Prescot Museum
Prescot Museum
Prescot Museum has now moved to its new
location at The Prescot Centre, Prescot Shopping Centre, Aspinall
Street, Prescot L34 5GA.
Prescot Museum was established in 1979 as a
joint project between Merseyside County Museums and Knowsley
Metropolitan Borough Council.
The main aim of the museum was to provide a
centre for the study of horology, the history of timekeepers
(clocks, watches, etc) owing to Prescot’s status as one of the most
important centres for the production of watches, and the associated
crafts of clock and specialist tool making. The horology
collection was brought to Prescot from Liverpool Museum, on loan,
for a period of 25 years. The successors to Merseyside County
Museums, National Museums Liverpool withdrew from Prescot Museum in
2007.
Alongside
the main horology collection, a second collection of historic
objects relevant to the local area gradually built up into the
Local History Collection. Anything brought into the museum of
a horological nature went into the horology collection, and other
objects went into the Local History Collection, if it had relevance
to local history. Since NML’s withdrawal, horological
material was added to the collection policy.
The collection is made up of a range of
objects, mainly related to local businesses, industries (BICC cable
makers, coal mining, watch making, pottery manufacture), and
people, so can be described as a social and industrial
collection.
A large percentage of the collection which
numbers at time of writing (September 2010) approximately
11,000 objects, is made up of paper based items including
ephemera and photographs. The ‘three dimensional’ objects in
the collection are varied, and include items such as glass bottles,
ceramics, tools, costume, domestic items, coins, badges, trophies,
architectural fragments, and militaria.
Visit the Prescot Museum
website.