Hertford Museum Blog

The Friends of Hertford Museum have done it again!  Their successful Quiz Night on Saturday 7th March at St. Johns Hall in Hertford raised just over £1000 towards the museum’s development project!

All will agree that the Quiz Night is always a cerebral challenge (the museum team came joint 4th which was great!).  A baked potato supper gave us food for thought halfway through (and the thought of winning a easter egg in the raffle helped me immensely!) and a great evening was had by all.

We now only have to raise about £45,000 to fulfill all the aims of our development project. If you can help, we would love to hear from you!  Just look on our main museum website for contact details or click the red DONATE button to go straight to our secure payment site.

If you are interested in becoming a Friend of Hertford Museum, please do contact us and we will send you a form.  Their next meeting is on Tuesday 21st of April at 8pm at the Millbridge Rooms in Hertford (SG14 1PX), where Learning Officer Eleanor Payne will be speaking to them about learning at Hertford Museum.  In May they will be going on a tour of St. Leonard’s Church in Hertford which is well worth seeing.

Staff and volunteers have been moving objects and furniture across to the stores for months now.  This has been a long and slow process, and we couldn’t have done it without our great team of staff and volunteers.

Collections Assistant Margaret Harris (left) and Assistant Curator Ruth Stratton (right) moving the old display cases to the museum stores.

Museum intern Junko Watanabe (left) and Learning Officer Eleanor Payne (right) boxing up all of the handling collection ready to be stored in the museum office and stores.

Last week, the building was finally emptied of all traces of museum items and our builders, ‘Bakers of Danbury’ started work on the 9th of March.  In a space of hours, they had removed all traces of  our ‘museum interior’ including the boarding that had been put up in the different display areas.  The museum looks completely different and a lot bigger!  We want to regularly update our supporters with pictures of the museum and how it is changing.  This started in December 2008, when Pan 3Sixty  produced a virtual tour of the museum before we closed to the public.  Since then, we have been taking our own photographs of the changes to the museum which can be seen here:

Work started on removing the old exhibition fixtures on the ground floor.

The same room with all the fixtures removed - it looks much bigger now!

The same room, completely empty.

View of the stairwell from the ground floor, as you walk through the front door

The first floor gallery space

The view into the old activity room which will become more display space

We will be posting more images of the progress on this blog.