Potters Bar Museum

Potters Bar Museum opened in 1990 and displays material relating to Potters Bar and the local area.

It is in one of the earliest known sites of interest in the area, facing the timber-framed Wyllyotts Manor, part of which dates back to the 14th century (now used as a restaurant and a public house).

There is reason to believe that the site has been occupied since the Iron Age and certainly Roman times. The museum contains much pottery and artefacts which were found during the construction of the Wyllyotts Centre and allows visitors to relive some of the history of the place.

The museum also contains many items from other sites in and around Potters Bar and from the motte-and-bailey castle at South Mimms, which for many years lay unrecognised or forgotten.

Some natural history items are also on display, together with fossils, geological specimens like Hertfordshire pudding stones, and a selection of Mesolithic stone implements used by the earliest known inhabitants.

Parts of a Zeppelin which crashed in Potters Bar in 1916 are also on view.

Tate Modern

Tate is an executive non-departmental public body and an exempt charity. Its mission is to increase the public’s enjoyment and understanding of British art from the 16th century to the present day and of international modern and contemporary art

Unst Heritage Centre

The Unst Heritage Centre owes its existence to the foresight and effort of the original Unst History Group.

Realising that a way of life linked to the old methods of crofting and fishing was disappearing, they organised an exhibition of old artefacts in the Haroldswick Hall.

The response was encouraging, making visitors realise that many similar items had already been cast aside.

A further exhibition was organised to coincide with the 1985 ‘Hamefaring’.

It became a priority to save both these artefacts and their stories so the hunt was on to find a suitable permanent home for them. Cost and availability were to make the task very difficult. However, Mouat’s Shop at Haroldswick became vacant and available in 1997.After alterations, much of it carried out by volunteers, it reopened to the public as the Unst Heritage Centre.

Joan Mouat and May Sutherland, with their extensive knowledge of Unst and its people did a sterling job as its main curators. Over the following years old treasures gathered till the building was groaning at the seams.

When the Haroldswick School closed in 1997 the History Group saw the possibility of a larger and suitable venue where the growing collection could be extended and developed.

The Shetland Amenity Trust came to the rescue by purchasing the School and leasing it back to the History Group. The move was made and the old school, which had served the area for 117 years, found a suitable role as Unst’s Heritage Centre.

At this stage the Unst Heritage Trust was formed to manage the Unst Heritage Centre and the Unst Boat Haven.

FLAME: The Gasworks Museum

The gasworks opened in 1855 and supplied the town with gas made from coal until 1967. It was subsequently used to distribute gas piped from Belfast until its closure in 1987.

The gasworks was restored by the Carrickfergus Gasworks Preservation Society and opened to the public as a visitor attraction in 2002.

Flame Gasworks is one of only three preserved gasworks in Britain and Ireland. It boasts Western Europe’s largest set of retorts (in which the gas was made), and an extensive collection of gas appliances and documents.

Mid-Antrim Museum

The Mid-Antrim Museum offers a range of talks, events and excursions which provide enjoyable ways to get involved with local history. From family activities to topics of special interest – there’s something for everyone. Of course, there’s an unmissable range of changing exhibitions too!

Royal Academy of Music Museum

Visit the Royal Academy of Music Museum to explore unique instruments, manuscripts and art, and discover behind-the-scenes stories from the United Kingdom’s oldest conservatoire.

In permanent galleries and temporary displays, visitors will see star items such as the ‘Viotti ex-Bruce’ 1709 violin by Antonio Stradivari once played to Queen Marie Antoinette, Gilbert and Sullivan’s original score for ‘The Mikado’, and a Viennese piano from 1815 with six pedals. You can learn about the role the Academy and its alumni have played in musical development for nearly 200 years, and perhaps hear a live gallery demonstration of a clavichord or a 19th century piano.

Our friendly Gallery Assistants are Academy students who will tell you more about the displays and talk about their studies at the Academy. The Museum regularly holds free public musical and lecture events, museum tours, and offers children’s trails with quizzes and puzzles.

Cartoon Museum

In 1988 a group of cartoonists, collectors and lovers of the art form came together as The Cartoon Art Trust with the aim of founding a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, promoting and preserving the best of British cartoon art. After a decade of exhibiting in smaller venues, in February 2006 the Cartoon Museum opened to the public at its current home in central London, very near the British Museum.

