Despite its name, this is not a contender for the UK’s smallest museum. The Micro Museum in Ramsgate, Kent, contains all manner of personal computers, games, small televisions, calculators, and electronic toys. The collection is run by Mike and Carol Deer, whose first computer was the venerable Sinclair ZX81. The addition of a BBC Micro prompted thoughts of a collection, and the Deers have been working on it for around forty years.
Image via the Micro Museum.
The Framework Knitters Museum is in Wigston, near Leicester. The last master hosier to work on the site, Edgar Carter, died in 1952 leaving the workshop locked and intact. As the museum’s website explains, the workshop “contained eight hand frames for making gloves, mitts and fancy ribbed tops for golf hose, together with all the needle moulds and tools associated with each machine”.
Image via the museum’s website.
Cheltenham College’s museum was created in 1870, and its emphasis on Natural History can be seen in this photo. The public were admitted on one afternoon a week. In 1923 the museum was moved into a larger and more modern building, but was packed away during the Second World War. The museum closed in 1976, when the collection was sold to Liverpool’s World Museum and what is now Portsmouth University.
Read more about the College’s history.
Armstrong’s Household and Farming Museum near Alnwick, Northumberland, was set up in the 1980s by Sylvia Armstrong. She began collecting when she realised that many people threw away things they no longer wanted, and the history of her area would be lost as a result.
The museum includes a traditional farmhouse kitchen with a black range, kitchen equipment and food packets. A stable contains areas on dairy, old hand tools and memories of the Second World War. An archive of farm literature includes catalogues, farm account books, and particulars of land and farm sales. Shoes, clothing, and jewellery are also part of the collection.
Sylvia was awarded an MBE in 1999 for her services to the museum. The Armstrongs also donate much of the museum’s proceeds to charity, and have raised thousands of pounds over the years.
Images via The Journal.
This postcard dates from 1981. St. Mary’s is a late 15th-century house with extensive gardens, which has been owned by various notable people including the Hon. Algernon Bourke, one-time owner of White’s gentleman’s club in St. James’s, London. Bourke and his wife are said to be the inspiration for characters in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. A more recent owner was Paul Smart, a lepidopterist with a large collection of butterflies.
Smart founded The Saruman Museum in 1970 in private premises in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The museum moved from there to Beckley near Rye, Sussex, in 1975, and was established at St. Mary’s in March 1980 as the National Butterfly Museum. Smart was an international expert on butterflies, and published an encyclopedia which contained over two thousand species. The ‘National’ in the museum’s title was never an official designation and caused some disquiet amongst Smart’s colleagues. It has been suggested that although the museum was open to the public and had educational displays, it was primarily a butterfly trading agency.
Whether truly a museum or not, it seems not to have been a financial success. Between forty and fifty thousand specimens from the collection were offered for auction at Christie’s in July 1982, with only two lots sold to Glasgow Museums (PDF). The house and contents including the rest of the collections were successfully auctioned at Sotheby’s in October 1983.
Advertisement for The Saruman Museum from The Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, vol. 89, 1977.
For more on the history and contents of the two museums, see: Tennent, W. J., 2005. The ‘National Butterfly Museum’ (Bramber, West Sussex) and dispersal of butterfly ‘type’ material following a Sotheby’s sale in 1983., Entomologist’s Gazette, 56 (1): 13-24.
What is the connection between the 1960s pop music TV show Ready, Steady, Go! and a long-lost aircraft museum in Devon?
The answer is Keith Fordyce, an ex-RAF serviceman who co-presented the show from 1963, and famously asked the Beatles if they thought they had a future. In 1971 he began restoring old aircraft, and later established the museum in Torbay. Amongst other aircraft the collection included replicas of the Spitfire and Hurricane. The museum closed in the late 1980s and the collection was dispersed.
According to Hudson and Nicholls’ Directory of Museums and Living Displays, the Bear Gardens Museum was in a Georgian warehouse standing on the original site of the Elizabethan bear baiting arena and the Hope Playhouse. Its displays illustrated the history of 16th and 17th-century playhouses, and included scale models.
As Bankside was on the south bank of the Thames and thus outside the jurisdiction of the 17th-century city of London, it was a popular site for all manner of entertainments including bear baiting and theatres. Shakespeare’s Globe theatre famously made its home there in 1599.
An image of the museum in 1976, close to the time of the exhibition poster above, is available from the City of London Picture Archive:
As Fiona Candlin writes elsewhere on this site, one problem when researching small museums is that there may be very little information available about them. These two postcards are almost all we have of The Precinct Toy Collection, also known as The Sandwich Doll Museum. We can see that it contained Doll’s Houses, and another site suggests that it also had Noah’s Arks on show.
The site looks very different today, with the shop fronts removed and just a single entrance door in the centre of what was once the museum’s frontage. The Mapping Museums team always welcome more information about lost museums, so if you can tell us anything about this one, please get in touch.
Images kindly provided by the Sandwich Local History Society.
Museums may move in different ways. Sometimes collections are transferred to different sites, and occasionally get renamed in the process. Others are completely itinerant, such as the Museum of Water. But the premises of Send and Ripley Museum had to move even before it could be used as a museum.
This building was formerly a branch of National Westminster Bank in the village of Ripley in Surrey. It was offered to the Send and Ripley Historical Society on the condition that it be moved to another site. In a small feat of logistics, the building was moved in one piece on the back of a lorry to its present location, where it now functions as the museum of the Society.
The displays include geological specimens, photographs, and a locally made WW2 air raid shelter.
Image from Send and Ripley Historical Society.
The Telecom Technology Showcase was open between 1982 and 1997 and run by British Telecom. It occupied premises in Baynard House, Blackfriars, which is still owned by BT. The museum’s opening was specially timed: 1982 was Information Technology Year in the UK. BT had been created just two years earlier and separated from the Post Office in 1981 before being privatised in 1984.
Amongst the educational and interactive displays were the design classic K6 telephone kiosk, old telephones, a switchboard, and a working exchange rack. This was just a small portion of BT’s large archive, which included vintage GPO vans, bakelite handsets, numerous telephones and switchboards.
Museums advertise themselves in various ways, and the Technology Showcase used a medium that was distinctly relevant to it: BT Phonecards. These cards were a way of prepaying for calls from phone boxes, and featured a wide variety of products and services, including the BT Museum.
The museum had 23,000 visitors in 1995 but closed two years later. It was reported to be losing around £500,000 a year.
Images via Light Straw.