When the Museum of English Rural Life reopens this week after a £3m Heritage Lottery-backed redevelopment, it will have all its 25,000 objects on display – plus a new acquisition that came to them by itself. The mouse that crept into a Victorian trap in the stores, and died there while the museum was closed, has been preserved and added to the collection.
“The mouse has become one of our most famous objects,” the senior curator, Isabel Hughes, said. “When the poor little thing was found the tweet went round the world, we even made Canadian television.”
The new displays bring the story of country life up to the present day. The collection was begun in the 1950s when Reading University staff realised how fast the countryside around them was changing, and it now takes in far more than tractors and horse-drawn ploughs. Another new display is a colourful but spectacularly tattered outfit worn by the environmental campaigner Jim Hindle, when he camped in a treehouse in an attempt to stop the building of the Newbury bypass in Berkshire. The nine-mile (14km) stretch of road required the felling of 10,000 trees, and in 1996 Hindle camped in the branches of one of them, the Middle Oak. The roof was too low for him to stand, which is why the knees of his trousers took such heavy wear.
The museum director, Kate Arnold-Forster, said: “Unlike when the museum first opened, we can’t now assume any knowledge of farming and rural life on the part of our visitors. We have to find a way to use the objects in our collection – such as Jim’s trousers – to tell those stories and show people the links with their lives.”
Other new acquisitions include workwear that became fashion garments – including Hunter wellies and a Barbour waxed jacket – and a classic Land Rover bought new and used daily by a farmer for decades until his neighbour swapped it for a tractor to preserve it. The vehicle came to the museum with all its original documents and every tax disc of its long working life.
The redevelopment has allowed the museum, part of Reading University and one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the UK, to put many objects on display for the first time. They include huge wall hangings of farming scenes made for the Festival of Britain in 1951, which apart from occasional visits in the 1950s to agricultural shows, have been rolled up in storage ever since.
Hughes said one of the museum’s major problems was having to tell an outdoor story in an indoor space. The gap has been filled with photographs including a woodland scene, blown up to near lifesize, photographed by her colleague Ollie Douglas on his way to work one morning.
The archive photographs of a vanished world are even more evocative, drawn from a collection of more than a million images. They include sun-scorched hop pickers and haymakers, the breath of animals steaming in frosty morning fields, and a poacher, face turned carefully away from the camera, bicycle hidden in a clump of bushes, going about his furtive work.
• The Museum of English Rural Life is open every day except Mondays from 19 October. Entry is free
