Please see Styx thread on the Registered Shipmates consultation for the main discussion forums - your views are important, continues until April 4th.

Local Museums

MMMMMM Shipmate
Over the last few years, Macarius and I have visited quite a few towns in England - not big cities, but small towns - and as a consequence, have visited quite a few local museums. I love 'em! My extensive investigations have shown me that the typical small local museum will have on display:

- the enamel sign from the local railway station that was shut by Beeching
- part of the machinery from the local brewery OR mill that existed from 1720 to 1983
- the spouts from 3 mediaeval jugs
- a 17th century shoe found in the roofspace of an old cottage in the High Street OR a 17th century hat found behind the wainscot of an old cottage in the High Street
- two ration books and
- a photo of girls in frilly dresses standing in front of floral decorations celebrating Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

You might additionally get a neolithic flint and a photo of the local big house being used as a military hospital during the First World War.

This got me wondering what Shipmates would expect to find in little local museums where they live?

MMM
«1

Comments

  • My wife is the curator of this local museum.

    http://jewishmuseumsj.com/home.html
  • LeRocLeRoc Shipmate
    I like Milton Keynes Museum.
  • My local museum was the Rupert Brooke one in the Orchard tea rooms at Grantchester, housed in what looked like a large shed. It closed in 2013 but there are plans for a new one.

    The local museum in Luton, where I grew up, was filled with information on straw plaiting for the local hat industry (hence Luton Town Football Club being called 'The Hatters'.
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Our local museum has examples of local pottery and a large space devoted to Eadweard Muybridge of galloping horse photography fame who was local to the area.
    Though probably too important to be considered 'local' ,Horniman's museum in Forest Hill London has the wonderful over stuffed walrus.
  • I live quite near the Lewis Latimer House Museum but I have to admit I've never gone to it.
  • We have several local museums in our county. One is the School House Museum which is set up to look like the classrooms did at the turn of the century. Another museum changes every 3 months but always shows local history. One time it was local civil war history, another time the local hot spring resorts that once doted the area. The resorts are all gone now except for one. The county seat museum features baskets made by our local indian tribe.
  • We explored the local museums when we've travelled around the country and have found some gems. The local museums, next towns over, one is in a Tudor house, so has that history, plus a local artist - Pissarro - Lucien Pissarro, son of the more famous Camille, so there's lots about him too. The other local museum started as a bicycle museum, but was combined with the other local museum which was run by a ceramicist and Roman historian for a while, so based in the grounds of an old house, in the 16th century stables, with the bicycles displayed in one building, but the rest as a very good history of the local area, focusing on ceramics and the local Roman history and the development of the new town. Sadly, the paid historian running the museum was laid off in one of the early local authority cuts, so it's now run by volunteers part time.

    There's a weird folk museum in Leominster, that fascinated us when we visited.
  • Sarasa wrote: »
    Our local museum has examples of local pottery and a large space devoted to Eadweard Muybridge of galloping horse photography fame who was local to the area.
    Though probably too important to be considered 'local' ,Horniman's museum in Forest Hill London has the wonderful over stuffed walrus.
    I used to live in Forest Hill and loved the Horniman museum.
  • We went there in the summer. It was amazingly busy!
  • It has the most amazing display of musical instruments - I've never seen anything like it anywhere else.
  • Although the lighting is, of necessity, rather dim.

    Has anyone been to the Southwold Museum? Very professional, as one might expect. The quirkiest museum I've been to is the Bakelite Museum in Somerset (does it still exist?) though the Dog Collar Museum (nothing to do with Vicars) in Leeds Castle, the Greenwich Fan Museum and the Sir John Soane Museum run it close. And, for sheer amazement, go to the (adjoining) Pitt-Rivers and Natural History museums in Oxford. The first has the most remarkable ethnographic display possible - arranged in a very Victorian way (it's also dim but you are given wind-up torches), the second has an incredible building.
  • The Pencil Museum in Keswick has to be the whackiest I've seen and surprisingly interesting.

    MMM's list holds good.

    One of the best things I've seen in a local museum is a copy of a film made to coincide with The Festival of Britain in High Wycombe. It's worth a visit to the town just for that. A number of towns commissioned films about themselves they were supposed to show future generations what life was like at that time. Few were made and even fewer survive. It was shot within living memory but it's like a throwback to a lost world. It's very much like Harry Enfield's spoof Mr Chalmondley-Warner films. There's a terrific sequence of a woman trying on a 'het' at a milliner's and not even consulting her husband to indicate how times had changed. The voice over is going, 'How ebout thet, madam? Does this one suit you, madam?'

    It's a gem. Men in thick tweed three piece suits puffing pipes in the town hall and saying, 'The way I see it ...'

