Urgent: Save this heritage for future generations

This appeal is an urgent drive to fund emergency works at the railway museum at Ebute-Metta in Lagos, Nigeria, which is under daily threat from scrap thieves, land invaders and vandals.

The museum has been operating since 1998 and has a globally and nationally important collection of historic buildings, wagons, carriages and four River Class steam engines, one of which was running until as recently as 2012.

It hosts visits from more than 12,000 schoolchildren yearly and is a unique resource for teaching Nigerian and global history, as well as a rare green space in a crowded city.

However today we are under huge pressure from theft, vandalism and land invasion, and our collections are being damaged. perhaps irreparably.

To save them we need to construct a steel rail fence around our Old Running Shed collection location, install solar lighting, and move the rest of the collection into the safe location. Our members and volunteers have designed it and donated services for free but we still need to fund the build.

If we do this, we can continue to build a museum with huge social and heritage impact. If we don't, in a few weeks we will have nothing but the bits the scrap thieves left behind.

All donations will be routed to Legacy, the registered and audited NGO which is custodian of the museum.