Wisbech & Fenland Museum

Built in 1847 and designed  by architect George Buckler, this fine Victorian  building  on the former  site of Wisbech Castle was purpose built as a museum  to house and display the collection previously held in in two rooms of a property in Old Market Place.

Initially open to subscribing members only the original  collection shared its premises with the Wisbech Literary  Society (the  Literary Society and Museum formally merged in 1877) and this may account for the fact that a small museum  in a small  market  town in Cambridgeshire houses the manuscript of Charles Dickens’s novel “Great Expectations.”

The collection also includes that of “Hours of Idleness,” the first collection of poems by Lord Byron. The museum  is also associated with the collection of anti slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkeson, including the West African artifacts that he used to use to illustrate his lectures during the campaign to abolish the slave trade starting in the 1780s. There is a display of material related to the Wisbech and Upwell Tramway. The natural history collection includes some fine fossils of Ichthyosaurs and the skeleton  of a small Orca.

The collection  is eclectic, as one would expect from a Victorian  museum, but the building itself is the star of the show, a permanent  record of the way our Victorian  forefathers believed a museum should look and operate.