On Saturday evening you can come along to the museum enjoy melodic, soulful songs with acoustic guitar gymnastics from Rob Clydesdale and music from harpist Steve Clear. We’ll also have wine and nibbles for you to enjoy while you listen to the music in the unique and tranquil atmosphere of Hertford Museum on a spring evening.

And it’s all for free!

Harpist Steve Clear

Guitarist Rob Clydesdale

Where Hertford Museum
Date Saturday 19th May 2012
Time 6pm- 9pm
Price FREE

There’s no need to book, just drop in, but if you’re coming why not sign up to the event on facebook and let us know?

As a big thank you here are some pictures of our hardworking staff & volunteers putting together the bases of our giant objects ready for them to go out to our school partners to be built up and decorated!

Can you guess what any of these are going to become?

Christ's Hospital by Lionel Horsnell

The museum is hoping to add two of the exhibited paintings to our collections and to help us raise the funds to purchase them we are asking visitors and supporters who are interested to give us a small donation. The two paintings we hope to buy are of McMullens and Christ’s Hospital. If you would like to support us then please get in touch!

Lionel Horsnell

Lionel Horsnell by Elva Peacock

Lionel specialised in painting landscapes across the British countryside but particularly in the Home Counties. His work has been exhibited in London, provincial and international galleries and he won several awards including The Havilland De Saumarez Award.

In later life Lionel settled in a cottage in Hertford and was well known around the town. He died in 2011.

The Salisbury by Lionel Horsnell

It will be opening the weekend of the Diamond Jubilee and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response to our request for Royal Souvenirs so now we’re asking you to think about some other kinds of souvenirs.

We’d really like to have some objects in our exhibition that are souvenirs of special events, times or people in your lives like a cinema ticket or receipt from a first date. Sara our curator has brought in her children’s hospital wrist tags from the days they were born and Eleanor is lending us a pair of Take That pants bought during their reunion tour in 2006 so anything that’s a personal souvenir to you could be in our exhibition!

We’d also like any souvenirs of wartime, 1970s foreign holidays and the British seaside.

Of course we will take the utmost care of everyone’s treasured possessions and the exhibition runs from the 2nd June to the 1st September.

Please get in touch if you think you can help us!

Our Hertingfordbury exhibition will be closing soon and we’re gong to have an exhibition of paintings by local artist Lionel Horsnell and of course there are always our events and children’s activities but if you look carefully you’ll see that there are other new objects and displays to find as well.

With the closure of the old Hertford Library building we were given the library clock to add to our collection and we’ve found a space for it upstairs in our galleries. There’s lots of information about its maker and its life at the library and its still ticking away if you want to come and visit it!

We’ve also recently added a framed picture of the Panshanger Oak to our stairwell- a lasting legacy from our Hertingfordbury exhibition.

Those are both permanent additions to our galleries there is also a new display in the small case behind our Reception.

One of our volunteers, Ben, came to us after studying for an MA in Classical Art and Archaeology from King’s College London and he has chosen some special objects from our collection for a display on antiquities. There are Greek, Roman & Egyptian objects on display so come take a look!

Any money we are given by Waitrose will be going towards our Carnival float for this year’s Hertford Carnival in June. We’ve got big plans to decorate our float- we’re hoping to make giant models of some of the objects from our collection- like our Samurai and maybe an ENORMOUS toothbrush.

But we won’t be making them alone- we’re working with lots of local schools who will each take on a different model. The schools taking part are:

• Bengeo Primary School

• Hollybush Primary School
• Richard Hale School
• The Sele School
• Morgans Primary School
• Hertford Heath School
• Hertford Selections Children’s Centre

So your Waitrose token in our box will help all of those schools as well as us AND you’ll be able to enjoy wha we create at the the Hertford Carnival on Sunday 24th June 2012

We’ve got sea and water based activities on this week and next on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday from 10:30am- 3:30pm. It’s only £1.50 per child and you can make all sorts of exciting things.

