Friday Fledglings – Online Special
Hello, everyone! This week, because the museum is closed, we’ll be doing Friday Fledglings a little differently. Rather than meeting in our lovely garden (which we miss very dearly), the brilliant Friday Fledglings team have sent us several fantastic things for kids and their grown-ups to do at home instead! Firstly, Charlotte received a lovely […]
Revealing the archives of the Open Spaces Society
Helena Clarkson, a Project Archivist at the museum, writes about our ongoing work with the fantastic archives of the Open Spaces Society, a registered charity dedicated to preserving commons across England and Wales. At the museum, we’ve made significant progress on an exciting project involving the collections of the Open Spaces Society, a registered charity that […]
A Land Down Under
Anthropologist and Collections Volunteer Paul Trawick continues his journey of subsoil discovery, exploring the role of land drainage on English farms. In his first post – What Lies Beneath? – he introduced us to these little-known systems. In this installment he elaborates further on their history and how they work… We have already seen how […]
Exhibition causes quite a buzz!
Fiona Melhuish (UMASCS Librarian) writes about our exhibition on the fascinating Cowan Bee Collection: Last year, The MERL acquired the Cowan Bee Collection, a library of 1,800 volumes of books, pamphlets and journals relating to bees and beekeeping, which has been described as the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. The items […]
Time to Picnic: Top 10 tips from The MERL
Picnics. Sandwiches. Cake. Slightly too warm lemonade. Wasps. Picnics are a staple of the summer. They’re a great way to get outside and to experience all that the countryside has to offer. Indeed people have been enjoying eating outside for hundreds of years. In the late 1600s the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall sold cold meats […]
How do you give medicine to a horse?
Now that June has indeed passed, taking with it the rain and clouds, it’s time to look back at a few of the fascinating objects that have made their way into the Museum’s collection in the last month. With eight new objects in total, we have selected three to look at in a little more […]
What lies beneath?
Anthropologist and Collections Volunteer Paul Trawick has been delving into the role of field drains on English farms. These hidden gems offer an ingenious and indigenous way to reclaim ground, improve topsoil, tame groundwater, and achieve sustainable crop yields. But few of us even know they are there. In this, the first of several posts, […]
Get out … into the countryside
Have you noticed that the days are staying lighter for longer? Is spring just around the corner? Does the change in season make you think about spending time outside? If you are one of the 53 million people in the UK who live in an urban environment, you might want to ‘get out into the […]
The mystery of Joseph Arch’s plaster hands
One hand forms a light fist – the other relaxed, as though sleeping. The passing of years has given the plaster almost the colour of skin, the fingers looking almost nicotine-stained. The plaster-cast hands of Joseph Arch (10/11/1826-12/02/1919) are very personal objects. One theory for their existence is that they were cast in place of […]
‘Muscle Memory: the story of a pair of clogs’ by Hannah James
For the 2018 MERL Annual Lecture we presented ‘Muscle Memory’, a world-premiere performance from award-winning accordionist, singer and clog dancer Hannah James, developed in response to the collections at The MERL and the traditions that have helped shaped them. One of the key figures in the revival of English percussive dance, Hannah’s musicianship takes her […]