The Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth was run by Peter and Jane Hays for 58 years. Opened in 1954 and named after Madame Tussaud’s great grandson, it featured models of celebrities and historical figures. But faced with rising costs, declining income, and the loss of the wax modeller they had used, the Hays closed the museum in 2012. When the closure was announced they were praised for their contribution to local tourism. The exhibits were sold to a Czech collector in 2014.
The Adamston Agricultural Museum was opened in 1972 by Hew McCall-Smith. His collection comprised more than 500 items related to farming and domestic life in the North East of Scotland. This included ploughs, horse harness, and dairy equipment. McCall-Smith also organised events, including exhibits of threshing, ploughing, and cheese-making.
The museum remained open until the early 1980s, when the collection was purchased by Moray District Council and incorporated into Aden, the North East of Scotland Agricultural Centre (now known as the Aberdeenshire Farming Museum).
This building has had various lives, with at least four different institutions occupying the site. It was once the Cannon Hill Museum and devoted to the history of Birmingham. Around 1953, changes at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery led to the natural history department establishing a museum on the site. It subsequently became the Birmingham Nature Centre and is now the entrance to Birmingham Wildlife Conservation Park.
It is situated on the edge of Cannon Hill Park, which opened in 1873. The park was designed by T. J. Gibson, who had previously designed London’s Battersea Park.
Some information about the history of the museum is from: Wingfield, Christopher. “(Before and) after Gallery 33: Fifteen years on at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery” Journal of Museum Ethnography 18 (2006): 49-62, p.57. (read online at Academia.edu)
Plummer Tower was part of the old walls of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which were built from the mid-13th century to the middle or late 14th century. It was converted into a meeting house in the latter part of the 17th century by the Company of Cutlers, and a facade was added by the Company of Masons in the mid-18th century. The older parts of the building are Grade I Listed.
In 1948 the Tower was restored and used as a dwelling, and in 1957 it was acquired by the Corporation of Newcastle. After further restoration the Tower was used as a branch museum of the Laing Art Gallery. The upper floor was furnished as an eighteenth century room, while the ground floor housed temporary exhibits based on the city’s archives.
The 1964 photo above shows the tower in use as a museum, while a more recent image shows the museum sign was removed. The museum seems to have been open until at least 1985, when Kenneth Hudson and Ann Nichols’ Directory of Museums & Living Displays listed it as displaying 18th-century period rooms.
A leaflet kindly supplied by a reader of this blog provided more information about the Tower’s history and its use as a museum.
The 18th century room inside Plummer Tower Museum, Newcastle
Plummer Tower, 2007
Black and white image via Co-Curate, colour image via Wikipedia. Leaflet provided by Angela Essenhigh. More information from See Newcastle. This post was updated in August 2020.
Over the course of their research, the Mapping Museums team have been collecting photos of museums, which will be featured in a series of posts on the site and in the Photo Gallery.
The Fraserburgh Heritage Centre opened in 1998 and describes the history of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The centre building was originally a herring barrel store.
