Artist at the Museum – come and meet our jeweller!

We’re delighted to be hosting an exhibition of Thornbury jeweller Rosemary Millar’s work, for the duration of the Severn Vale Art Trail.  The exhibition runs from Thursday 28 April to Monday 2 May 2022, from 10am to 4pm each day – longer than we are usually open.

Museum volunteers are offering to do extra sessions in order to enable this to happen, so that Rosemary’s exhibition can be open for 6 hours a day for all 5 days.  Do come and support Rosemary – and our lovely, welcoming volunteers!

Rosemary makes silver and gold filled jewellery, incorporating hand-picked semi precious stones.  Each piece is unique.

Almost as beautiful as her jewellery is the very creative way she displays it.

Definitely not to be missed!

We’re open! Welcome back!

We’re delighted that the museum is now open for visitors again!

For the moment, our opening hours are 1-4 pm on Tuesdays and Fridays, and 10am-4pm on Saturdays.

We are encouraging visitors to wear face coverings to protect themselves and our volunteers.  Hand sanitiser will be available.

We have some new exhibitions, focusing on local “treasures” from the collection, as well as permanent displays on Thornbury Castle, the “Thornbury Hoard” of Roman coins, and the old railway line which once ran between Thornbury and Yate.

We have also revived the exhibition about Thornbury Picture House which had not long been in place when Covid shut everything down.

The Museum may be small, but there is a lot to see, so do pay us a visit!

Having fun at the Picture House…

Do you remember the Thornbury Picture House on the High Street?  (There’s a plaque on the wall to show where it used to be.)

Visitors have told us they remember sitting in the back row (the ‘two and nines’) with their girlfriends!

If you have memories of local nights out at the pictures, do share them with us.

Even if you weren’t around to enjoy the Picture House’s heyday, you’re bound to find something interesting in this exhibition of maybe simpler times, when entertainment choices weren’t as varied as they are now.

‘Thornbury Treasures’

We’ve used the re-opening of the museum to rearrange our displays!

Downstairs in the ‘Coins Room’, as well as information about the Roman coin hoard and a display about Thornbury Castle and its owner and builder, we’re also showing off some other ‘Thornbury Treasures’.

These objects all help to tell the history of our market town.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Although our very small  museum is still closed to visitors, volunteers have continued to work in a socially distanced way behind the scenes.  We hope to return to action in 2022, refreshed and ready to go, when Covid allows. But now the museum is all tucked up for Christmas and New Year.

Meanwhile, we have a lovely new seasonal spray painting on the museum wall, thanks to our ever inventive friend, Steve.

So, for now, Best Wishes and Happy Christmas and New Year, to all our friends far and near, from all the volunteers on the museum team!    We hope to see you next year.

Christmas Colouring Competition

During the run-up to Christmas, Thornbury & District Museum is inviting children to sprinkle some Glitter and Sparkle over Santa and a Christmas Tree!

There are three pictures for you to choose from in each age category and you can use any or all of them to colour and decorate with lots of sparkle and bling!

There are two age groups:

SANTA PICTURE – children aged 5, 6, 7
CHRISTMAS TREE PICTURE – children aged 8, 9, 10

The winners will receive a £5 voucher from Horders!

The competition will be posted on the Museum Facebook Page at the beginning of November 2020, so keep a lookout for it!

Discover Thornbury’s hidden railway…

We can’t hold guided walks in person at the moment, because of limits on numbers, but thanks to a brilliant collaboration between the museum’s own Meg Wise, Claire Jaggard of My Thornbury and Chipping Sodbury photographer Rich McD, we can offer you an online photographic walk along the line of Thornbury’s railway.

Many thanks to Meg, Claire and Rich for putting this walk together.

Check it out.  There will be so many things you didn’t know about Thornbury’s railway line!

We’re very busy on social media…

Our social media pages are humming, especially our Facebook page.

Images are posted most days, showing Thornbury and the surrounding villages at different times in their history.

Some of those images are supplied by our sister website Thornbury Roots. An example of a Thornbury Roots picture is the photo above, showing a charabanc outing by Thornbury Baptist Church to Cheddar Caves. Not much social distancing going on there!

Our Facebook followers are sending us lots of local historical photos too, so a big THANK YOU to all of them.

We’re finding out a huge amount from all these contributors, who are sharing their memories of people and places.

So, do check us out on Facebook… you never know what you’ll find out… or what information you may be able to share with us…

“We’re not scared…” – help us with a new project

How are you dealing with daily life during the Covid-19 outbreak?

In Olveston, as you can see from the pictures above, families on lockdown have joined other families around the world in being inspired by Michael Rosen’s book ‘We’re going on a Bear Hunt’, with its famous line:  “We’re not scared…”.

Teddy bears are being put in windows for people to spot on their daily walk.

With that as an example, our museum wants your assistance with a community history project for 2020.

PLEASE HELP US GATHER AND KEEP THE HISTORY OF CORONAVIRUS (COVID 19) 2020

Coronavirus (Covid 19) 2020 will become history and, in classrooms in the future, children will be learning about this.

As a museum, we want to gather, document and keep preserved for the future a rounded picture of the current situation, as experienced in Thornbury and the surrounding district.

(Our Museum, by the way, is called Thornbury AND DISTRICT because our collecting area covers 14 other parishes besides Thornbury: Almondsbury, Alveston, Aust (including Elberton and Littleton-upon-Severn), Charfield, Cromhall, Falfield, Hill, Oldbury-on-Severn, Olveston (including Old Down and Tockington), Pilning and Severn Beach, Rangeworthy, Rockhampton, Tortworth and Tytherington.)

We are hoping that those of you in all these areas who are willing and able to do so, would be interested in keeping notes or a diary and photos of some of the experiences that you or your friends and family have during this time.

Those experiences might relate to shopping, health, travelling, communication, home schooling, working, home entertainment – or anything else that’s important to you. We would like to hear about anything, no matter how insignificant you may think it is.

You can send us information at any time, or you may prefer to wait until this episode in our history has passed.

There is a special email address for this project: museum.thornbury@gmail.com

Or you can send by post to:
Thornbury & District Museum
c/o The Town Hall
35 High Street
Thornbury
BS35 2AR

By submitting information, the museum will assume that your permission is given for the material to be used in the future. This could be in print, on-line or in one of our exhibitions.

When the museum reopens, we will start to go through all that we have received from you. We realise this is a huge request at this time, but we hope that you are able to help with this project, enabling us to capture how our community experienced this unprecedented situation.

Please, do share this information as widely as possible.

We wish you all the very best.  Stay safe.