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.
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.
The Ark is the oldest building in active use in Tadcaster, Yorkshire. Built in the late 15th Century, it is reputed to have been used by the Pilgrim Fathers to meet when planning their voyage to America. As well as a meeting place, at different times the Ark has been used as a post office, an inn, a butchers, a private house and a museum. Its name derives from two carved corbel figures on the exterior which are said to be Noah and his wife.
It housed a museum of local and brewing history, owned by John Smith’s brewery, but the museum closed in 1989. The collections were dispersed to a variety of places including Doncaster Museum, the Castle Museum in York, and private collections. Today the building is in use as council offices.
The Museum of British Transport opened in an old bus garage in Clapham, south London, in the 1960s. Standing in the forecourt was a replica of Rocket, the pioneering locomotive designed by Robert Stephenson. The museum housed objects and vehicles relating to London’s roads, railways and the Tube. The collection had been started in the 1920s by the London General Omnibus Company, which decided to preserve two Victorian horse buses and an early motorbus.
In 1969 the museum was losing £30,000 a year and threatened with closure. It moved to Syon Park in 1973 as the London Transport Collection. The collection was eventually divided between the National Railway Museum in York and London’s Transport Museum, which opened in 1980 in a Victorian flower market building in Covent Garden.
The Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth was run by Peter and Jane Hays for 58 years. Opened in 1954 and named after Madame Tussaud’s great grandson, it featured models of celebrities and historical figures. But faced with rising costs, declining income, and the loss of the wax modeller they had used, the Hays closed the museum in 2012. When the closure was announced they were praised for their contribution to local tourism. The exhibits were sold to a Czech collector in 2014.
The Adamston Agricultural Museum was opened in 1972 by Hew McCall-Smith. His collection comprised more than 500 items related to farming and domestic life in the North East of Scotland. This included ploughs, horse harness, and dairy equipment. McCall-Smith also organised events, including exhibits of threshing, ploughing, and cheese-making.
The museum remained open until the early 1980s, when the collection was purchased by Moray District Council and incorporated into Aden, the North East of Scotland Agricultural Centre (now known as the Aberdeenshire Farming Museum).
This building has had various lives, with at least four different institutions occupying the site. It was once the Cannon Hill Museum and devoted to the history of Birmingham. Around 1953, changes at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery led to the natural history department establishing a museum on the site. It subsequently became the Birmingham Nature Centre and is now the entrance to Birmingham Wildlife Conservation Park.
It is situated on the edge of Cannon Hill Park, which opened in 1873. The park was designed by T. J. Gibson, who had previously designed London’s Battersea Park.
Some information about the history of the museum is from: Wingfield, Christopher. “(Before and) after Gallery 33: Fifteen years on at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery” Journal of Museum Ethnography 18 (2006): 49-62, p.57. (read online at Academia.edu)
Plummer Tower was part of the old walls of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which were built from the mid-13th century to the middle or late 14th century. It was converted into a meeting house in the latter part of the 17th century by the Company of Cutlers, and a facade was added by the Company of Masons in the mid-18th century. The older parts of the building are Grade I Listed.
In 1948 the Tower was restored and used as a dwelling, and in 1957 it was acquired by the Corporation of Newcastle. After further restoration the Tower was used as a branch museum of the Laing Art Gallery. The upper floor was furnished as an eighteenth century room, while the ground floor housed temporary exhibits based on the city’s archives.
The 1964 photo above shows the tower in use as a museum, while a more recent image shows the museum sign was removed. The museum seems to have been open until at least 1985, when Kenneth Hudson and Ann Nichols’ Directory of Museums & Living Displays listed it as displaying 18th-century period rooms.
A leaflet kindly supplied by a reader of this blog provided more information about the Tower’s history and its use as a museum.
The 18th century room inside Plummer Tower Museum, Newcastle
Plummer Tower, 2007
Black and white image via Co-Curate, colour image via Wikipedia. Leaflet provided by Angela Essenhigh. More information from See Newcastle. This post was updated in August 2020.
