The galleries

The Market Town

Ground floor, front

The market charter of 1252, the Thursday market and the trades of the Market Square and the Shambles: weights and measures, the borough’s pewter pint, shop signs, and the ledgers of Pargeter’s brewery.

The gallery is arranged round a stall of the Thursday market as it was in about 1900, with the weights and measures that the clerk of the market checked. Cases on the walls cover the charter and the borough, the inns of the Market Square, the Shambles and its butchers, and Pargeter’s brewery, which employed 140 people at its height in 1911. The borough seal matrix, lent by the town council, is here.

River and Mill

Ground floor, rear

The Pontar, its fish, its boats and its floods. The Flood Bell of 1652, a model of the Town Mill as it was in 1890, the eel traps from the weir, and the five flood marks shown at their true heights.

The river gallery is in the oldest part of the building, below the schoolroom. It shows the Pontar as a working river: the barges and the Town Quay, the mill and its leat, eels and salmon, and the floods. A strip along the end wall marks the five floods recorded on the Town Bridge at their true heights, and the Flood Bell hangs beside it.

The Old Schoolroom

Ground floor, west wing

The grammar school’s schoolroom of 1558, kept as it was when the school closed in 1909, with the master’s desk, the benches and the names cut into them. Used for school visits on weekday mornings.

The schoolroom was built in 1558 and is the room the building was made for. The benches, the master’s desk and the painted rules of 1712 are original to it; the slates, books and the stove come from other schools in the district. On weekday mornings in term time the room is used for school visits, and visitors may find a lesson in progress.

The Lilac Room

First floor

The legend of the Lilac Sorceress as the town has told it, the plaster model for the statue in the Market Square, a hundred and twenty years of Lilac Fair posters, and the cordial committee’s bottles back to 1953.

The first-floor room over the porch tells the legend of the woman the town calls the Lilac Sorceress, and the story of the Lilac Fair. It has the plaster model for the statue, the 1897 pamphlet that first printed the legend, the programme for the unveiling, and the fair posters and cordial bottles collected by the fair committee since 1899.

Upper Gallery

First floor

Changing exhibitions, two or three a year, from the collection and from local groups. Closed for rewiring over the winter.

The Upper Gallery shows two or three exhibitions a year, from the collection and by local groups. It is closed for rewiring over the winter of 2026–27 and reopens in March with an exhibition on the town’s shopfronts.