    The agricultural museum in Usk was delightfully chaotic last time I visited.

  • Southwold Pier has a room full of bizarre interactive machines, like a cross between a fun fair and Wallace and Gromit's house.
  • I am on the Board of our local railway museum, which is situated on a heritage-listed former colliery site. The collection covers everything from model railways to full-sized trains, engineering documents, images and documents, as well as documentary material and artefacts relating to the mining history of the site. I am the first director in many years to have any qualifications or experience in collection management. Many of the other members are bowerbirds, and it is often a battle to make sure that acquisitions are of value.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    Barnabas Aus, 'bowerbirds'? Google tells me they gather bits and bobs to make bowers, so I'm guessing 'hoarders'?

    It's interesting reading some of these, thanks! I'd forgotten the pencil museum, and the Soane is terrific. I missed that when we last went to Southwold, Heavenlyannie.

    Reading museum has a reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry embroidered by the ladies of the town in the 19th century, which is worth a look.

    MMM
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    I should add that I'm off to High Wycombe as soon as poss to see that film, Gamma Gamaliel.

    MMM
  • I went to the Pencil Museum ... in 1958 (gulp). I'd forgotten the Usk Museum, went there this summer and enjoyed it. There's a tiny museum in Cowbridge I have yet to investigate, and a Nelson Museum in Monmouth which I will not.
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    Nowhere near where I am, but the Bagpipe Museum in Morpeth is well worth a visit. Well set out, interesting, if slightly esoteric, exhibits and when I went there, you were given a little sound thing you plugged in your ear, and when you stood in front of some of the cases (I nearly wrote 'cages') you could hear a sample of what you were looking at sounded like.
  • I live right across the road from the Clan Macpherson museum, and in 9 years here have never gone around it. My brother has, though and he is not encouraging. I think if you are called Macpherson and are American or Australian the lure is stronger.

    At the other end of the village is the entirely wonderful Highland Folk Museum. A bit like the more famous Beamish, with buildings brought and reconstructed etc. And a wonderful old fashioned post office which still has the boiled sweets in jars - Soor Plooms!
  • Tullie House in Carlisle is I'd guess perhaps the best local museum in England, with - as you might expect - a wonderful Roman collection. And it has a nice cafe too!

    Locally, the Aberystwyth Museum - housed in a former theatre-cum-cinema which can still be used as a theatre (Patience will be performed there next spring) is well worth a visit.

    It does bug me that so many 'should be held locally' items are actually in London. If the British Museum really want to show what the Lewis Chessmen look like, then they should have replicas; the originals ought to be in Lewis.
  • The Sir John Soane museum is amazing.

    Sunderland had two museums, the big formal one and one in the old train station at Monkwearmouth and South Shields has two, one on a Roman site and another standard museum, with Roman tile and dog paw print.

    Lots of these museums have dressing up boxes.
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    Another really good museum, and not to be missed, is the Shetland Museum in Lerwick. I thought it was particularly good on relatively recent social history, the last 200 years or so.
  • Cathscats wrote: »
    I live right across the road from the Clan Macpherson museum, and in 9 years here have never gone around it. My brother has, though and he is not encouraging. I think if you are called Macpherson and are American or Australian the lure is stronger.
    My wife is/was a Macpherson (before changing her name to boring old Smith), so when we were on holiday in Scotland with her parents in October we went to the Clan Macpherson museum (as well as the family grave). I must say I didn't find it all that interesting (but then I find the whole clan thing slightly baffling), but our two girls really enjoyed doing the "treasure hunt" activities in the museum.

    We then had to stand outside in the freezing cold while my in-laws took photos of the girls outside the museum.
    At the other end of the village is the entirely wonderful Highland Folk Museum. A bit like the more famous Beamish, with buildings brought and reconstructed etc. And a wonderful old fashioned post office which still has the boiled sweets in jars - Soor Plooms!

    We went there after the Macpherson museum and 100% agree with this - it was great! Though sadly we didn't have time to go round all of it, but we definitely made sure we went to the sweet shop (purely for the girls, of course...).
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    Oh, CK, I'd forgotten the obligatory Roman tile with dog paw print! I shall add that to my list.

    The provision for children in all the local museums I've been to seems to have been good, with snippets of information, dressing up boxes etc. I suspect they host lots of school parties (in fact, the last one we went to, we were nearly run over by lots of 6 year olds being shown a mock up of a Victorian parlour by patient teachers.

