The Camera Museum began life as a cafe before being established in 2012 by Patrick and Adrian Tang, displaying Patrick’s growing collection of cameras. The display includes a timeline of cameras from the 1800s to the present. The sign makes reference to the nearby British Museum. Photo by Jamie Larkin.
The Bournemouth Transport Museum was a collection of public transport vehicles on display to the public each summer, probably from the late 1970s. It was later known as the Bournemouth Heritage Collection. Some of the vehicles were returned to commercial service in the early 1990s. The collection changed hands and locations a number of times […]
The Folk Museum, now known as the Gloucester Life Museum, is housed in Tudor timber-framed buildings. One of them is traditionally associated with the last night of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who was burned for heresy by Queen Mary in 1555. The museum tells the social history of Gloucestershire and includes a […]
Some museums are well documented, while others can be rather elusive. A case in point is the Big Four Railway Museum in Bournemouth, about which we know very little. According to one source it housed a collection of railway locomotive name plates belonging to the enthusiast Frank Burridge and was open in the 1980s. As […]
This museum occupies an old blacksmith’s forge which had been unused since 1953. The collection was begun by Doreen Hodson-Smith, a local resident, but it had outgrown her home. The forge was seen as a suitable venue for a museum to house the collection, and after refurbishment it opened in 1991. The old forge and […]
The Basket Museum is part of Coates, a willow business based on the Somerset Levels. Willow for basket making has been grown on the levels for centuries. The museum displays a variety of willow items including bushel baskets, tricycles and traps. Images via the museum.
David Mellor was a designer specialising in cutlery, although he also designed street furniture including bus stops and the traffic lights still in use in Britain today. The museum shares the site with a working cutlery factory, which occupies a new building on the site of Hathersage’s old village gasworks. Image via the museum.
Freddie Fox (1913-1990) inherited his father’s Dublin cigar business, and expanded it to an international concern. In 1992 JJ Fox acquired the older business of Robert Lewis, an eighteenth-century tobacco dealer based in St James’s, London. This museum devoted to smoking history is in the London shop’s basement.
The National Fencing Museum was established in 2002 in by Malcolm Fare, a fencer and fencing historian. It includes displays of fencing equipment, paintings, prints, books, and all kinds of ephemera. Image via the museum.
Hopewell Colliery Museum is in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Mining is an ancient tradition in the forest and those born there can exercise their rights to mine coal, iron ore, ochre and stone. The museum includes a working mine, through which visitors can take a guided tour. Image via the museum.
