining lighthouses, in 1989. The museum building was converted from the Trinity House buoy store, part of the Penzance Depot, where buoys were stored and repaired.[1] It featured an interactive experience of lighthouse keepers, as well has housing Trinity House's collection of lighthouse equipment. It also featured a recreation of a lighthouse keeper's bed room where visitors were able to touch the exhibits, a collection of optics, lighthouse keepers' uniforms and documentation[2][3] The museum also traced the history of Trinity House, and featured a selection of buoys from the buoy store.[1]

Between 1989 and the museum's closure in February 2005,[4] the museum hosted approximately 10,000 visitors each year.[1] Despite a campaign to keep it open, in 2005, Trinity House closed the site as they were contemplating opening a replacement museum at a busier site in Plymouth.[2][5] Trinity House confirmed that they would not be moving the museum to Plymouth in 2009, and that the memorabilia would no longer be visible to the public, though they would possibly display some at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth.[6]