    MMM
  • Another vote for the Pencil Museum at Keswick. I never realised THAT's how they are made.
    I used to make bobbin lace, so when we stayed in Honiton some years ago, I demanded to go to the local museum. It has the usual mixture of local items, but also has the most amazing collection of lace as Honiton lace was highly sought after. As I told one of the attendants that I was a lacemaker, we were given almost a guide tour of the lace section. I still remember a lace shawl depicting a hedgerow - such fine work.
  • Another charming little local museum with a good lace section is the one at Coggeshall in Essex. It's only open on Sunday afternoons and Bank Holidays. (There are also a couple of interesting National Trust properties in the village).
  • Priscilla wrote: »
    Another vote for the Pencil Museum at Keswick. I never realised THAT's how they are made.
    I used to make bobbin lace, so when we stayed in Honiton some years ago, I demanded to go to the local museum. It has the usual mixture of local items, but also has the most amazing collection of lace as Honiton lace was highly sought after. As I told one of the attendants that I was a lacemaker, we were given almost a guide tour of the lace section. I still remember a lace shawl depicting a hedgerow - such fine work.
    I told the historian guide at Arkwright's mill that I could spin wool and ended up giving a carding demonstration.
  • OK, I've just been reminded - from the London Bodies exhibition at the Museum of London, some 20 odd years ago, I know that I'm the same size as the average Roman woman. So at South Shields museum, they remembered me as the woman who fitted into the Roman woman's clothing from the dressing up box, and my daughter also fitted the right sized children's clothing, when my daughter reappeared on a school trip. It was apparently very embarrassing when the teacher was inaccurately telling the children that they were all going to grow taller than a Roman woman for the curator to point out that, for at least one of the children, this was unlikely.

    I also have hands of a similar size to Stone Age women, because I could get my fingers into the indentations on a Stone Age pot on show at the Museum of London, which fascinated the exhibitor and had me adding indentations to the pot in progress. They had been convinced that this was evidence of children making pots until then.

    I am really not that ridiculously small - 5'2", size 4 feet.
  • Of course Manhattan has the Museum of Sex, which I have in fact been to. The museum gift shop is, um... interesting.
  • When I was a girl, Inverness museum had my great uncle's medals on display, along with newspaper cuttings such as "Inverness Man Kills Ten* Huns" and some fairly gory details (his machine gun jammed and he killed the "burly huns" with a trench hatchet). There was also a poem written by him, with verses such as "Now Britain she can boast today / Of her soldiers at the front / Who are fighting with great energy / And the Germans love to hunt"

    His photo and medals are still there but the cuttings and poem have vanished. There's little indication that my great uncle killed anyone during the war.

    * The local newspapers claimed that he killed ten, but the regimental history says five and only three dead were "mentioned in despatches."
  • NicoleMR wrote: »
    Of course Manhattan has the Museum of Sex, which I have in fact been to. The museum gift shop is, um... interesting.
    At Greenbelt this year, I went to a talk in the Red Tent by a woman who is setting up a vagina museum.
  • When I visited Reykjavik last year I did not make it to the penis museum: https://phallus.is/en/
  • HeavenlyannieHeavenlyannie Shipmate
    edited November 2018
    Climacus wrote: »
    When I visited Reykjavik last year I did not make it to the penis museum: https://phallus.is/en/

    That museum is one of the reasons she wants a vagina museum.
  • Every good museum has a musical item, an instrument of player or some such.

    I grew up in Derby and the museum there had a version of a record player that I always loved.
  • It also (and appropriately) had an excellent model railway.
  • In Southport there's a Lawnmower Museum, which I've never visited, but which I believe is highly recommended.
  • It also (and appropriately) had an excellent model railway.

    It did too. I had forgotten that. And I remember loving that too.

    (It was a very very long time ago)
  • Ricardus wrote: »
    In Southport there's a Lawnmower Museum, which I've never visited, but which I believe is highly recommended.

    I've been there, and yes, it's good. It features in a book called 'Bollocks to Alton Towers' which readers of this thread might well find diverting.

    If you are ever in Dublin, get on the DART train to Dun Laoghaire and go to the maritime museum. We did, to fill an afternoon, and were offered a guided tour. I was a bit reluctant but smiled through gritted teeth and said 'that would be lovely' - and it was brilliant. Loads of great info from a really switched on and engaging retired ship's radio officer. I must go again.

    Closer to home, I volunteer at the Anson Engine Museum. It's a kind of a monument to what made global warming possible. And, when working there, the biggest rustiest scrap pile to play in (relatively) unsupervised for miles around. :smile:


  • "Bollocks to Alton Towers" and the follow-up "Far From the Sodding Crowd" are two of my favourite books.

    I love odd museums but I think my favourite is Eskdale Mill at Boot in the Lake District. Apart from a few handwritten signs it looks as though the last miller simply shut the door behind him and left it to gather dust.

