Chertsey Museum

A couple of weeks ago I visited Chertsey Museum having first done so several years before when I was still working at Lamford. I'd forgotten how good it is. A rarity among local museum collections now, it is still administered by the Council, Runnymede District in this case, and is one of the class of museums which has a specialist as well as a local-historical brief. Chertsey houses the Olive Matthews Collection, a nationally-significant assembly of fashion and clothing items dating from the 17th century onwards; although Ms Matthews wasn't very interested in anything made after the Edwardian period subsequent custodians have added to the Collection a variety of representative pieces from subsequent decades. As for local history as such, Chertsey exists because of its medieval Abbey and so that looms large in the museum (particularly during my visit as there was a special exhibition about it), along with the usual paraphernalia of a small market town across the ages, but it's all presented in a very engaging way (and entry to the museum being free, you can't lose really). I even found the answer to a specific question that was nagging me - what was the big house not far from Chertsey which became an asylum and for several of whose former residents I took funeral services while I was at Lamford (it was Botley Park). That doesn't happen very often. Nor do you see particularly frequently a revolving-dome silver food warmer with sausage and egg in it (plastic), or a model of a stately house made by one of the staff out of fruit pith - an object which has a slightly melancholy sense to it, like Remains of the Day with added obsessive-compulsive disorder.