To coincide with the Railway 200 anniversary, Cambridge Industrial Archaeology Group has launched a new addition to its popular guided-walk programme
Viewing entries in
Community
Day 1 Morning symposium and Afternoon Industrial Showcase on Energy Resilience and Scaling Clean Tech. Key note Speaker Sir Vince Cable
Day 2 Public Engagement Day with family friendly activities.
Heritage Fund | New Staff | Food Festivals | Steam Days | Volunteer Records | Education
2024 proved to be a groundbreaking year for Cambridge Museum of Technology. From announcing our Heritage Fund project ‘Full Steam Ahead’ earlier in the year to ending the year with the annual Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, we really did have it all!
A massive THANK YOU to all our visitors (our greatest year on record!), our volunteers, our staff and trustees, our on-site hospitality partners, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and all of our supporters. As an independent museum, support like this is essential, and we really could not do this without you all.
Along with our usual visitor hours, the museum played host to over 50 events throughout the year including:
Two Steam Days (April | November)
Exhibitions (What Happened Next | Moving Now | TECHNE | Motorcycles | Morris Minors | Volunteer Art Exhibition | Dragon Computers | & Much More!)
Festivals (Folk Day | Food for the Planet)
Workshops (Twilight at the Museum | British Science Week | Summer at the Museum | Maths Week England | Printing)
STEM education and tours (school and community group visits | Pye History Trust |Open Cambridge)
Community Events (Toddle into Tech | Repair Cafe | Dying for Life)
Research Presentations (Cambridge Industrial Archaeology Group |Association for Industrial Archaeology)
As a Museum, we also celebrated some personal achievements!
In March, we announced that we had received a grant of £99,932 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for an exciting heritage project, Full Steam Ahead. This grant allowed us to start work on our Engineer’s House so we can use it for community events in the future, as well as create three new roles at the museum and welcome two new staff members!
Joanne Hamilton, previously our Front of House Team Leader, stepped into the role of Communities and Visitor Engagement Officer. With this role, we will put community at the heart of our museum, and help make our exhibitions as welcoming and accessible as possible. Lindsey Bavin joined the team as our Museum Enterprise Manager, helping to adapt our events and hiring system, and lead on our Heritage Fund project. As our new education officer, Hannah Battersby has been charging along with developing our education offer, helping to get pupils in the museum and learning about all things technology! Our team is completed by Catherine Rooney, who as administrator, has helped keep the museum on its feet while we waited for new staff members, and now ensures everything is running smoothly!
The Museum received a record number of visitors through its doors, increasing on its previous 2023 record. As well as developing our exhibitions, we moved our shop this year to ensure the best visitor experience possible! This has really upped our shop sales, including the work done by our wonderful, generous craft group which brought in over £800 this year (well done team!).
Our volunteers recorded 6693 hours this year (with 4 volunteers recording over 500 each!). We also welcomed 14 new regular volunteers to the team, and five new trustees to the team – Amy, Kieran, Matthew, Bhagwat and our new chairperson, Vincent!
The Future
As we head into 2025, the question of what is in store is on everyone’s minds. For us here at CMT, 2025 is hoping to be one filled with:
We strive to create memorable experiences for all our visitors, and we're already looking forward to welcoming you back next year. 2025 is bound to be an exciting one for the museum — stay tuned for updates on our upcoming events and special offers by checking our website or following us on social media. We can't wait to see you all again soon!
On Friday 5th July, we hosted our first ever Repair Cafe at the Museum, in partnership with Abbey People. This event was in association with the Cambridge Carbon Footprint network who host a range of Repair Cafes across Cambridgeshire !
We had 69 items come through the door and our volunteer repairers managed to fix over 48 of them. This is the most items Abbey People have had at a Repair Café to date, and prevented around 197kg of waste and 1,053kg CO2 emissions, as well as helping a lot of people learn new skills. Over 30 people said that they would now try a repair themselves!
This is what some of the people who came along to the Repair Cafe had to say:
“Very friendly community event that brings people together to share knowledge, skills and experience. Well worth supporting!”
“I am very happy that repair cafe exists. It's really helping people”
“Brilliant initiative and many thanks for providing this service. So valuable to reduce waste and encourage people to improve their skills and increase their confidence”
Abbey People would like to give special thanks to the National Lottery players for their support through the National Lottery Climate Action funding the River Cam CAN (Climate Action through Nature) project.
Students from Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University’s Fine Art & Photography degree courses publicly displayed an #art exhibition at the Museum of Technology over the weekend of 19-21 April 2024.