Visiting the Museum!

Our standard opening hours are:

Wednesday-Saturday 10-5pm

Sundays & Bank Holidays 2-5pm

Closed Mondays (apart from bank holidays)

Tuesdays are reserved for pre-booked group visits by schools and other parties in term time. 

www.saffronwaldenmuseum.org

Object of the Month

The Museum’s ‘Object of the Month’ provides an opportunity to explore interesting and unusual objects from our stores. 

May’s object of the month is a fossil sponge from Radwinter

Saffron Walden Museum offers a free identification service for objects from north-west Essex. People often find interesting stones in their garden or in fields. Many of these are flint nodules. Flint is a hard rock that comes from chalk, a soft white limestone that is 200 metres thick in north Essex and Cambridgeshire. Chalk was formed as a limy mud on the floor of a tropical sea that once covered most of Britain and north-west Europe during the Cretaceous period 65-145 million years ago. The sea water contained dissolved quartz, or silica, originating from the skeletons of tiny sponges. As the mud was compressed into chalk the silica became concentrated as nodules or layers of flint. When the chalk became exposed as dry land, erosion by rivers released the flint and redeposited it as thick layers of gravel. Flint is often found as brown, iron-stained pebbles. Unweathered nodules, fresh from chalk rock, are black with a white outer surface.

Occasionally flints contain fossils of sea urchins or cockle shells. This circular stone from Radwinter is a Sponge called Porosphaera globularis which is fossilised in flint rock. The animal lived in the sea that covered Essex 80 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs. To find out more visit the Museum in May or see our website www.saffronwaldenmuseum.org

Feeding the Family 

Runs until Sun 9 July 2023   

Saffron Walden Museum dishes up a new exhibition!

The new temporary exhibition which opened in April showcases the history of food preparation and food serving from Roman times to the present day. 

Throughout history, people have laboured to put food on the table. The Museum draws on its own collections and historical sources to see what local families might have been preparing and eating over the last 2,000 years.

Food is always a major topic and these days more so than ever. Affordability, supply, diet and environmental sustainability are all in the news. We wanted to explore how our meals and food fashions have changed throughout history.

Visitors to the exhibition will get the chance to see original recipes as well as typical dishes and tableware from each time-period. To accompany the display there will also be mystery food smells to identify, and why not decorate a plate with a picture of your favourite meal or write about your food memories and add it to our display. 

In conjunction with this exhibition, the museum has partnered with Uttlesford Foodbank to help our visitors learn more about their vital work, helping local residents who are struggling to afford to feed their families.

Your Stories: 

The Hidden History Project:

A special exhibition by The Lodge

In this display, you will find an intriguing array of different items, information, and stories. You will also get a peek into the process that brought these items together!

Earlier this year, a group of young people and facilitators from The Lodge - a consent-based, self-directed learning community based in Saffron Walden - formed a collaboration with the Museum.

The Uttlesford Open 2023

Closing date 20th May

The Uttlesford Open 2023 is Saffron Walden Museum’s first, open call, judged art exhibition.

Artists, aged over 18 who are living, working, or studying in Uttlesford or within 20 miles of Saffron Walden Museum are invited to submit artworks on the theme of “A Sense of Place: The people, places and landscape of Uttlesford”.

Why not enter a drawing of your favourite place? Or a photograph of a person who inspires you? What about a print of that iconic building in your town or village or a sculpture of the kestrel you see every morning when you walk the dog.  Keep an eye on social media posts for some more inspiration.

We are excepting artworks in any media except video and sound recordings.

To Enter:

1) Read the full T&C's (available at https://www.swmuseumlearning.com/uttlesfordopen23)

2) Create your artwork, exploring the theme of a "Sense of Place" and taking inspiration from the people, places, and landscape of Uttlesford.

3) Visit our art tickets page from April 3rd and pay your entry fee. Keep your digital receipt.

4) Complete the entry form.

5) Email the entry form, images of your work, and your entry fee receipt from art tickets to UttlesfordOpen@uttlesford.gov.uk by 11.59 on 20th May (we recommend not leaving it to the last minute!)

Linton Children’s

Book Festival

James will be taking a small Lost language of Nature stall to Linton Children’s Book Festival on Saturday 13^th May, to ask people to tell, write or draw their stories about wildlife in their life.

Linton Children’s Book Festival has lots of activities for Children aged 2 to 12 and is FREE to attend, but it’s a good idea to book your slot in advance at https://lintonbookfest.org/authors/

"Greater in Spirit, Larger in Outlook" project visit

Staff and volunteers from Epping Forest District Museum (EFDM) visited the museum in April as part of the museums' joint project, Greater in Spirit Larger in Outlook (GSLO), which is focussing on re-interpreting both museums' world culture collections. 

