Guest post: Our Country Lives project goes global with a ‘Stitch in Time’
MERL Fellow, Dr Jane McCutchan has written a guest post about her project with ‘Permeate’ trainee, Genell Watson, to encourage more visitors to MERL by local people with a BAME background Local community and wider audiences are at the heart of our re-display and there are many chances to influence how we explore English rural […]
Our Country Lives project submitted!
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. MERL’s HLF project Our Country Lives reached an important milestone last Monday when we submitted our bid for second stage funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). We will find out whether we have been successful in June. Our consultants for the design of the new galleries, […]
Keep up! Stakeholder consultation on MERL's Our Country Lives project
MERL Curator of Collections and Engagement, Isabel Hughes, brings us up to date with progress on the Our Country Lives project Our project plans are developing quite quickly now and one of the challenges is to keep all our various stakeholders informed including our volunteers, neighbours and other interested parties in the University. Last week […]
Press release: Wolfson grant to help MERL display hidden treasures
Wolfson grant helps Uni Museum display hidden treasures Visitors to the Museum of English Rural Life will soon be able to discover some of its more hidden treasures thanks to an award of £175,000. The Museum (MERL), which is owned and managed by the University of Reading, is one of 40 museums across the country […]
Our Country Lives project update: Activity planning
Isabel Hughes, MERL Curator, updates us on the work on the ‘Activity Plan’ for our Heritage Lottery Fund project Earlier in the year, the Cultural Consulting Network was appointed to help MERL produce an activity plan as part of the Round 2 submission to the Heritage Lottery Fund for Our Country Lives. The first section of […]
My Favourite Object #4: 'By the Roadside' cigarette cards
written by Felicity McWilliams, Project Officer. Quite a few of my favourite objects in the museum were collected as part of the Collecting 20th Century Rural Cultures project. The project began in 2008, with the aim of acquiring objects for the collections which build a picture of the twentieth century English countryside. A wide variety of […]
Our Country Lives Update
written by Sophia Mirchandani, Katie Norgrove and Jocelyn Goddard, consultants working on Our Country Lives We are founder members of Cultural Consulting Network, which provides professional consultancy services to the heritage and arts sectors. Specialising in research, evaluation, project development, funding and grants, we work closely with our clients to provide intelligent and workable solutions […]
Volunteers' Voice #4: Summer Volunteers
written by Rob Davies, Volunteer Coordinator. It’s summer and for us at MERL it is a very busy time for us. Our varied host of family activities means that we are very busy with a large footfall of visitors who would otherwise be at school. This is an excellent opportunity for younger visitors to explore […]
Our Country Lives update: MERL goes to Stockholm
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. One thing I never expected from working at a museum of English rural life was the opportunity to visit Sweden. However, with some Erasmus funding me and five colleagues did just that, and went to Stockholm to see one of the world’s most successful open air […]
Is the future of MERL ethnographic?
written by Dr Ollie Douglas, Assistant Curator. My colleague Felicity McWilliams and I recently attended an ambitious conference at the Pitt Rivers Museum on The Future of Ethnographic Museums, which encouraged me to reflect on how the Our Country Lives project might begin to explore issues of nationalism, multiculturalism and even colonialism. MERL may seem […]