Community & Learning
Our unique learning tool is our museum collection and archive. It contains over 50,000 documents, photographs, maps, oral histories, publications and artworks – all given to us by the local community for safekeeping, research and education. The collection contains an abundance of characters and stories for teaching – from memoirs and accounts of Romani life, to the antics of snake-catchers, herbalists, artists and spiritualists
In our inclusive and supportive setting, we foster imagination, curiosity, confidence, and self-awareness through observing and creatively exploring heritage. Museums and collections offer a valuable chance to gain insights into the past, enabling us to shape the future with assurance. Our vast range of resources, including collections, archives, reference library, and museum, offers exciting and innovative methods for children to learn about the diverse history and geography of the New Forest.
Learning
Our archive has been accumulated over decades by gifts of items from local people. So has our understanding of the groups who benefit most from the chances we create to engage with it and us.
Community is vital to our work
In 2023, we began work on Embroidered Tales, a project which will sit alongside the original New Forest Embroidery.
This project will transform the way we catalogue, interpret and display our material. Crucially too, it will enable future co-curation of our collection with marginalised groups, whose vital voices and lived experiences have historically been overlooked.
Transforming our outreach
