As part of the response to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, in March 2020 the museum closed its doors to the public. It also closed its doors to its volunteer force too. Staff have been working away, sometimes at home and sometimes in Helston, making sure the collections are safe and that the museum is prepared for when lockdown in England is lifted.

Lockdown has been difficult for the museum sector as a whole, but it has enabled some creative thinking about how to share some of the collections and the stories. To date, these have included:

• A daily Twitter/Instagram campaign –  ‘An everyday thing, every day’. An online gallery of images and captions under the curation of Vicky, one of the museum’s trustees.

• Facebook ‘live’ on a Wednesday and Thursday morning. Wednesday is a mini-tour of part of the collection and Thursday is a ‘make’ (arts and craft) session. The videos are available afterwards on the musuem’s YouTube channel.

I’m about to add to the creative collection, in a series of blogs of the museum in this current social history context. One day this experience of lockdown will be consigned to the history books, so I thought it would be interesting to take a view of the museum’s collections through a ‘Lockdown Lens’, by asking a couple of questions…

What experience of lockdown is reflected in objects in the museum’s collections?

What does that object tell us about social history more generally?

Perhaps when you next visit the museum, you can look out for these objects, or if you have any to add, we’d love to hear from you.

Julia Webb-Harvey

Volunteer Citizen Curator

19 May 2020