Bedford_Museum

Bedford Museum

Bedford Museum is the principle museum in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England. Housed in the former Higgins and Sons Brewery (built in 1838), the museum is situated within the gardens of Bedford Castle mound, beside the River Great Ouse Embankment. Bedford Museum is situated next to the Cecil Higgins Gallery. The museum itself opened to the public on its current site in 1982.

The museum's collections reflect the human and natural history of Bedford and the surrounding area.The social history collections of the museum reflect both the home and working environments of the people of north Bedfordshire. The collections of some 20,000 items cover the wide range of domestic, corporate, military and agricultural life as well as local crafts and industries.

Bedford Museum's archaeology collections range from the flint tools and hand axes of the Palaeolithic period to the more recent pieces from the Medieval times. The museum holds a good numismatics collection of coins, tokens, jettons, medals and medallions. The museum's geology collections include the well-known coiled shells of ammonites and the spectacular giant marine reptiles of the Jurassic seas. The natural history collections include the birds, mammals, insects and plants to be found in the county.

The Bedford Modern School display contains information on the origin of the museum as a school collection. It includes natural history specimens from the county as well as information on some of the individual collectors who contributed to the Museum’s collections. This area also contains a small number of specimens collected from other countries by former pupils of Bedford Modern School. The Ethnography and foreign archaeology collections mostly originate from the collections of the Bedford Modern School, where parents and old boys were encouraged to donate material from other cultures.