Despite the name, no national body runs it: the museum on Discovery Quay is an independent charitable trust, formed in 1997 out of a partnership between Greenwich's National Maritime Museum and the old Cornwall Maritime Museum, and it takes no government revenue funding. The purpose-built harbourside building by the architect M. J. Long — £21.5m, the design won in a RIBA competition — opened in 2003 and holds the National Small Boat Collection, 103 craft transferred from Greenwich, along with the national register of historic vessels under thirty-three feet. A working boatbuilding shop can be watched midweek, and the Tidal Zone gallery looks out under the harbour's waterline. Exhibitions run long and deep — the current one gives a hundred years of Cornish surfing a two-year treatment.
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