Here’s a good thing. A museum of storytelling in Oxford is getting the go-ahead after an anonymous £2.5m donation.

From Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland to JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth, CS Lewis’s Narnia and the parallel universes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Oxford has played host to some of the UK’s most enduring literary creations. Now a £2.5m donation from an anonymous private benefactor means the first steps have been taken towards the creation of a museum dedicated to storytelling in the city.

The Story Museum has existed online for the past four years, holding events across Oxfordshire and running storytelling pilots in schools, but the donation enables it to start constructing a permanent home in Oxford. It has just signed a lease on Rochester House, a Victorian building a stone’s throw from Christ Church College – where many scenes in the Harry Potter movies are filmed – on Pembroke Street. It now needs to raise a further £11m to transform the building into a museum, which will aim to attract 100,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2014.

If the timing works out then it will open in time to coincide with Oxford’s bid to be UNESCO World Book Capital that year.

Read the rest of The Guardian’s article here.