New Displays at Faversham Museum

Housed within the Fleur de Lis Heritage Centre, Faversham’s Museum has recently been updated to include several new displays. Visitors begin their visit by seeing what archaeology has revealed, from the earliest Iron Age beginnings of the area through to Faversham’s development in the medieval period, particularly the role played by its two monasteries, Faversham Abbey and Davington Priory.

This is followed by the new Elizabethan Room, illustrating the rise in prosperity of the town after the Dissolution. The development of the explosives industry is traced in a specially-commissioned video.

Upstairs is a Victorian Schoolroom and a late Victorian kitchen, as authentic as possible in style, with a selection of Victorian ‘entertainment’ such as lantern-slide shows and wind-up gramophones also on display.

Both World Wars are remembered, with memorabilia from the work of ‘Dad’s Army’ and the Air Raid Wardens. A hand-operated air raid siren sits silently nearby - too incredibly noisy to operate!

The town’s civic and ceremonial life and sporting scene are also shown. The virtually extinct local sports of goal running and rink hockey take pride of place.

Finally comes the ‘shopping centre’. “Not exactly Bluewater” says John Culmer, Senior Honorary Curator, “but a vivid evocation of how High Street shops used to be in our grand, or great-grandparents’ day”. A barber’s, a chemist’s, a sweet shop, a sub-post office and lending library, and a draper’s are all recreated in period style with almost everything on show being authentic.

Displays on Faversham’s other industries, such as brewing and brick-making, are planned when finance for upgrading the available space is found. Pride of place will surely go to an old fashioned electro-mechanical (Strowger) automatic telephone exchange, of which there are only two or three left in the country. Engineers will install lines around the Fleur de Lis complex and visitors will be able to call each other on old-fashioned phones. There is even an old telephone kiosk with a ‘Press Buttons A and B’ mechanism, complete with a stock of old pennies for its use.

The repatriation and restoration of a beautiful Georgian Faversham shopfront which had found its way to a Chicago Museum 75 years ago, will lead to eventual display in front of a garden laid out in formal Georgian style.

The Museum is open from 10am to 4pm on Monday to Saturdays and from 10am to 1pm on Sundays with an admission charge of £2 (concessions £1).

Keith Parfitt