Priest's House Museum & Gardens

Description:

The Priest's House Museum is set in an historic Grade II* town house in Wimborne Minster  town centre, the administrative centre of East Dorset. The Museum comprises a series of 10 period rooms which take the visitor back through the centuries. From the seventeenth century Hall to the Georgian Parlour and working Victorian Kitchen, the rooms show what life and work was like for people in the past.

The Museum tells the story of East Dorset from prehistoric to modern times. With hands-on activities in the Archaeology, Childhood and East Dorset Villages galleries, there is plenty to do and see!

The Museum offers a special guided tour, for groups of 10 or more. The tour takes approximately 30-45 minutes taking in the whole ground floor, after which the visitor is free to explore the four rooms upstairs, browse the shop, enjoy the beautiful garden, and take tea and cake in the Boat-house Tea Room.

The Museum building was formerly an ironmongers shop operated since 1872 by the Coles family and opened as a museum in 1962. The building is now maintained by East Dorset District Council and was restored in partnership with them, mainly between 1990 and 1991. The most obvious change being the reconstructed eighteenth century shop frontage with bow windows and shutters. Inside a series of permanent displays were implemented between 1991 and 1995 under the direction of successive curators.

The Museum has won a number of awards for its creative display and education programmes.

The collection includes original items from the ironmongers shop and further items from the adjacent stationer's shop which had closed in 1872. This was further enhanced by a significant bequest of objects and photographs collected by a local doctor and hstorian Sir Ernest Kaye le Fleming during the early twentieth century. The collection has since been enlarged through donations, bequests and purchases.

The Archaeology collection includes material recovered from the late prehistoric and Romano-British site at Tarrant Hinton during excavations by members of the Museum in the 1960's and 1970's.

The Museum also houses important social and local history material relating to domestic and rural life, crafts, trade and childhood. There are also major holdings of photographs, costumes and ephemera, in all over 35,000 objects.