Museum OPEN

FAR MORE THAN ECCENTRIC REPOSITORIES OF THINGS, A TRIP TO YOUR LOCAL MUSEUM CAN REMIND YOU OF THE UNIQUE CHARACTER OF WHERE YOU LIVE, AND BRINGS A TOUCH OF CIVIC PRIDE, SAYS JULIAN OWEN

Nobody pays closer attention to their local environment than young children. I genuinely looked forward to the twice-weekly viewing of my favourite building, when Mum would push me and my sister from the green, over the town bridge and up the hill to town. And it was back there at the bridge that you beheld it, 30 yards upstream, its windowless sides of perforated brickwork spanning the river atop a stone archway.

I assumed that every town had one such building. But they didn’t. Not a single other place. I only came to know of its uniqueness some years later, on a trip to the local museum. I also learnt its name and purpose. In the 19th century, explained Mrs Rodway, Trowbridge was a giant of the woollen industry, and it needed the Handle House to dry the vast amount of teasels required by more than 20 factories to raise the nap of the cloth.

Its ingenious river-straddling location meant that, even on the most tranquil of days, air would still be drawn through.

Mrs Rodway, better known to young folk throughout town as their favourite supply teacher, was also a volunteer at the town’s museum. She looked as old as time and carried a warmth, humour, and latent threat that even the unruliest child thought better of testing. When she talked, you listened, reeling off so peerless a knowledge of local history that she was commonly known as Mrs Trowbridge.

Every local museum will have a Mrs

Rodway. Mr Grimsby or Ms Lytham St Annes might have peered into the darkest corners of local arcana for their own interest, but it’s clear that their real gratification comes from passing their findings on. Generally, they’re working with limited materials, just a room or two of objects assembled on the whim of previous curators, an often idiosyncratic collection related to, say, a proud local history of cheesemaking, or rail automation. But they know how to make it talk.

And people are increasingly minded to listen. Pretty much every settlement in the country now has its own Facebook group sharing pics of yesteryear. Your local museum will not only have supersized versions of many of these images – showing the town’s first fire service, say, or women making munitions in a converted engineering works – but many of the artefacts contained therein. It’s one thing to peer at a slightly grainy photo of women manufacturing artillery shells, quite another to be able to theoretically – it’s okay, Mr Grimsby, we know the rules – reach out and touch the very lathe on which the shell casings were turned; it’s in ‘Just imagine, they were pushing that lever’ proximity that the brain is most moved to breathe life into history.

“They are often working with limited materials but they know how to make it talk”

And while we’re familiar with the bigger picture – how women’s work during the Great War fuelled the march towards emancipation, for example – it’s the local angle that adds a layer of texture we can truly grasp. Take that photo of shop steward Peggy Bainbridge standing outside the row of terraced houses round the corner from your nan. Might she have known her as a girl? At the very least,

Peggy must have walked through that same alley you took to let yourself into Nan’s after school. You’ve brushed the same wall, seen the same shadow of the church tower fall across the cobbles in late summer.

The past draws close in local museums.

They are also a dab hand at instilling a sense of civic pride. Useful, in a place habitually regarded somewhat sneeringly by denizens of nearby towns holding rather more allure. So, while Trowbridge may not have the (twee, self-consciously arty, if you ask me) rambling charm of nearby Frome, or the same scale of historic architecture as Devizes ( honestly, it literally smells like a brewery there), I can instead delight in knowing that I share the same hometown as the inventor of the UK’s most popular shorthand system, Sir Isaac Pitman, not to mention the celebrated union martyr, Thomas Helliker. Everywhere has a someone, and your local museum will be able to tell you yours. Just don’t expect a Handle House, that’s ours.