Where
In the wool town of Clare, Suffolk. The house was given to the parish by a local businessman who acquired it in 1930 to stop a rich American who planned to buy the house, pack it up and reassemble it in the US.
What
A small, volunteer-run museum, says Tom Shaw, the secretary to the ten trustees who run Clare Ancient House Museum Trust.
Opened
1979. The original Clare Ancient House Museum trustees could not maintain the house and the museum became, says, Shaw, “a bit like a granny’s attic”.
With the help of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and St Edmundsbury District Council, and a new group of ten trustees, the museum was redesigned and reopened in 1998.
Since then, the house has been leased to the Landmark Trust at a peppercorn rent. Half the house is the museum; the other half is rented out by the Landmark Trust to visitors.
Collection
Other than 500 small items such as flints and daggers, the museum has a collection of documents and historical photographs relating to Clare, a town with a past that stretches from the prehistoric to an important role in the Roman and Norman periods. “When we reopened, we had to be ruthless about our collections,” says Shaw.
“We gave away our stuffed animals and mangles to bigger museums and refocused on what this museum was to be. We wrote a mission statement saying that we would be a source of heritage information, rather than a display of historical knick-knacks.”
The museum prides itself on skills in interpretation of material evidence and aims to involve the whole community.
Help at hand
The museum is run by the ten trustees, all of them retired – four of them, including Shaw, are historians, which helps with the research it carries out. The museum has 45 volunteers and about 70 friends.
Budget
“We are self-supporting, but we get occasional grants from the council, the Association of Suffolk Museums and the local hub,” says Shaw. Admission is £1.
Visitors
800 in 2009; this figure doubled when the Clare reliquary, a medieval cross unearthed nearby in the grounds of Clare Castle in 1866, was shown in 2008. “We can’t fit more than ten people into the museum at a time,” says Shaw. The museum also raises funds from film showings, open days, town tours and special events.
Highlights
“Overall, I think it’s all the photographs people have given us. We have some that date back a long way,” Shaw says.
Survival tip
“You need community enthusiasm. You have to keep plugging your relevance to the community and make it proud of its cultural heritage.”
Sticky moment
“Around 1997, the old trustees became so dispirited. We had to imagine a new solution – and this lead to the museum as it is now,” Shaw says. Another low point was when all the museum’s accreditation documents got lost in a postal strike and Shaw had to do them again.
Current projects
Living with Dissent (until September) focuses on Clare’s volatile religious history. One of its prize exhibits, borrowed from the cathedral at Bury St Edmunds, is the Armada chalice. “It’s old, but it’s probably a fake,” says Shaw.
www.clare-ancient-house-museum.co.uk
In the wool town of Clare, Suffolk. The house was given to the parish by a local businessman who acquired it in 1930 to stop a rich American who planned to buy the house, pack it up and reassemble it in the US.
What
A small, volunteer-run museum, says Tom Shaw, the secretary to the ten trustees who run Clare Ancient House Museum Trust.
Opened
1979. The original Clare Ancient House Museum trustees could not maintain the house and the museum became, says, Shaw, “a bit like a granny’s attic”.
With the help of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and St Edmundsbury District Council, and a new group of ten trustees, the museum was redesigned and reopened in 1998.
Since then, the house has been leased to the Landmark Trust at a peppercorn rent. Half the house is the museum; the other half is rented out by the Landmark Trust to visitors.
Collection
Other than 500 small items such as flints and daggers, the museum has a collection of documents and historical photographs relating to Clare, a town with a past that stretches from the prehistoric to an important role in the Roman and Norman periods. “When we reopened, we had to be ruthless about our collections,” says Shaw.
“We gave away our stuffed animals and mangles to bigger museums and refocused on what this museum was to be. We wrote a mission statement saying that we would be a source of heritage information, rather than a display of historical knick-knacks.”
The museum prides itself on skills in interpretation of material evidence and aims to involve the whole community.
Help at hand
The museum is run by the ten trustees, all of them retired – four of them, including Shaw, are historians, which helps with the research it carries out. The museum has 45 volunteers and about 70 friends.
Budget
“We are self-supporting, but we get occasional grants from the council, the Association of Suffolk Museums and the local hub,” says Shaw. Admission is £1.
Visitors
800 in 2009; this figure doubled when the Clare reliquary, a medieval cross unearthed nearby in the grounds of Clare Castle in 1866, was shown in 2008. “We can’t fit more than ten people into the museum at a time,” says Shaw. The museum also raises funds from film showings, open days, town tours and special events.
Highlights
“Overall, I think it’s all the photographs people have given us. We have some that date back a long way,” Shaw says.
Survival tip
“You need community enthusiasm. You have to keep plugging your relevance to the community and make it proud of its cultural heritage.”
Sticky moment
“Around 1997, the old trustees became so dispirited. We had to imagine a new solution – and this lead to the museum as it is now,” Shaw says. Another low point was when all the museum’s accreditation documents got lost in a postal strike and Shaw had to do them again.
Current projects
Living with Dissent (until September) focuses on Clare’s volatile religious history. One of its prize exhibits, borrowed from the cathedral at Bury St Edmunds, is the Armada chalice. “It’s old, but it’s probably a fake,” says Shaw.
www.clare-ancient-house-museum.co.uk