Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Kathleen Hale

Our next blog from the students of The Abbey School explores the fascinating story of Kathleen Hale. If you were a child in the 1930s, you might well have ended your day with a bedtime story by Kathleen Hale. Her Orlando the Marmalade Cat books captivated many children with their bright colours and entertaining stories, setting […]

Explore Your Archive: Interview with an archivist

We asked Whitney, one of our volunteers, to find out about the different roles carried out by archivists at MERL and the Special Collections. She started by interviewing Cataloguing and Projects Archivist, Sharon Maxwell, who joined us just a couple of months ago. What does cataloguing entail? I’m trying to make the collections accessible to the public. Collections […]

Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Mary Wondrausch

The Museum of English Rural Life is very fortunate to have close links with country potter, Mary Wondrausch. Our latest blog written by students from The Abbey School, focuses on her fascinating story. When the lovely staff at the Museum English of Rural Life told us we would be researching Mary Wondrausch as part of their […]

Explore Your Archive: Reading Readers – Francesca

For our first Reading Readers post, Francesca shows us the wealth of material she has found in the CPRE (Council for the Preservation of Rural England) archive whilst researching for her PhD. I am researching for a collections-based PhD entitled Preservationism and Development in Rural England, 1926-2016: Policy and Practice, focusing on the collection of […]

Exploring the world of the archivist…

Before we post her interviews with colleagues later in the week, Whitney, one of our volunteers, explains how she’s been delving into the mysterious world of the archivist… Hi my name is Whitney. I recently graduated from Hertfordshire University where I studied English Literature and Journalism. I’m now volunteering at MERL which is a really […]

Explore Your Archive: Introducing Reading Readers

Our Reading Room Supervisor, Adam Lines, introduces a new feature for the MERL and Special Collections blogs, finding out how readers explore archives. On a daily basis, members of the public, students and academics from around the world use our extensive and varied collections. In the reading room at one time, researchers can be consulting manuscripts […]

Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Emily Eavis

Audience Development Manager, Phillippa Heath, introduces a project in which local school students discovered how archives can be used to research fascinating lives.  As part of the Museum of English Rural Life’s redevelopment, we are keen to reveal the hidden stories behind our collections. Over the Summer we were fortunate to welcome sixth form History students from […]

Explore Your Archive: Let there be drawers…

Deputy University Archivist, Caroline Gould, has spent a huge amount of time exploring the MERL archives and photographic collections to select the items which will help tell the stories in our new museum galleries. Faced with such a wealth of fascinating archive material, this hasn’t always been the easiest of exercises!  For the last two years we […]

Explore Your Archive: 16 to 22 November

Next week is the launch of this year’s Explore Your Archive campaign, which is coordinated by The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland). The Explore Your Archive campaign is encouraging people to discover the stories, the facts, the places and the people that are at the heart of our communities. Archives across […]

Rip Roaring Reading Room News: Full opening from Monday 28 September 2015

Great news everyone! We have extended our Reading Room opening hours. Up until now, although you have been able to visit our wonderful Reading Room Monday-Friday, 9-5, we have operated a restricted service on a Monday. This meant that, on a Monday, we opened later (10am) and we were unable to retrieve material from our […]


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