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| "It would be hard in this old
town, with all its enchanting places, to find a place surpassing in
attractiveness the museum on the river bank. We have seen few museums
built so neatly in so fair a place as this." ARTHUR MEE, THE KING'S ENGLAND |
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| Parties by appointment, please. There
is full disabled access. The Museum bookstall stocks a wide range
of books about local history as well as cards, maps and souvenirs.
The Norris Museum is run by St Ives Town Council. It is Accredited with the Museums Libraries and Archives Council. St Ives is located just off the A14, with fast road links from London, the Midlands and the North. There are railway stations at Huntingdon and Cambridge with frequent bus services linking them to St Ives. |
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| For a 21st-century transport experience, come to St Ives along the Cambridge Busway. The world's longest Guided Busway links our town to the university city, with fast and regular services through attractive countryside. The bridleway and footpath alongside the Busway gives you a 14-mile traffic-free alternative - but note that parts of it are sometimes closed by floodwater! | ||
| THE NORRIS MUSEUM
IS THE MUSEUM OF HUNTINGDONSHIRE. IT TELLS THE STORY OF THIS HISTORIC
COUNTY FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY.
THE OLDEST OBJECTS IN THE MUSEUM are the remains of animals that lived here 160 million years ago, in the age of the dinosaurs. Huntingdonshire was under the sea in those days and you can see the fossil bones of the great marine reptiles - Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs - that lived here. MORE RECENT INHABITANTS OF THE AREA were the Woolly Mammoths that were here in the Ice Ages - you can see bones, teeth and a tusk which have been found locally. PEOPLE HAVE LIVED IN HUNTINGDONSHIRE for a quarter of a million years. On display at the Norris are the flint tools of the first Stone Age settlers, and weapons and pottery from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. There are finds from local Roman cemeteries and a reconstruction of the Roman town of Godmanchester. WE HAVE ARMS AND ARMOUR from the Civil War, when Huntingdon was the birthplace of the Roundhead commander Oliver Cromwell and King Charles passed through the county as a hunted fugitive. FROM A LATER WAR come intricate objects of bone and straw made by French inmates of the prison camp at Norman Cross during the Napoleonic Wars. And there are displays of the local craft of lace-making and the local sport of ice-skating on the flooded Fens. OUR VIDEO SCREEN shows you films of the Fen skaters in action, and of traction engines that were built at St Ives by the family firm of Fowells. THE NORRIS MUSEUM WAS FOUNDED BY HERBERT NORRIS, who left his lifetime's collection of Huntingdonshire relics to the people of St Ives when he died in 1931. AS WELL AS THE MUSEUM COLLECTIONS, the Norris Museum has an art gallery showing paintings of the local landscape. There is also a research library (by appointment only). |
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| Norris Explorer – Discover the magic of St Ives. (7.52Mb) | ||
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