Portland Museum, Dorset
   HOME

TheInfoList



Click Here for Items Related To - Portland Museum, Dorset
OR:
Portland Museum, Dorset on:   [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Amazon]

Portland Museum is a
museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...
on the
Isle of Portland An isle is an island, land surrounded by water. The term is very common in British English British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct fr ...
in
Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset. Covering an area of , ...
, southern
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. It is located at the southern end of the hamlet of Wakeham. The museum is housed in two 17th-century thatched cottages, which have both been Grade II Listed since 1951. One of the museum's cottages, Avice's Cottage, is featured in Thomas Hardy's 1897 novel ''
The Well-Beloved ''The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament'' is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It spans forty years, and follows Jocelyn Pierston, a celebrated sculptor who attempts to create in stone the image of his ideal woman, while he tries also to find her i ...
'', as the home of three generations of "Avices" - the novel's heroines. Portland Museum was founded by
Marie Stopes Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, ...
, who purchased the museum's two cottages, then derelict, in 1929. She then donated them to Portland as a museum which opened in 1930. Stopes was the first honorary curator and continued her association with the museum until her death in 1958.


Features

The museum has four distinct themes; the history of Portland stone, the
Jurassic Coast The Jurassic Coast is a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about , and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in mid-Decembe ...
, shipwrecks around Portland's coast and famous people linked with the island. It also displays examples of the island's archaeology from the Stone Ages onwards. The Marie Stopes Cottage features a small exhibition about Stopes and a display of items connected to Hardy. A "Victorian Corner" displays the wedding dress of a local girl and objects that would have been found in a Victorian parlour. The top-floor of the cottage contains the Maritime Room. The garden has a collection of local fossils and artifacts, including the casing of a World War II bomb found on Portland in 1995. The management of Portland Museum was transferred from Weymouth and Portland Borough Council to the newly formed Portland Museum Trust on 1 April 2008. The trust, a registered charity, continues to operate the museum. From 2009 to present, the museum continues to have a major makeover, while the Portland Island Museum Supporters group has also been established.


See also

* Jurassica, a proposed theme park on Portland * Grove Prison Museum, a museum based on the active HM Prison Portland


References


External links


Portland Museum
- official site {{Jurassic Coast Museums established in 1930 Museums on the Isle of Portland Geology museums in England Local museums in Dorset Jurassic Coast 1930 establishments in England Paleontology in the United Kingdom