It might look like a fine setting for a grand dinner, but this is actually for playing a game. The aim is to slide large brass discs along the narrow bench – the winner is the one to get closest to the end without falling off. Like shuffleboard …
During the miners’ strike of 1984–85, an alliance was formed between mining families and queer activists. Tins like this were used by gay men and women to collect money on behalf of mining communities, eventually collecting £20,000 …
102 portraits look across this room, all participants from one of Suzanne Lacy’s participatory workshops that lead to the creation of her work. In 2018, Lacy and her collaborators travelled along the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic …
The hand-drawn scene here isn’t from the perspective of war we often see – it’s from a Red Cross volunteer nurse, Edith Maud Drummond Hay who served for the whole of war, first in Scotland and later at several hospitals closer to the frontline in France …
A moment when you are allowed to run in the museum. Visitors are invited to use this interactive booth to explore the area around the museum using a digital interpretation installation. The screen progresses around the route of …
This object is displayed upside down. It was made to hold flowers or plants in a cemetery, with the screwed spike pushed firmly into the ground for stability …
Of all the interpretive devices, museums can choose from, a timeline is a great way of getting either a historical narrative or a background story across to visitors. And they work particularly well when they combine imagery and objects, as here in Sankeys: Extraordinary and Everyday …
Major Sherry Womack broke ground by serving with all-male green beret units. In 2005, she was the first female physician’s assistant to accompany Army Special Operations Forces into Afghanistan. She used new and untested equipment such as this phraselator …
Meet Celia the seal, an unlikely participant in climate change research. As COP 26 heads to Glasgow this week, Celia is reminding visitors to Dive In! Protecting Our Ocean that seals and other marine mammals are facing …
It can sometimes seem as if there’s a museum for everything. The Pencil Museum gets cited often, but less so the Pen Museum, which is a shame, as Birmingham was a major pen-making industry in the Victorian era …
The little grey nodules all over the surface of this cup led to its strange name, even though grapes wouldn’t have been grown in the Bronze Age in England, where this object was found …
This object is cheap to produce, easy to use, durable and incredibly reliable. As an example of design, it’s about as successful as it’s possible to be. And given there are countless thousands of them still in use …
A post from guest curator, Laura Mc Coy, who explains how this plastic decoy is used as a conservation tool … “There are only an estimated eight pairs of Puffin on the Isle of Man …
Arischer Zahnarzt translates from German as ‘Aryan dentist’. Although IWM doesn’t know too much about the exact story of this sign, made most likely at some point in the 1930s or 40s in the city of Karslruhe, the meaning of the object is pretty clear …
Look carefully into the multiple layers of this chequerboard drawing (red watercolour) and there are shapes and lines waiting to escape the paper. Maybe even a flying horse. Close looking is encouraged …
The name 'buhai' means bull, and it’s the bellowing of this animal that the instrument is thought to resemble, even though the membrane of the drum is made from rabbit skin and the hair flowing over the top is from a horse’s tail …
The outsides of football stadiums are generally pretty dull affairs – but at Manchester City’s ground, they’ve used old photographs from the club’s history not only decorate the …
This was a pretty radical camera, for the time. Within months of this camera going on sale in 1959, camera makers in Germany and Japan were imitating the ‘chequerboard’ design …
At first sight, this seems like a drawing of the sea. But look closer and you’ll see it’s actually three pages of marks made by a typewriter, of all things. Close up, the &s, -s and %s are mixed with letters and numbers …
These men aren’t gods; they’re doctors. The architecture of this museum not only provides a backdrop to the subject of medicine, it also shows the typical features …
How elaborate ceiling and plaster decoration like this doesn’t fall down baffles me. Over the fireplace here is the arms of Elizabeth I with the Latin inscription …
At first sight, this is surely a piece of contemporary sculpture, carved from white stone. But it’s completely natural, formed millions of years ago in northern France, when superhot water filtered through ancient dunes of pure sand …
Google-search a image of the Süleymaniye Mosque and you generally get a picture taken from the Golden Horn side, with the huge dome dominating and the four huge minarets to the right. Or head on, with the dome between the minarets. Galloway has chosen to go round the ‘back’ …
In an age before computerised synthesizers, everyday objects and strange, home-made devices were used to generate electronic sounds. Delia Derbyshire’s Coolican lampshade was one of her favourite things to make artificial sound with …
Handsome or ugly – what do you reckon? As a cult god worshipped by Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptians Serapis was revered. But for the conservation staff at the Museum, he’s a star of Ugly Object of the Month, a clever blog that checks in on museum collection items …
At high tide the waves of the English Channel lap the base of the cliffs at Lyme, the little white talons of the sea grabbing at grey mud, revealing little gems like this. It’s not a dinosaur – despite this being the Jurassic Coast, you can abandon any hopes of finding a T-Rex …
This is the oldest topiary in the world. Wandering into this garden of sculpted delights, I feel like a character from a children’s tale, shrunk down to a fraction of my normal size. In fact, there’s something of the magical illustrated storybook about this place …
