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 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.
Mapping Museums: Preliminary results on UK museum closure, 1960-2017
Jamie Larkin The museums sector generally concentrates on current practice and developments; it does not keep longitudinal data that would enable academics and museum professionals to trace patterns over time. The result is that commentary on closure is focussed on the very recent past and lacks a broader perspective that could add insight to contemporary […]
National Fencing Museum
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.
The Bakelite Museum on film
Patrick Cook, the founder and owner of the Bakelite Museum, started collecting plastic when he was an art student in London. Among other things, he used his collection to hold a series of Bakelite picnics, where the crowd ate food off Bakelite plates, drank tea from Bakelite cups, and listened to music played on Bakelite […]
Hopewell Colliery
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.
Buxton Transport Museum
The Buxton Transport Museum was relatively short-lived, open for only three years. It was established in 1980 by Peter Clark, a vintage car enthusiast. The site is now occupied by Buxton Mineral Water company. Images and information via Badge Collectors Circle and Derbyshire Through Time by Margaret Buxton on Google Books.
The Douglas Museum
The Douglas Museum was the brainchild of Randolph Osborne Douglas, who created it in his home in Castleton, Derbyshire with his wife Hetty. Douglas was a silversmith, locksmith, and amateur escapologist with the stage name of The Great Randini, inspired by his childhood hero Houdini. His collection included miniature houses, locks, models of the world’s […]
Football Museums
Jamie Larkin An area that initially passed us by on the Mapping Museums project was the prevalence of sports museums. While we recorded the more obvious, high-profile venues such as the MCC Museum and National Football Museum, we were unaware of the increasing numbers of club museums. This growth has occurred across team sports, such […]
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Fiona Candlin On Friday 26th January, the Mapping Museums project reached the end of its first phase, and for us, it felt like a momentous date. For the last fifteen months Dr Jamie Larkin and I have been compiling a huge dataset of all the museums that have been or were open at any point […]
