Museums

Museums are fantastic places that give the public a chance to view things they might not be able to see. Many early museums were in fact places to display the private collections of various wealthy collectors, although the form has expanded now into the museum structure we are all familiar with.

There are many types of museums, though. National museums tend to specialise in certain aspects of history and artefacts, for example, the National History Museum, or the Imperial War Museum. Here the public can find long-standing and permanent exhibitions alongside shorter special-interest and focussed exhibitions and displays. Other types of museums include galleries, where art collections are often housed on a permanent loan arrangement with the private collector and, of course, where new installations and exhibitions are displayed.

There are also small, local history museums, specialising in anything of interest from the history of the particular town and often functioning as tourist information points, too. There are also museums dedicated to military history, near for example Winchester and Chelmsford can be found museums dedicated to the histories of the Royal Greenjackets and the Essex Regiment respectively.

National Trust houses, castles and sites are also museums, in some cases a kind of living history, where they serve as very small parts of the greater National Trust story of British History, like the Tudor cloth merchant’s residence Paycocke’s House near Coggeshall. Listed buildings in the UK also provide living museums within cities part of the history of the area and still part of modern life.