Blog / Collections

New display at M Shed: the toppling of the Colston statue

by Helen McConnell Simpson, Senior Curator of History Today we have launched an extended display at M Shed about the history of protest in Bristol, with the permanent inclusion of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which was pulled down during a B…

Decolonisation: An update on what’s been happening at Bristol Museums

by Lisa Graves, Curator – World Cultures and Archaeology In 2020 we set-up a museum Decolonisation Working Group to direct our ambitions to address racial inequalities in our work. Due to huge internal upheaval over the last two years this work ha…

Reassessing the Agricultural Collection

by Amber Druce, Curator of Social History One of the biggest challenges facing museums is a lack of storage space for expanding collections. For the past 10 years, we’ve been rehoming some of the agricultural objects in our collection that don’t have a lo…

Black Lives Matter Placards at Bristol Museums

by Amber Druce, Curator of Social History During protests against police brutality and racial inequality on 7 June 2020, people left placards at the base of the Colston statue plinth. This began before the statue was pulled down and continued af…

200 years of amazing collections and stories

By Deborah Hutchinson (Geology Curator) and Kate Iles (Archaeology Curator) Bristol Museums’ forerunner, The Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts, officially opened 200 years ago on 6 January 1823. We’ve bee…

Women’s work: Making discoveries in the Australian collection

By Polly Bence, University of Bristol, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology My research focuses on cultural objects from Oceania – an understudied part of the collection at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Earlier in 2022 I undertook a fou…

The unknown story of Te Whiti, a Māori chief from Hauraki, New Zealand

by Polly Bence, PhD student at the universities of Bristol and Exeter. Polly is researching material culture collected from Australia and the Pacific Islands in Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Sensitivity warning: Some of the details in the blog r…

First impressions of the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection

by Eve Andreski, Documentation Assistant Hello! I am a long-term volunteer and previous museum front-of-house team member. I began working with the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection (BECC) at the end of January. This is when generous funding f…

Decolonising Language

by Ray Barnett, head of collections and archives In our efforts to address decolonisation, one major piece of work is around our use of language. In everyday speech, many people are now more aware of terms that may be offensive to different com…