The Community Dig
Monday 11th – Sunday 24th August, Hen Field and Victory Field
The defensive bank showing both side of field boundary wall (click the image to see a larger version)
We are off again! Our dig in April produced a surprising result. A slight bank on the edge of the paddock east of the tithe barn...
Read MoreExhibition: Bradford At War, 1914-18
Monday 4th – Monday 25th August, in the Library Meeting Room
Bradford on Avon Museum’s exhibition commemorating the First World War, will be focused on the themes: The Eve of War, The Front, The Home Front, and Twin Towns.
The exhibition will include photographs and WWI objects, as well as...
Read MoreAcquisitions: Milking stool and yoke
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Among the agricultural objects that a local museum should have in its collection are two that were very common in the dairy, but somehow they had not come to Bradford on Avon Museum until now.
The milking stool is low, to get down to the level of a cow’s udders and is three-legged, because that is more stable on...
Read MoreThe Museum’s Millennium Embroidery on show in Bath & Bradford
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Bradford on Avon Museum’s Millennium Embroidery is going to be on display at the Friends Meeting House in York Street, Bath from 2nd until 16th August, Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 4pm.
It will join there some of the panels of the famous Quaker Tapestry, other panels of which will be displayed in Bath Abbey for...
Read MoreMuseum booklet: Geology, landscape and building stone
Bradford on Avon Museum’s latest addition to its list of booklets comes with the publication of this one about the foundations of our local area. It has been written by Isobel Geddes who was the author of a book about the geology of Wiltshire a few years ago.
Like the others in the series, this booklet is lavishly illustrated. It is available from the Museum, Tourist Information...
Read MoreExhibition: Peter Maundrell’s Bradford
. Bradford on Avon Museum has mounted an exhibition of black and white photographs of subjects taken in and around Bradford from the last three decades of the 20th century.
They are the work of Peter Maundrell, a keen amateur photographer who was born in Bradford in 1932 and has lived here all his life. He was joint-author, with...
Read MoreNew Booklet: The Domestic Woollen Industry
. The next in our growing series of museum booklets is The Domestic Woollen Industry at Bradford-on-Avon, which has been written by Kenneth Rogers, a well-known expert on the West Wiltshire woollen cloth industry and former Archivist at the Wiltshire Record Office.
Beautifully illustrated, it details the early years of cloth...
Read MoreA Brewery Outing in 1899
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The photograph shows the members of a party from the Newtown brewery of Willkins Brothers & Hudson on a trip to Ilfracombe on the north coast of Devon in July 1899. We haven’t yet found the exact location, but it is pretty reasonable to assume that it is a pub.
It is not...
Read MoreMuseum Booklet: A Land Through Time
The eighth in the Museum’s series of booklets is a follow-up to our successful Heritage Lottery-funded LiDAR project. This measured tiny differences in height of the land surface of part of the Bradford Hundred area by the reflected beams of lasers fired from a plane.
It produced amazingly detailed images of large numbers of features in the landscape that have...
Read MoreMuseum members at the Roman Baths
. A small party of Museum Society members was treated to a tour of the stores of the Roman Baths Museum in Bath. The serious reason for the trip underground in Bath was towards identifying and understanding the Roman and Medieval pottery that has been found in Budbury and other places in Bradford. They had the opportunity to examine some fascinating sherds...
Read MoreNew Museum booklet: Bridges of Bradford-on-Avon
The latest in Bradford on Avon Museum’s series of publications is a well-illustrated historical survey of the town’s bridges -across the river, canal and railway. Ivor Slocombe has included new research from his delving into records in the Wiltshire & Swindon Archives and has section on the footbridge which (so far) never was.
The booklet is on sale at the Museum,...
Read MoreNEW – Museum Discussion Group
From September, we are starting up a new Museum group for Members. The Discussion Group will be held on the first Wednesday of every month at 7:30pm in the Library Meeting Room. These informal sessions are FREE to Members and will cover a broad range of topics, with a different speaker introducing the theme each month.
Here are the topics for the first four months:
Wednesday...
Read MoreMillennium Embroidery at Fringe Festival
The Museum’s Bradford on Avon Millennium Embroidery will be displayed as part of the Bradford Fringe Festival. The twelve panels depict episodes in each of the centuries between the two Millennium Years of 1001 and 2001 and were sewn by hand by Bradford people, based on paintings by the late Jeanne Walpole. It can be seen for the period of 1st to...
Read More‘Flog It!’
Hot on the heels of ‘Antiques Road Trip’ another BBC-tv crew has visited Bradford on Avon Museum. As part of making an insert for a ‘Flog It!’ programme, another antiques and auctions-based series, they videoed some of the museum’s old images of Bradford, then headed off with presenter Paul Martin to shoot around the town.
Follow this website for...
Read MoreAntiques Road Trip
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On Thursday 18th July a team from STV spent an entire morning filming in Bradford on Avon Museum’s chemist shop. This was for a piece that will be included in a programme in a forthcoming new series of the BBC television series “Antiques Road Trip“, which is a spin-off from the venerable and well-known “Antiques Road...
Read MoreMuseum Trip to Dorset
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—FULLY BOOKED—
New date for your diary – Saturday 14th September 2013.
The June outing for members of the Museum Society has been postponed, and will now be taking place on 14th September instead.
We will visit the Priest’s House Museum in Wimborne Minster, a...
Read MoreExhibition: A Life on Wheels
EXHIBITION NOW RELOCATED TO ST LAURENCE SCHOOL FOYER UNTIL 8th FEBRUARY
Following the recent death of Alex Moulton, the inventor and developer of the Moulton bicycle, Bradford on Avon Museum has mounted a display about his life.
It draws on the material from the exhibition that was jointly staged by...
Read MoreAlex Moulton 1920-2012
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Dr Alexander Eric Moulton, the inventor of the small-wheel Moulton bicycle, died on Sunday 9th December 2012 at the age of 92.
He was best known for his involvement with two of the style icons of the 1960s: the range of innovative bicycles and the Mini car. In...
Read MoreNew Air-conditioning
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During the week 10-14 December new air-conditioning machinery and associated pipework are being installed in the Museum and in the meeting/exhibition room next door.
As a precaution against the dust that could have accumulated in the roof space being released when suspended ceiling tiles are removed, as much as practical of...
Read MoreA New Museum Publication: The Hall
Bradford on Avon Museum’s publications group has come up with another in our series of booklets about local subjects, in conjunction with Ex Libris Press.
Pamela Slocombe’s booklet, which is in a slightly larger format than the previous ones, is about The Hall, the ancient and beautiful mansion on the eastern side of Bradford. It gives a history of the development of the...
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