Volunteers' Voice #16: Young people as volunteers
Written by Rob Davies, Volunteer Coordinator As part of the Our Country Lives project we are launching a series of projects to encourage young people (aged 11-25) to volunteer and engage with MERL. The age range is vast, with a wide variety of skills, abilities and interests within this target audience. You may ask: why are […]
Stereotypes and slaughter: Why are horror films set in the countryside?
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. The countryside is terrifying. When you’re not being offered as human sacrifice you’re either being forced to knife-fight your own wife and son to the death, getting eaten by the local wildlife or being pushed off a cliff by a psychotic caravaner from Redditch. Or, at […]
Weekly What's on: Sat 25 to Fri 31 Oct
Archives and texts seminar series: Travels in a publisher’s archive: John Murray and nineteenth-century travel publishing Dr Innes M. Keighren (Geography, Royal Holloway) Monday 27 October 5-6pm Conference room, Museum of English Rural Life* For details of this seminar, read the latest post on the ‘Archives and Texts’ blog Our Country Lives display Saturday 25th to […]
Discovering the Landscape #7: Peter Shepheard
This month Peter Shepheard is the subject of our continuing series of blog posts about MERL’s acquisition of the archive and library of the Landscape Institute. Written by Claire Wooldridge, Landscape Institute Library Officer Sir Peter Shepheard (1913-2002) was an influential architect and landscape architect. After training at the Liverpool School of Architecture, Shepheard moved […]
Rural Reads review #8: 'Clay' by Melissa Harrison
Rob Davies reviews the latest rural read. For the September meeting, we read Clay by debut author Melissa Harrison. Clay is an unusual novel for Rural Reads because it is set firmly in a city; it is, however, about how people within an urban environment interact with the green spaces available to them. This is a theme […]
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 […]
Project update: Getting closer to closing
written by Alison Hilton, Marketing Officer When we put the date of our last Saturday’s Our Country Lives project Information Day in the diary way back in the summer, we never imagined that the timing would be so close to the wire. Since receiving the news that we had been successful in our bid to the […]
Volunteers' Voice #15: What is a community?
Rob Davies, Volunteer Coordinator, shares his thoughts on what ‘community’ means to a museum Last Monday I attended the Sharing Day for Reading Engaged, an Arts Council England project where Reading Museum and the Museum of English Rural Life are collaborating on numerous aspects of our work from retail to volunteering. It was an interesting day where […]
Weekly what's on: 22nd Sept to 5th October
Full details of our events this term can be found on our website, and events in the Our Country Lives programme are listed here Samuel Beckett in London – the Murphy Notebooks Weds 1st to Saturday 4th October As part of the University of Reading’s Beckett Week, a celebration of the University’s internationally renowned collection […]
Chocolate box images & perceptions of the countryside
Alison Hilton, Marketing Officer, shows how, with a little bit of research, it is possible to link chocolate and English Rural Life, and invites you to come and talk about your perceptions of the countryside at our first Our Country Lives Information Day on Sat 4th October. Staff and volunteers spent last weekend on the […]