Blog / Collections

Posted on by Fay Whitfield.

Pyronaut’s 90th Birthday

This June M Shed’s fire boat, Pyronaut, turns 90 years old! She served for almost 40 years in the City Docks for which she had been designed, before being chosen as a diver’s boat for the Port of Bristol, and later beginning transformation into a p…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

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…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

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…

Posted on by Alice Bush.

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…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

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…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

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…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

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…

Posted on by Alice Bush.

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…