Museums - Saffron Walden Museum

Opened in 1835 near the ruins of the twelfth-century Walden Castle, the Saffron Walden Museum is one of the oldest purpose-built museums in Britain. It contains a wide-ranging collection of over 175,000 objects, covering ethnography, local and Egyptian archaeology, natural history, and decorative arts. The ethnographic collections comprise some 3,500 items from a large number of cultures in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and the Americas. Formed largely by donations from nineteenth-century travelers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonial officers, the collection has particular strengths in Polynesian, Aboriginal Australian, and North American material. The museum also holds ethnographic collections from other Essex museums, such as the Chelmsford, Southend, and Colchester Museums, as well as the Cuming Museum in Southwark. A number of important donations were made in the first half of the nineteenth century by George Bennet of the London Missionary Society, Joseph Tickell, John Helder Wedge, and the Marchioness Cornwallis. The ethnographic collection contains many rare Oceanic works, perhaps the most important among them being a female "Tii Vahine" figure and a chief mourner's chest apron, both from the Society Islands.