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 […]
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 […]
Coopering in the MERL collections
Since May I’ve been working on the Reading Engaged project to research content for the new galleries which will form part of MERL’s redevelopment project, Our Country Lives. True to my passions as ever, I’ve been taking the opportunity to focus on researching craft, as we’re hoping to dedicate a large part of one of […]
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 Country Lives goes ahead with £1.7m HLF grant
We are all very pleased and excited to announce that we have been successful in securing a further £1.7m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, in order to redevelop MERL as part of the Our Country Lives project! You can see our press release here. That we have got to this stage is testament to […]
Our Country Lives update: Volunteering opportunities
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. Since last week was National Volunteering Week, I thought it would be worth dwelling on the volunteering opportunities for this week’s update. Volunteers play a massive part in the operation of MERL, from staffing events to carrying out vital work on the conservation of objects, […]
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 […]
Our Country Lives update: How we research
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. You may have noticed that we’ve been a bit quiet recently about our HLF-funded redevelopment project, Our Country Lives. This is because we’re waiting for a response from the Heritage Lottery Fund due on June 13th (fingers crossed), but also because a lot of us have been busy catching […]