Southend_Central_Museum

Southend Central Museum

Southend Central Museum

Museum in Southend-on-Sea, England

The Central Museum is a museum in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England. The museum houses collections of local and natural history and contains a planetarium constructed by astronomer Harry Ford in 1984.[1]

Quick Facts Established, Location ...
A close up of the Central Museum, Southend

The museum was opened in April 1981 in a Grade II listed building that was previously Southend's first free public library. The library service had moved to a new purpose built site on Victoria Avenue, which opened on 20 March 1974.[2]

The building

The Museum was originally built in 1905 as a free library, with £8,000 of funding from Andrew Carnegie. The architect was Henry Thomas Hare. The building was listed in 1974.[3]

The collections

The Museum features a collection of original Ekco radios, manufactured by E.K. Cole & Co. Ltd. (or 'Ekco') formerly based in Southend. In the 1930s, this company was one of Britain's largest radio manufacturers.

The displays also include local and natural history and archaeology.[4]

In September 2018 the museum opened a major exhibition of finds recovered from the wreck of the London, a 17th Century Cromwellian era warship that exploded and sank in the Thames Estuary in 1665. The exhibition ran till July 2019.[5]

In May 2019 a new gallery opened to display the archaeological finds from the Royal Saxon tomb in Prittlewell, an Anglo-Saxon burial mound in the suburb of Prittlewell that was discovered in 2003 as a result of a road-widening scheme. The excavations unearthed a number of Anglo-Saxon artefacts that suggested a high-status burial; carbon dating has revealed that the burial probably dates from about 580 AD, and may have been the tomb of Sæxa, brother of Sæberht, King of Essex.[6][7]

Additional photographs

  • Collection of Ekco radios on show at the Central Museum
  • Butterflies from the reserve natural history collections of Southend Museums Service

References

  1. [1]
    "Southend Planetarium". Southend Museums. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
  2. [2]
    "History of Libraries in Southend". Southend on Sea Borough Council. Archived from the original on 24 September 2013. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
  3. [3]
    "CENTRAL MUSEUM, Non Civil Parish - 1322354 | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
  4. [4]
    "Southend Museum Service (Central Museum)". Southend Museum Service. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
  5. [5]
    "Opening of HMS London, museum exhibition". Leigh Times. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
  6. [6]
    "Southend burial site 'UK's answer to Tutankhamun'". BBC. 9 May 2019. Retrieved 9 May 2019.
  7. [7]
    Whitehouse, Ellis. "Anglo-Saxon king exhibition showing 'Southend's rich cultural heritage' officially opens". Halstead Gazette. Archived from the original on 13 May 2019. Retrieved 13 May 2019.
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