Visitors to Westbury Museum in 2025 have enjoyed finding out more about their town’s heritage thanks to exhibitions, talks, blogs, films and guided walks.
One of the museum’s main exhibitions this year was about Westbury in Wartime, featuring everything from vintage clothes to newspapers, posters and film. The town’s PoW camps came in for special attention too, with an interesting talk by David Jenkins. Other exhibitions included turning the spotlight on our unique Victorian swimming pool, featuring its history and even instructions on archaic swimming styles!
Historic talks during the year focussed on subjects from town shops to temperance. And for the first time, the museum staged a fascinating and well attended guided tour of the town cemetery with historian Liz Argent tracing its history. This will be repeated next year.
Volunteers have also been working with local schools, both with history talks in the classroom and pupil visits to the museum where they get the chance to learn about their town history and handle historic artefacts. We have also been working with the town council, providing text and images for new information boards planned for the white horse viewing area.
We are always delighted to receive donations of Westbury history artefacts for our collection and this year we were given a fascinating book that detailed housekeeping and etiquette from more than a century ago. The book, which belonged to the donor’s great grandmother, was a fund of knowledge from how much to pay staff when on a country house stay, through to tips on how to retain servants! Another donation which was very gratefully received was a model of a wagon from the Westbury ironworks. This was donated by the West Wilts gauge 0 group. The ironworks which closed in the 1920s is an important part of town history.
We will be kicking off our 2026 offering with the launch of a new book by Sally Hendry about the history of Westbury pubs. A guided walk around the town’s hostelries, past and present, is planned for later in the year. The year will also see us staging our special photographic exhibition, featuring a range of images of the changing face of our town along with aerial photographs and maps. It promises to be a fascinating glimpse into how Westbury has changed over the years.
Also on offer in 2026 will be talks on subjects from quirky Westbury to military history…and much more!
The museum will reopen on Tuesday 17th February to enable volunteers to work on our collections including a complete review of our photographic library.
We are very grateful for the support of the local community over the last year and really look forward to welcoming you in 2026!
Updates, news and a range of our publications and gifts are available online at our website www.westburyheritagesociety.org.uk
