Explore Your Archive: Rats in the archives
Professor of Social and Cultural History at Leeds Trinity University, Karen Sayer is our Gwyn E. Jones Fellow exploring rat control in British agriculture. She’s spent a lot of time looking for rats in our collections… The MERL archive is full of interesting animal records; as you might expect, there are papers, pamphlets and books on livestock […]
Consuming the fat cows
Livestock portraiture depicting prize animals (cattle, oxen, pigs and sheep) began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century. We derive much historical value from these commissioned paintings through their collective recording of the process of English livestock improvement. It was a period in which livestock was being altered from medieval to modern purposes. In a time […]
Discovering an unknown opera
With such vast and varied collections, we sometimes come across hidden treasures. Adam Lines, Reading Room Supervisor, tells us about a discovery he made recently. One of the most invigorating aspects of my role as Reading Room Supervisor is the wealth of knowledge about the collection that I accumulate on a daily basis. Often researchers draw my […]
#DisabilityStories – Labelling visual impairment
How do you write a label in under 50 words on a basket made by an anonymous, visually impaired basket-maker without appearing patronising and tokenistic? This question conveniently coincides with this week’s #CultureThemes topic of #DisabilityStories. The staff here at MERL are busily writing labels for our new galleries, covering overarching topics and themes, object […]
The Cheese Curry Experiment
It is difficult to know quite how to categorise this post by Project Officer, Felicity McWilliams, but it’s all in the name of research for one of our new galleries…promise! Given that it is, apparently, British Cheese Week, today seems an appropriate time to share with you the results of a little experiment I carried […]
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, […]
Research post: X marks the spot
We’ve all been very busy researching nine new galleries for the Our Country Lives redevelopment, covering everything from wagon construction to rural fashion. What caught our eye recently, however, was a one-way, horse-drawn Butterfly plough. While delving into our accession files for its measurements we found this interesting little map tucked into a sheaf of […]
International Women's Day: The Women's Land Army
To celebrate International Women’s Day, University of Reading student Dylan Doran has been exploring the collection of Women’s Land Army objects here at the Museum. The Women’s Land Army (WLA) was created in 1915 to help farmers cope with the shortage of male labour as a result of the First World War. It was brought back […]
Discovering the Landscape #12: Brenda Colvin
Written by Claire Wooldridge, Project Senior Library Assistant: Landscape Institute Brenda Colvin (1897-1981) was a founder member of the Institute of Landscape Architects and its first female president (elected in 1951). In anticipation of FOLAR’s (Friends of the Landscape Library and Archive at Reading) study day focusing on Brenda Colvin here at MERL on Saturday 21 March, […]
Democracy Day: Parliamentary Firsts
Project Officer, Felicity McWilliams, spotted an opportunity to share some of the research she’s been doing for the new galleries… Today is BBC Democracy Day, the 750th anniversary of the first ever parliament of elected officials at Westminster. Known as the ‘January Parliament’, it was called in 1265 by the Earl of Leicester, Simon de […]