Wisbech & Fenland Museum

The Victorians were fascinated by the natural world and this display is typical of Museums of this era. In a time before compulsory education, television, or the internet, museums gave people the opportunity to learn from the real thing.

Farming has been backbone of Fenland life for over 2,000 years. It is only in the last 50 years or so that this way of life which relied on horses, oxen and the wit of the wily Fen folk began to change forever. The Museum displays farming and drainage tools, horse harness, fruit pickers' tokens and mole traps.

Here's a trip down Memory Lane... The Museum has a display of the Post Office and General Store from nearby Elm village. For many, items in the shop such as Tower's lemonade crystals or tins of Gibbs' dentifrice will conjure images of days gone by.

Thomas Clarkson, son of Wisbech Grammar School's Headmaster, dedicated his life to the campaign against slavery. In 1807 a parliamentary act outlawed the slave trade within the British Empire. Clarkson gathered objects and information to support his campaign and kept them in this chest. Inside it were goods such as spices and cotton that could be traded in place of Africans, instruments of torture to prove how the Africans were being mis-treated and ethnological material to prove that the Africans were a cultured society with fine craft skills.