Fascinating Facts about the museum service
Welwyn Hatfield Museums: Some Fascinating Facts
- Last year 24,045 people visited Mill Green and Welwyn Roman Baths.
- We cost £334,000 a year to run, or just £3.32 per local person each year! Here’s what we did:
- 12,239 children visited us - or were visited at school by our Education Officer.
- A total of 36,548 people used our services, when website use and outreach is added to personal visits.
- We milled over 26 tonnes of organic flour by water power - and Simmons Bakery made about 68,000 loaves with it. That's enough for over 166,000 sandwiches or 332,000 slices of toast!
- The museum is a great centre of volunteering and friendship: 55 volunteers gave a total of about 2,000 hours last year to support our local heritage and build up our Welwyn Hatfield community.
- The Friends of the Museum are a thriving group and have recently given grants for tools, care of the collection, exhibition materials, and gardening items, repair of historic furniture, to name just a few.
- Last year the Friends gave us nearly £2,500 – a fantastic amount all raised by volunteers.
- Our cream teas include superb scones which are baked each week in the kitchens of the Jim McDonald Centre. At our recent classic car day a hardworking team of volunteers sold nearly 200 of them in just three hours - a Mill Green record!
- We have been commended by the Museums Libraries and Archives Council for excellence in education work - great news for a small museum!
- Our amazing collection includes 15,000 objects, ephemera and photos.
- Welwyn Garden City was the home of Lone Star Die Cast Toys. So we have a fab collection of toys old and new. From a Morris Bullnose to the Ford Thunderbird, as well as Lone Star construction kits, archery sets, pistols, and a space gun, it’s toy heaven in our store room!
- We care for 200 Murphy radios and televisions made locally, including the very rare and early V84 set, introduced at Radiolympia in 1939 - just before war stopped transmissions.
- Some of our more bizarre local objects include: a goat’s leg carving fork; the horns from a plucky bull who escaped from the local abbatoir in the 1940s; the christening bowl presented to the first baby born in WGC in 1921; a rare and elegant cresta silk beaded evening dress; the clock from the opening of the Welwyn Garden station in 1926 and a BAE Skyflash Missile of 1972.