The EFDM group had a guided tour of the museum and stores by Jenny. Alice (Collections Connector for the Project) then gave an update on the GSLO project and the upcoming exhibition for the project which is being held at EFDM, which will feature objects loaned by Saffron Walden Museum. 

The group discussed the issues associated with caring for and interpreting world cultures collections in museums. 

Lost Language of Nature celebration event

On 11^th April, we celebrated the culmination of the Lost Language art commission with a thank-you event for the students of Joyce Frankland Academy Newport who took part in workshops led by our artist, Janetka Platun, and whose work inspired Janetka’s work, Nest. A big thank you also to our partners, Essex Cultural Diversity Project, for their funding provided by Arts Council England, and Saffron Walden Museum Society who also contributed.

(Pictured left): Thank You Event. Image credit: Essex Cultural Diversity Project

Ambitious Women in Essex

In March we hosted a joint Uttlesford District Council and Ambitious Women in Essex event in the run up to International Women's Day, at the museum. 

The feedback from the event was very positive and it was a joy to host this event, as the key speaker and attendees were inspirational and thought provoking. 

Ready for spring

The wooden planters have been emptied, re-lined to help keep out the wind and keep in the water, given fresh compost and the plants have been thinned. Most importantly, the edible plants and the sensory plants now sit either end of the bench near the tennis courts. It gives them more daylight and puts strawberries in easy reach of a summertime rest-stop!

Parsley seedlings

Self-seeded and over-wintered in the Museum’s wooden planters, these parsley seedlings were available from the Museum for a discretionary donation by cash or card. Thank you to the parsley lovers for your contributions!

Roman Radwinter

Roman finds from Radwinter are currently the focus of cataloguing at the Museum’s off-site store. Of particular interest is a site at Eastview Close, excavated in 1970. Two large pits were discovered, full of pottery and some other fragmentary finds. Skeletal remains of infants were also found. The site lies very near the projected route of the Roman road from Wixoe to Great Chesterford, and it seems that a small settlement grew up around the road junction in Radwinter, taking advantage of trading opportunities. Small pieces of painted wall plaster and the top of a glass bath flask hint at a well-to-do Roman-style building in the vicinity.

Learning & Outreach

Saffron Walden Museum is committed to sharing stories from its collections through its learning and outreach services.

We welcome schools and community groups to the Museum or offer outreach sessions. 

Why not book in your school or community group.

Our loan boxes are also available for hire, at £18 for 6 weeks, and will be quarantined in between hires to ensure they are Covid secure.

Greetings Cards 

On the official Coronation invitations, the border design has been inspired by British wildflower meadows, it features lily of the valley, cornflowers, wild strawberries, dog roses, bluebells, and a sprig of rosemary for remembrance, together with wildlife including a bee, a butterfly, a ladybird, a wren and a robin.

Flowers appear in groupings of three, signifying The King becoming the third monarch of his name. 

We have a lovely range of greetings cards featuring this wildlife in our museum shop:

Greeting Card - Butterfly in natural habitat - 7 x 5 Inches, blank inside. On sale at just £2.75

Thank You!

Big thank you to Liz and Jerry who very kindly helped with the annual stock take of the Museum Shop in April. It's a big task counting every item in the shop and then all the stock held behind the scenes and totting it all up. We really appreciated your help. 

Collections Volunteers : Ceramics Collection 

In April, university students Eleanor, Elizabeth and Katie joined us to help inventory the ceramic and glassware store behind the scenes at the museum. 

Eleanor is continuing with the project until September. 

They picked out their favourite items from the stores:

This condiment stand and bottles (pictured left) was donated to the museum in 1895 by Dr Henry Stear. A considerable portion of this collection was bequeathed and donated by Stear, who died in 1917.

The three bottles are labelled "Oli", "Azyn" and "Peper". "Azyn" means vinegar in the Frisian dialect, which is an area north of the Netherlands. "Oli" means oil in Dutch and "Peper" is pepper. This item is particularly exciting, as it provides some further insight into the Dr, with an obituary written on its base and a small accompanying image.

Henry Stear was a surgeon and worked as one of four initial doctors in the Saffron Walden General Hospital which was founded in 1866. The writing gives a positive and comedic account of Stear's influence on the town, family, character, occupation and a physical description, and is signed Guy Maynard 1920. Maynard took over as curator of the museum from his father in 1904 and had grown up in the building.

This strange-looking teapot (pictured left) is known as a ‘Cadogan’ or a ‘Puzzle’ teapot. In order the fill the teapot, it’s turned upside-down, where there is a hidden tube running from the base into the upper part of the pot and when turned the right way up no liquid spills.

This particular pot has a beautiful gold highlight around the top which emphasises its unusual shape, which conceals the top of the hidden tube, and allows the pot to be spill-proof.

Happy Birthday

Steve!

In April we helped Welcome desk volunteer Steve celebrate his milestone birthday!