To add to the Easter excitement this Saturday sees the return of Afternoon Tea at the Museum. Tea & cake are served from 11am- 4pm every Saturday and this year we’re going to have fresh coffee as well! If it’s sunny you can enjoy a cup of tea in our lovely garden and if it’s raining (or snowing!) there’s plenty of space inside.

And as if that wasn’t enough our Museum & RNLI Trail also started at the weekend so the sea and coastline are popping up all over Hertford! We’ve already had some answer sheets back so make sure you come in and buy yours (£1 for a family trail or an adult one). So far we’ve mostly had answers back from the children so it’s time for the grown ups to catch up!

As usual there’s plenty to do at Hertford Museum over the holidays.

Copyright Mark A. Hicks

Under the Sea craft activities

Take part in craft activities themed around all things aquatic! Tuesday 3rd – Thursday 5th and Tuesday 10th – Thursday 12th April 2012

Our activities run from 10.30 am to 3.30 pm and cost £1.50 per child, drop-in

In week one you can make a paper plate port hole and an octopus or starfish and in week two we’ll be painting underwater scenes and making a cork boat!

Hertford Museum & RNLI Easter Trail

Have a go at this trail around some of Hertford’s shops and businesses from Saturday 31st March – Sunday 15th April

Hertford Museum has teamed up with a local RNLI fundraising group to organise another fun trail around the town centre shops. This year the trail, which runs over the Easter Holidays, has the shops each choosing a lifeboat station around the UK as the theme for their display. There will also be two trails this year! Our usual one for families and a trickier, cryptic, one for adults!

Trails cost £1 each and are on sale at the museum.

© Copyright Natalia A McKenzie and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

As part of a project called Effective Museums our Learning Officer Eleanor has beeing working really hard on some new ideas for visiting families.

If you visit the museum today you might notice our new Discovery Station.

Visiting children can choose 2 or 3 things from the boxes- like a magnifying glass or some finger puppets or even a magic wand!- to take round the museum and the instruction sheet gives you ideas of how to use them.

There are also some books available in the galleries for you to read as a family if you have a chance.

But that’s only the start of our plans! At the moment we’re collecting questions from children to help us put together special fact files for some of our objects and there might be some more fun interactive areas appearing in the museum as well.

Keep watching this blog/facebook/twitter and visiting the museum and let us know what you think of our new ideas!

A volunteers meeting

This week we thought we would bring you a resume of the tasks our volunteers are working on at Hertford Museum today; Wednesday being our busiest day for volunteers…

Liz has been inputting onto our museum collections database ‘Modes Complete’ details from the book ‘The History of Hertford Castle’ by WF Andrews.  WilliamFrampton (WF) Andrews was one of the founding fathers of Hertford Museum, along with his brother Robert Thornton (RT) Andrews.

Fran and Terry are creating an inventory of our photograph collection (which comprises of over 12,000 images!) as well as organising the Friends of Hertford Museum summer garden party scheduled for Saturday 7th July.

Our work experience student from The Sele School has been taking photographs of some of our small archaeological finds, downloading the images onto the computer and then renaming the photograph files.  This is a really useful job as these images will eventually be uploaded onto the individual database entry for each object.

Donna is inputting details of a variety of photographs onto Modes Complete.

The museum was donated the Hertford Addis factory collection and archive in 2002 and Robin is cataloguing the Addis factory paper archives, including documents such as accounts, letters and memos. 

An oral history, is a recording of someone talking about their memories of certain events and Jean has been checking many of these files for mentions of Hertford shops and businesses that are not clearly audible.  She is now looking in the relevant Kelly’s Directories of local Hertford businesses to corroborate these records.  This will make the oral history transcripts (or typed up versions of the audio file, which every oral history has to have) complete, making more sense to us and of course of more use!

Activity volunteers Gillian and Dawn

We have over 40 volunteers at Hertford Museum that help us on a daily basis and at the moment we are currently unable to take on any more to help with collections work.  However, if you are interested in volunteering in the future, please email us your CV and interests to hertfordmuseum@btconnect.com and we shall be in touch after September if we are able to take on any more.