The museum has three main galleries displaying original artwork from British cartoons and comics, past and present. Temporary exhibitions since 2006 have featured Private Eye, William Heath Robinson, Steve Bell, Giles, Pont, H.M. Bateman, Viz Comic, Ronald Searle, The Beano, Ralph Steadman and many other luminaries. At the heart of the museum lies its growing collection of cartoons, caricatures and pages of comic-strip art. The foundations of modern British political and social cartooning can be found in works by Hogarth – whose social satires are regarded by many as the foundation of the British cartoon tradition, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. The permanent collection also includes works by a number of fine Victorian cartoonists including John Leech, George Cruikshank, George Du Maurier and John Tenniel. William Heath Robinson – whose name is synonymous with outlandish and hilarious contraptions – hangs with his contemporary, H.M. Bateman, two of the most successful cartoonists of the first half of the 20^th century. Also featured in the permanent collection are Pont, Gerald Scarfe, Ronald Searle, Giles, Martin Rowson, Steve Bell and a host of favourites from newspapers and magazines.

Our upstairs gallery displays original artwork by some of the founding fathers of British comics, such as David Law (Dennis the Menace, Beryl the Peril), Leo Baxendale (Bash St. Kids, Minnie the Minx), and Frank Hampson (Dan Dare), alongside work by Posy Simmonds, Sarah MacIntyre, Nick Abadzis, and the final page of Alan Moore & David Lloyd’s seminal V for Vendetta. From the US, there are originals by Garry Trudeau and Charles Schulz.

The museum runs events and workshops for schools & colleges, families, children and adults. The classroom can be booked for children’s birthday workshops, and the whole museum can be hired to host special events for businesses and social groups. There is also a library of 5,000 books on comics and cartoons which is available for research purposes by appointment.

The Cartoon Museum Shop stocks more than 900 books on the history of cartoons and comic-strips, graphic novels and children’s books, and a wide range of cards, posters, prints and cartoon-related novelty gifts.

National Museum of Rural Life

Discover how 300 years of farming and rural home life have shaped and altered Scotland’s countryside. Tour the period farmhouse for a sense of what living on a farm was really like more than 50 years ago, and meet the animals on the historic working farm: Ayrshire cows, Tamworth pigs, Scots dumpy hens, black-faced sheep and Clydesdale horses.

Lincolnshire Road Transport Museum

Our Museum includes a variety of items large and small connected to road transport in the area, as well as a number of items of street furniture from the eras our vehicles were an everyday sight on the County’s streets.

There are also displays of small artefacts, model vehicles, and displays with information, photographs and posters from the past – these are changed regularly.

Leadhills Miners Library

Leadhills Miner’s Library is the oldest subscription library in the British Isles. The Liverpool Subscription Library, the first in England was not founded until 1758. The second oldest library being in Wanlockhead our neighboring village.

Of the 23 founder members at Leadhills all were miners except for the minister and the schoolmaster.

The early books were mainly religious in character and included;

Scougal…’Life of God in the Soul of Man’
Grotius…’Truth of the Christian Religion’
Du Pin’s…’History of the Church’
Burnet’s…’Thirty-nine Articles’
Matthew Hendry’s…Communicant’s Companion’
and many volumes of sermons.

Many of the volumes acquired in the first century of the library’s life are still extant, and the miners deserve credit for tackling such reading after a hard shift underground or at the smelting mills. The considerable sums, noted in the Minute Books, spent on repairs and rebinding show that the books really were read, and were not merely status symbols.

Members included a number of celebrated men. William Symington, mining engineer of Leadhills and inventor of the paddle steamer and steam pumping engines. Dr. John Brown, the Edinburgh author of ‘Rab and his Friends’ both belonged to the library.

The Library used to be named after Allan Ramsay. This refers to Allan Ramsay the elder, poet and auther of ‘The Gentle Shepherd’. He was born in Leadhills in 1686, the son of Robert Ramsay, the mine manager. While there is nothing to link him to the library other than he was an author and poet, there may be a connection, but, having not found one we decided to revert back to the original name of ‘The Leadhills Reading Society’.

Allan Ramsay had already, in 1725, established a circulating library in the Luckenbooths area of Edinburgh, and no doubt this idea was heard of in his native village. Allan Ramsay was the son of Robert Ramsay and Alice Bowes. Robert was the son of another Robert Ramsay, also a mine manager at Leadhills, and Alice Bowes was the daughter of a Derbyshire man who had been brought to Leadhills to teach the miners there, Allans father was cut off at 25 leaving no provision for his family. Allan was apprenticed to a wigmaker in Edinburgh, and lived there the rest of his life. He never forgot Leadhills and the influence of its moorland scenery is easy to trace in his poetry.

Today the library contains various relics of the past life in the village and the mines, as well as the book collection. A mineral collection is on display showing rare minerals unique to this area including one of ‘Leadhillsite’