It's home to one of the nation's best collections of knives, but now the Royal Armouries has launched an initiative to persuade young people not to carry them.
The national museum, based in Leeds, has built a website where young people can get information and make a pledge not to carry a knife.
The development cost for the No To Knives (NTK) website was just £85,000, but media companies have already donated over £2.5m worth of free advertising space to support the campaign.
Peter Armstrong, the Royal Armouries museum director, said the idea was to do something worthwhile and relevant for the community in return for taxpayers' funding.
"As a national museum we have a good knowledge about weaponry but we wanted to think about the objects not just as objects but about what they can be used for," he said.
"This is not aimed at gangs - it would take more than a museum launching a website to tackle that - but at kids who have bought a new pair of trainers and figure they should take the knife out of the kitchen drawer to protect them."
Armstrong said the danger with carrying a knife is that it could either be taken off you and used against you, or that you end up using it, and "either way it ruins your life".
The website was launched earlier this month and several media companies with youth audiences or connections to transport have lent their support.
The media donors so far include outdoor contractor Clear Channel, free newspaper Metro, youth radio station Kiss FM, and TV stations MTV and the Extreme Sports Channel, with more to follow.
"I think we've tapped a nerve - people want to do something about it and we're very clear about what they can do," Armstrong said.
Public attention is focused on the issue of youth stabbings, with recent reports that a knife crime is committed every 24 minutes.
One in three young people will carry a knife for protection at some stage, according to a Mori poll commissioned by the Youth Justice Board in 2003.
The majority of knife crime occurs among 14- to 19-year-old males - something Armstrong likened to young men with swords fighting duels in the Elizabethan period.
Royal Armouries already works with the Be Safe programme to run weapons awareness courses in Yorkshire.
Richard Sunderland, the managing director of brand agency Heavenly, said his company had been working with Royal Armouries for the past year on developing the campaign concept and execution.
Sunderland added that Heavenly was working with PR agency Frank PR on the next step of the campaign, which would involve integrating the website with other sites such as Facebook.
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