Take a look behind the scenes as Brixham Heritage Museum prepares to reopen

Brixham Heritage Museum is ready to reopen to the public once again, after volunteers have spent the winter preparing and restoring both the historic building and the unique artefacts contained within it. 

It’s planned that the museum will reopen to visitors on February 6, providing enough volunteers come forward to help out. 

Founded in 1958 to share and preserve the history of Brixham, the museum now contains over 10,000 artefacts and counting. 

With a team of volunteers, museum curator Holly Jarrett’s job is not just to display these items, but to preserve them for the future as well. 

“Everything is decaying and working its way towards dust eventually,” said Holly. “The job of a curator is to slow that process down as much as possible so we’ve got these objects for generations to come.

“Just the lights and the humidity of the air will be slowly decaying the artefacts here. It’s a real science to try to preserve them.”

Every piece must be meticulously cleaned, checked for damage and documented. For a small team of predominantly volunteers on a budget, this is no small task. The displays visitors see is just the tip of the iceberg; countless hours are spent behind the scenes to make sure the museum's collection stays organised and in good condition. 

The Association of Independent Museum’s Pilgrim Trust has also played a crucial role, sending two conservators to help conduct an audit into how to best take care of Brixham’s highly-diverse collection. 

While Holly and her team have been using the winter period to assess and clean as many objects as possible, this process continues throughout the year. 

The break has also been an opportunity to refurbish the actual museum as well. A piece of history in its own right, Brixham Heritage Museum resides in the old police station, built in 1906. The building has been refreshed for 2024: interactive displays have been fixed, the roof no longer leaks and the museum has been given a fresh coat of paint. 

The winter break has also seen fascinating new objects come through the door. Whether it be from the sea bed or someone’s garage, items are still coming into the museum all the time. 

Holly said: “We had a recent donation of a piece of scrimshaw. It’s a worked piece of whalebone that would have been put into a corset to make you sit up straight and it’s just very beautiful. It shows the story of a sailor going off into the Napoleonic Wars.”

The objects in Brixham Heritage Museum don’t just tell the story of Brixham, but its relationship with the rest of the world. 

A piece that sums this up is a 700-year-old Mamluk vase from North Africa, accidentally pulled from the seabed by a trawler just off Brixham in 1994.

Holly said: “You think that the world was a small place back then, but that’s never been the case. People have traded and sailed from one end of the world to the other for millennia and port towns like Brixham were where those connections started. I just love trying to imagine how that vase got there.”

She added: “There’s so many stories in which Brixham has been at the centre of. Like the first anti-rust boat paint was developed here. That might seem small, but that’s a hugely important story internationally. It’s really central to the story of shipping and modern trade.”

With a vibrant calendar of events planned, Brixham Heritage Museum is preparing for a big year. However, more volunteers are needed to allow the museum to run smoothly. To get in touch, email mail@brixhamheritage.org.uk.