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The Museum is back!

Sea Mills museum opens with a new exhibition “Coronavirus Stinks.”

The museum has reopened at last

The museum opened again, finally after four months of being closed due to the corona virus. We are asking visitors to bring hand sanitiser with them and use it before and after touching anything. This is the same approach that is being taken in the children’s play area opposite.

Our opening hours are Monday – Friday 9-5pm and Saturday 9-4.30pm. The Cafe on the Square is also open those days 10-3pm and the toilet there is also open.

The exhibition Coronavirus Stinks is made up of the thoughts and feelings of children and young people told in works and pictures, some of them are very moving and they are all important.

Children and young people are still welcome to contribute postcard sized pieces of writing or artwork to the Coronavirus Stinks exhibition, submissions should be posted through the door at 28 St Edyth’s Road. There a postcard templates available in the museum or to download, or just use a similar sized bit of paper or card, or submit digitally.

Freebies at the museum: postcard templates, Homes for Heroes walk books and comics

Even as lockdown has eased we are keen to collect children and young people’s feelings about coronavirus. In some ways they have been the most affected, with many not having attended school for months, exams cancelled and first job prospects made a lot more challenging. We will keep all the cards at the end and offer them to Bristol Archives as a record of our time. Sharing feelings and being listened to is also good for mental health. There’s more about this is our press release about the project.

One of the postcards in the exhibition showing how children have been affected by lockdown

We aim to fill the available space in the phone box and also add postcards to some of the noticeboards around Sea Mills and Coombe Dingle. There are already a few in the noticeboard opposite the phone box between Elexis and Collistear Beauty.

It’s possible to see all the postcards from the outside of the phone box so it’s very easy to go along and have a look whether we are open or not. We hope that you get something out of reading the opinions of children and young people. Please encourage those you know to go and have a look and the young people you know to contribute.

You can also read more about the exhibition at the Bristol 24/7 website

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SS Great Britain Return

Fifty years today on the 19th July 1970, exactly 127 years after it was originally launched, the SS Great Britain finally made it back to the dry dock in Bristol dock in which it was built. It had waited the previous two weeks in the Cumberland Basin for a tide high enough to take it into the dock.

It’s final voyage on 5th July down the Avon, past our Sea Mills Garden Suburb and under the Clifton Suspension Bridge had been witnessed by many from the area.

A first glimpse of the SS Great Britain on her return

Tim Wallis remembers that day well, “it was heartening to get the first glimpse of it come around the horseshoe bend, it felt like an honour to have this on our river after the distance it had travelled all the way from the Falklands. It was a special moment. There was a feeling of this is it, it’s no longer a story – it’s here”. Many gathered on the banks of the Avon that day, watching alongside Tim and his wife Mary. There weren’t many places you could stand safely and it must have been travelling quite slowly as Tim remembers the crowd trotting down the Portway to see the ship pass under the suspension bridge. At that point Tim found himself standing next to Jack Hayward, the man who had paid for the whole operation “it felt like a real team effort”.

The ship had travelled across the Atlantic on a pontoon but floated itself from Avonmouth to the docks. Many Sea Mills residents remember seeing in it as children, either from the school playing fields or being taken down to the river with their parents to see it. Mandy Meek is glad she saw it now but at the time it was a different matter “I was a teenager and resented getting up early to watch this lump of rust floating up the river.” The 37 years the ship had been left in Sparrow Cove in the Falklands had not been kind to her.

The Avon is notoriously difficult to navigate, with tricky tides and the horseshoe bend which has been the site of many accidents involving large vessels. Avonmouth provided channel pilots to guide ships along the river and the pilot on the SS Great Britain that day was Shirehampton resident, Fred Amphlett. His son Ed remembers “The ship had come into Avonmouth the previous evening, they were planning to take it up the channel that day but it was too late. My father was lucky, there was a rota for the pilots and he was on, so he got the opportunity to bring the ship in. I was a shipping agent on the dock and I gave him a lift, as I watched the ship depart I was very tempted to step on board and go with him. I wish I had now! It was quite a nice day and there were lots of people lining the route, cheering as it went past, it was quite a spectacle. My father took the ship as far as the locks in Bristol and then a dock pilot took over. Looking back it was an interesting, fun day and I’m quite proud of the old man for doing the thing. I’m sure he was a bit anxious at the time because there was a lot of media attention, but for him it was just an everyday job”.

Find out more
https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/your-visit/collection-stories/ss-great-britain-returning-bristol
https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/story/incredible-journey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Britain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggbCAa3ebzg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayJDPjeoWhQ