Don’t forget to book your place on our Behind the Scenes tours! See how staff are preparing for the new North Hertfordshire Museum. Find out about the history of the buildings and the museums. Have a look at objects as they are cleaned and packed.
Tours are free, start at 10am and last approximately 45mins to 1 hour. Spaces are limited and tours must be booked in advance (tours without sufficient bookings may be rescheduled).
You can book onto a tour at Letchworth Museum or Hitchin Museum (or one of each!).
Hitchin Museum dates
Fridays
27th June
25th July
15th August
To book telephone: 01462 434476
or email: hitchin.museum@north-herts.gov.uk
Letchworth Museum dates
Tuesdays
15th July
19th August
To book telephone: 01462 685647
Last week saw the 40th anniversary of North Herts. District Council. Before they left, our two much-missed interns prepared information for a display about the birth of NHDC, which Sian and I put up in the Council Offices for the anniversary Council meeting on Thursday evening. As well as information about the winding up of the previous councils (Hitchin Urban, Hitchin Rural, Letchworth, Baldock and Royston Urban District Councils) Emily and Vicki had copied old adverts from 1974, when a Council salary started at just over £600pa, and you could buy a nice house for £13,000. The museum has a copy of the menu for the last meal of Hitchin UDC, held at the Angel’s Reply in Hitchin, where the pudding was Pineapple Surprise, followed by Cona coffee. The top photo shows some of the local government material normally held in store, the lower photo shows a small selection of the images we displayed.
Now that I have come to the end of my internship with the North Herts Museums, and taken pictures of thousands of objects, I thought I would share my favourite object from the Social History Store at Burymead.
The object I liked most in the Social History Store was the wooden Bird House.
When we first discovered it in the depths of the store room, it was very dusty, and its only inhabitant was a lonely spider. But once we had taken the object out, dusted it off a little and taken the spider out it was clear that it was a very beautiful, decorative bird house.The birdhouse is very ornate and delicate, the bird house itself probably would have been a decoration in the front room.
In the 18th century, birds lived in dwellings that were similar of houses for people than for the birds themselves. Often made of expensive and exotic woods and built like miniature architectural models, these structures were found among the very rich and fashionable people of England and France. While structurally beautiful, most of these fantastic cages did little to support the needs of the bird. Often dangerous for the birds and difficult to clean, it’s amazing that the birds survived in these structures at all.
I particularly like the small set of steps leading up to the ‘door’, which were obviously useless for the bird, but make the entire cage look more like a house.
Finally I would like to thank everyone at the North Herts Museum Service for being so welcoming and giving me the opportunity to see the objects in storage. I look forward to visiting the new museum in 2015.