Focus on Collections: Dragons
To celebrate St George’s Day we decided to delve into the object collection for dragons. Dragons are normally something you would keep well away from Museum stores. Messy eaters, far too large and prone to setting things on fire, they are possibly the least ideal animal to have in a storehouse full of dry baskets, […]
The return of King Alfred
It was just before Christmas that marked King Alfred’s return to Reading, 1143 years after the siege and loss of the town to Ivar the Boneless in 871 CE and Alfred’s subsequent exile to a swamp (where he took up a bit of baking). We’re not talking about the actual Alfred of course, the site of whose […]
Dog Carts: Travel in style
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. In my mind the idea of a dog cart is fairly funny. The idea of, say, a Pug or a French Bulldog pulling along bespoke, miniature carts is absurd, endearing and yet a little unsettling, like performing animals at the zoo. They are also some of my favourite objects […]
Conservation Diary 2: Repairing the damaged and dry
As promised, I am back with some more exciting and fresh updates. Good progress has been made! The first week flew by in the setting up of and preliminary preparations for the conservation project of the first 1951 wall hanging. In the second week I felt myself drifting off far away, swayed by the humming […]
Conservation Diary: Week 1 on our 1951 Wall Hanging
My name is Nitisha Ramrekha-Heeramun and over the next few weeks I will be blogging about the conservation of two large and colourful resist-dyed textile wall hangings produced by the renowned artist, Michael O’Connell, for the Festival of Britain in 1951. I started volunteering at the Museum of English Rural Life in August 2013 under […]
A Day in the Life of a MERL-man…
Written by Tom Hewitt, MERL Intern. My name is Tom Hewitt and I’m currently working as an intern at MERL. The title of my post may be somewhat misleading, as I’ve actually been here for 40 days (and 40 nights!) already and have just been set the scary task of writing my first ever blog […]
A stitch in time: Conservation of 1951 wall hangings begins
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. Today, a very exciting part of Our Country Lives began – in fact, it is almost the starting pistol to the project! Accredited conservator Kate Gill will begin conservation work on two of our Michael O’Connell wall hangings. These are huge, 7×3.5m pieces of textile art […]
Our Boneshaking connection to cycling
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. At the moment of writing, 198 lycra-clad men from across the world are cycling through the Cambridgeshire countryside. They’re riding the best bicycles in the world (with the best thighs in the world), aiming for a finish line at Buckingham Palace, the prize of a yellow jersey and a […]
Our Country Lives update: Michael Eavis's French wellies
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. Yesterday we picked up our newest acquisition: a pair of wellies. It seems strange that a museum of English rural life wouldn’t have this icon of the countryside already in the collection, but they never really came onto our radar as an endangered object. The welly has never needed […]
Please touch: Future handling collection at MERL
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. One of the biggest complaints levelled at museums is that visitors cannot touch anything. Objects are put tantalisingly out of reach behind thin Perspex and glass, or an arms-length behind a velvet rope. It is annoying because objects are almost always meant to be touched, and especially so in […]