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The Teddy Bear Museum

Teddy Bear Museum, Dorset

The Teddy Bear Museum is in Dorchester, Dorset. It first opened in Bournemouth in 1990 as The Bournemouth Bears and in 1995 relocated to Dorchester, where it was renamed Teddy Bear House. It moved again to accommodate a growing collection, and became The Dorset Teddy Bear Museum. It is Britain’s oldest teddy bear museum and its earliest specimen dates from 1906.

The Museum is furnished in period fashion and features life-sized bears who themselves appear to collect teddy bears. The collection includes replicas of some well-known bears such as Winnie the Pooh, Rupert Bear, and Paddington.

Image via The Teddy Bear Museum.

Categories
Museum Snapshots

Sandwich Doll Museum

Sandwich Doll Museum

As Fiona Candlin writes elsewhere on this site, one problem when researching small museums is that there may be very little information available about them. These two postcards are almost all we have of The Precinct Toy Collection, also known as The Sandwich Doll Museum. We can see that it contained Doll’s Houses, and another site suggests that it also had Noah’s Arks on show.

The site looks very different today, with the shop fronts removed and just a single entrance door in the centre of what was once the museum’s frontage. The Mapping Museums team always welcome more information about lost museums, so if you can tell us anything about this one, please get in touch.
Sandwich Doll Museum, also known as The Precinct Toy Collection, Harnet Street, Sandwich, Kent

Images kindly provided by the Sandwich Local History Society.