A 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 the Museum, Preservation Trust and Town...
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 both he developed a suspension that was...
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...
Read MoreMuseum Celebrates Lottery Win!

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Bradford on Avon Museum has been successful in a bid for an award from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s “All Our Stories” round of grants. With the HLF funding and support, community groups like ours will carry out activities that help people explore, share and celebrate their local...
Read MoreA School Visit

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.Bradford on Avon Museum has a small temporary display of letters of thanks that were sent by children from the Grove Primary School in Trowbridge.
They had visited Bradford and the Museum at the beginning of October as part of their studies about...
Read MoreTALK: The Saxon Church in Bradford on Avon
Tuesday 15th January, 7:30pm at Holy Trinity Church
If you already have a ticket for the November talk which was cancelled due to the flooding, then your ticket is STILL VALID for the new date, so please do come along! Please note the change of venue.
David Hinton, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton is the author...
Read MoreAnother Museum Booklet: The Saxon Church

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Hot on the heels of the Bradford printers and Abbey Mills booklets comes one about Bradford’s Saxon Church. It has been written by David Hinton, who recently retired as Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University and is the author of several books on the medieval period. He carried out an...
Read MoreMore Museum Publications

The Museum’s publications group has been busy and now two more booklets have joined the Museum’s growing list.
Bradford on Avon printers and town directories is the work of Roger Jones, who as the publisher Ex Libris Press has himself had plenty of experience of the printing industry. He gives a history of some of Bradford’s...
Read MoreFuture exhibitions
We hope you got a chance to see our last exhibition ‘Jubilee’ which was in the Library Foyer from Monday 28th May to Tuesday 19th June, and to see Stephanie Laslett’s fascinating panels of the shops in Bradford in the 1950s which were displayed in shop windows over the past couple of weeks.
If not, we’re hoping to be able to redisplay some of this information...
Read MoreNew Museum Publication: Lost Pubs

The Museum has now published the second of its series of booklets.
The Lost Pubs of Bradford on Avon is subtitled “A walker’s guide” and is designed to be a trail guide for a walk around the town, looking at the buildings and occasionally the sites that have at one time been public houses, but, for one reason or other, where pints are no longer pulled....
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