two people wearing nitrite gloves examining an object

Our Week At The Museum

Hello, our names are Ruby and Martha from Coombeshead Academy and Teign School and we are doing our work experience at The Newton Abbot Museum.

two people wearing nitrite gloves examining an object

Throughout our week here we have been doing many activities such as object handling and creating our own display for objects of the month which will be available to see in September!

During the week we had the chance to explore the store which was amazing as there are so many artifacts to choose from.

We took this photo of a old camera in preparation of world photography day which was one of  our favourite artifacts in the collection!

a vintage camera

A great picture of Martha in the store holding a camera!

a young lady in museum store

On Wednesday we went up to the clock tower and we made the treacherous journey up the 30 steep spiral stairs to the clock mechanism and heard the half hour chime.

We found out that the tower used to be attached to a chapel which you can see by the crests of Newton abbot on the ground which mark out were the walls once stood and the cannons were captured from Chinese pirates and were a gift from Devonport in 1901.

exterior of the town clock tower

During this experience we have enjoyed learning about what goes on behind the scenes in a museum such as cleaning artifacts which we did on our last day.

We also really liked learning about all the different ways that the artifacts that have come into the collection and the backstory behind them.

two women in a room with stone walls

Although there were a few things that surprised us such as the large number of volunteers that come in to help the museum do various jobs such as researching for projects, working on the front desk and helping visitors learn about the museum and its history.

hands wearing gloves cleaning a boot

Overall we are so grateful to the museum for letting us do our work experience here and we thank them greatly for all the knowledge we have picked up along the way.