Malvern Museum organises a number of activities throughout the year.
Lectures
Lectures are currently held on the last Thursday afternoon of every month from September through to April. The History of Croome Court, the royal wives and mistresses since William the Conqueror – yes all of them!, GWR railway growth and decline, medieval manuscripts, Worcestershire’s secret army in the Second World War, local Victorian family stories, have all featured over the last few seasons, along with many other talks. The lectures are free to the Friends of Malvern Museum and £3 for members of the public.
Fundraising activities
Malvern Museum organises a number of events to raise money to meet the cost of running the museum and updating display fixtures. Re-enactments of the Water Cure have proved quite popular and have taken place in the Coach House Theatre, Malvern. Florence Nightingale and Edward Elgar have also been the subjects of public lectures.
Supermarket collections provide other successful fundraising activities.
Heritage Events
The museum takes part in the National Heritage weekend in early September. Admission to the museum is free and stewards often dress in costume. Donations are encouraged of course! The dulcitone, a portable piano type instrument, has been played outside in the past. It was originally played at St Anne’s Well by ‘Blind George’ to entertain visitors in the last century.
Malvern Museum supports Midsummer Malvern in June by providing temporary displays that reflect the theme chosen for the Week. In 2018 it successfully co-organised an exhibition in Malvern Priory called ‘Malvern in 60 Objects’. Many of the exhibits came from the museum’s collections and generated much interest.
Outside exhibitions are designed and supervised by other enthusiastic volunteers. Malvern Museum pops up in the Public Library, Great Malvern Priory, WestFest and some county organised events, and exhibitions offer the public a glimpse into different periods from Malvern’s history. In this way some of our prints and artefacts are seen by a larger audience, and again donations are often forthcoming.
Malvern Library and Museum Archive collaboration
For several years, half a dozen museum volunteers have met weekly at the library to catalogue the hundreds of prints, paintings, albums, photographs and postcards that are stored in the library. This painstaking process has already brought to light many intriguing views of the Malvern area. All images are carefully protected and recorded. The aim is eventually to digitise these images to make them available online. The project requires significant fundraising and several events have been held to showcase some of these fascinating archived images. In 2022 an exhibition was organised by one of these volunteers along Church Walk and Waitrose; this enabled the public to see just a few of the 200 photographs that were taken around the area in one day in July 1971 and are kept in the library archives. It was a great success with a booklet to follow in 2023.
Priory Gatehouse Restoration Fundraising Activities
Malvern Museum has already been responsible for two fairly major programmes to restore parts of the Priory Gatehouse. 2018 saw the conclusion of the third phase to repair and conserve the stonework, gutters, roof, parapet and stone mullion windows. We were grateful to a number of charitable organisation who generously gave grants towards this work.