A NEW exhibition is set to open at the Museum of Farnham next month.
From Tuesday, June 4, A Brief History of Farnham will make its way to the ground floor of the town museum, making it accessible to all.
The exhibition has been broken down into three chapters, each of which will be opened throughout the year.
Chapter One: The Ground Beneath Our Feet uses the museum’s archaeological collection to explore pre-history through to the Civil War, featuring objects such as mammoth tusks and cannon balls.
Described as a “classic museum gallery” by museum curator Josh Godfrey, there will be lots of objects on display as well as an “interactive element”.
Josh said: “We’re trying to make it more family-friendly so you can come in as a family.
“So mum, dad, granddad, grandma can read the normal text, look at the images, but we’ll also have children’s labels so a child can actually enjoy it in their own way.
“We’ll have little stools for them to step on so they can look into the cases – little things like that so that everybody can come and enjoy it on a Saturday when they’ve not got much to do.”
The other two rooms will use “completely different interpretive methods”, allowing visitors to “experiment with how people interact with the house, the museum and what they want out of it”.
Chapter Two is titled A Georgian at 38 West Street – 38 West Street being the address of the museum, which was built in the Georgian period by a “well-known hopster called John Thorpe”.
It is set to be “more of a set-dress room that you might find in a National Trust property”, using different interpretive methods to talk about the Georgian period in Farnham and how that brought wealth into the area.
Chapter Three – God Save the Queens – will take visitors from Queen Victoria through to the modern reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
“It’s not to say we’re focussing on their reigns, it’s more about what Farnham was like during those periods,” Josh said.
“That was just a nice way to encapsulate it all.”
Due to open in October, it will be an “object rich display”, moving towards “rich object labels” which will “force people to interact with the objects and have some sort of connection with them and understanding,” according to Josh.
Josh continued that a highlight of the exhibition for the museum is “getting more objects out on display”.
And of those, there are four objects the museum is referring to as ‘star objects’.
* The Museum of Farnham is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, from 10am to 5pm. Entry is free and visitors have until the end of 2020 to see the exhibition.