A good start for 2015
.
2015 has started well for Bradford on Avon Museum with 166 visitors in the two weeks since re-opening in mid-January and some interesting new acquisitions.
.
A large enamelled steel road sign that was put up at one of the entrances to the town by the Royal Automobile Club. It lists the architectural delights that a visitor might enjoy, still legible despite rusted missing sections. The town still has signs, now in cast iron, which presumably replaced this and others like it, rather like those that advertise French towns and villages.
.
.
An ink and watercolour drawing by Dave Smith commemorating the Woolley Festival of 1999. The festival began in 1996 as a small affair in the street outside the George public house and by this time had grown to occupy a field opposite Woolley Grange Hotel. In its latest manifestation in July 2014 it had moved to Merkins Farm at Bradford Leigh. The framed picture has been donated by Richard Fletcher, the former landlord of the George (and the Three Horse Shoes before that), who was one of the main founders of the festival.
.
We have been given, by the Trustees of Hall’s Almshouses, a box containing the silver badges that the four men who lived in the almshouses wore on special occasions and attending the parish church. The almshouses, in Frome Road, were set up by John Hall in 1700 and the badges bear the arms of the Hall family, featuring three pole-axes. Two other badges have already been in the Museum’s collection and are on display.