| Walsall Museum | |
|---|---|
| Established | 1976 |
| Location | Lichfield Street, Walsall, West Midlands |
| Website | http://www.walsall.gov.uk/walsall_museum.htm |
Walsall Museum is located in the centre of Walsall, in the West Midlands. The holdings of Walsall Museum range from seventeenth century firemarks to twenty-first century posters. There is also a large collection of costume and textiles; notably The Hodson Shop Collection, a unique collection of unsold shop stock of working-class clothing dating from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Museum runs a programme of activities for adults and children throughout the year.
The museum shares its building with Walsall Central Library and is part of Walsall MBC's Museums Service[1].
Contents |
Walsall Museum’s permanent history gallery (called The Changing Face of Walsall) exhibits objects made and used in the Borough of Walsall. It includes displays of local industries, particularly those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as curios, a Wall of Fame, and costume. Changing displays within the gallery enable further items of costume and social and industrial history from the Museum's collection to be shown, and there is also space for community displays.
Areas covered include:
Walsall Museum has a very large collection of lorinery, some of which is on display, along with locally-made locks, brass wares and chains.
Innovative stainless steel homewares made by Old Hall of Bloxwich, and Gaydon and Beetleware items made by BIP's Streetly Plastics, are represented in the permanent history gallery.
Objects from the First World War and Second World War, including gas masks and soldiers' equipment, are on show.
A special display area within the gallery houses a selection of costume from the Museum's nationally significant Hodson Shop collection. The collection comprises the unsold stock of a small drapers' shop in Willenhall, and includes everyday clothing from the 1920s to the 1970s - the sort of garments that rarely find their way into museum collections. Displays in this area are changed on a regular basis.
The gallery also displays a scold's bridle; a preserved crocodile, discovered in the attic of the building; and a preserved child's arm, found in a chimney at the White Hart Inn on Caldmore Green. The arm was discovered in 1870 and thought to be a 'hand of glory', but tests showed it to be a medical specimen that has been injected with the preservative formalin. It is known that a doctor was residing at the White Hart, but not how he came by the arm[2].
There are also displays focusing on famous Walsall figures. These are centred on the life and work of local author Jerome K. Jerome, nursing pioneer Sister Dora, and John Henry Carless, receiver of the Victoria Cross in the First World War.