    AG


  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Oh, I love small-town museums. The typical one here in Newfoundland is:

    -two or three rooms in an old house
    -open only during tourist season (ie July and August) and staffed by a university student on a summer jobs grant
    -full of a random assortment of objects and photos obviously culled from people's clean-outs of their attics, or of Nan's house after she died, when the only thing that anyone could think to do with it was "donate that to the town museum!"

    My all-time favourite was not in Newfoundland but in Nova Scotia, in the little town of Tatamagouche, where the local museum contains (among other things) a glass display case featuring a number of antique tools, farm implements and other objects, with a plaintive note explaining that nobody knows what these things are or what they were used for, so if you, the visitor, recognize any of them, can you please tell the museum staff.
  • Sarasa wrote: »
    Our local museum has examples of local pottery and a large space devoted to Eadweard Muybridge of galloping horse photography fame who was local to the area.
    Though probably too important to be considered 'local' ,Horniman's museum in Forest Hill London has the wonderful over stuffed walrus.
    I used to live in Forest Hill and loved the Horniman museum.

    I came here to suggest that one. The perfect size of museum.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    Oh, Trudy, that sounds wonderful. The name of the town Tatamagouche is also wonderful.

    Macarius suggested I should add to my list the photograph of the absolutely stunning local find with the bitter little label underneath that the object is now in the British Museum.

    MMM
  • My daughter suggested that the even more bitter notes occur when the find wasn't quite good enough for the British Museum, but has still been placed in the county museum, not the local one you're currently visiting.

    (We've definitely seen this, but can't remember where; we've visited a lot of little museums over the last few years - we used to meet up somewhere for the weekend every 4-6 weeks and explored the area with Treasure Trails and/or walking. Wet weekends meant we saw all the local inside stuff, including the museums.)
  • EigonEigon Shipmate
    I'd like to recommend The Thomas Shop, at Penybont near Llandrindod Wells. It's a Victorian shop with tea rooms and a Wool Emporium (and B&B), run on a shoestring by the family who bought the property. As well as the shop, in Victorian times it was a tailors' workshop and a laundry for the hotels in Llandrindod Wells. They've got all sorts of fascinating objects, and you can get right in amongst it all. Also very good home made cake.
  • In Lockport, NY, there is a small museum of the Erie Canal, which is fascinating if you're into the Erie Canal, which I am.
  • At Spa in Belgium there's a Museum of Laundry (Musée de la Lessive). The articles on display include a lady's bridal nightie which covers the entire body, except that it has a little aperture in the appropriate place so that the bridegroom can perform without her having to undress.

    And neatly embroidered by the said aperture are the words Dieu le veult (God wills it).

    Priceless!
  • Wet KipperWet Kipper Shipmate
    edited December 2018
    the most intriguing/surprising thing i saw in our local museum was in the "local businesses" section - an X-ray machine that cobblers/shoe shops used to use to see if people's feet fitted into their new shoes

    And strangely enough for a museum, there is also an exhibit dedicated to a Future event in the town: we can lay claim to being (one of the places) where Scotty in Star Trek comes from (will come from)
  • Wet Kipper wrote: »
    the most intriguing/surprising thing i saw in our local museum was in the "local businesses" section - an X-ray machine that cobblers/shoe shops used to use to see if people's feet fitted into their new shoes,
    These were quite common when I was a child, then people realised the cumulative effects of X-rays (presumably on the shop staff as well as the customers).

  • MooMoo Kerygmania Host
    Wet Kipper wrote: »
    the most intriguing/surprising thing i saw in our local museum was in the "local businesses" section - an X-ray machine that cobblers/shoe shops used to use to see if people's feet fitted into their new shoes,
    These were quite common when I was a child, then people realised the cumulative effects of X-rays (presumably on the shop staff as well as the customers).
    I remember those. That's how my parents came to know that one of my feet was measurably shorter and wider than the other.

  • LydaLyda Shipmate
    First, I am a docent at a local historical museum, a mansion built for a Victorian widow who had no intention of going to live with her son and help raise her grand daughter back in Yonkers, New York as would be traditional under her circumstances. Rather, she invited him to move back to his home town in California, be gifted their old house and become pardner in the citrus business she had inherited from her husband, while she would settle into her custom built, cutting edge house on the town's main drag. She valued her own lifestyle, thank-you-very-much.

    Another museum I adore is The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA. It has a unique collection of items from different folks' philosophical, historical, and scientific hobby-horses. Some folks had very strange ideas about the world around them with the artifacts to prove them. Others had important serendipitous moments like that of Dr, Fleming the discoverer of penicillin. The rooms are dark and reverent with old-fashioned display cases. It also has the most elegant ladies' loo that I have ever seen, and a lovely tea room on the top floor.
Sign In or Register to comment.