Most museums in Cambridge are about the great university - its scientists, its manuscripts, its grand collections. The Museum of Cambridge is about the rest of the city. Housed in the timbered shell of the former White Horse Inn, a Grade II listed coaching inn that closed in 1934 after centuries of pulling pints on Castle Street, it tells the story of the people who lived in Cambridge and the surrounding Fens from 1700 onwards. The collection runs to more than 20,000 objects, and almost none of them came from a college. They came from kitchens, farms, butcher shops, schoolrooms, and parlours.
The White Horse Inn served drinkers from the 16th century until 1934. When it closed, the timber-framed building - low ceilings, narrow staircases, small irregular rooms - sat empty, waiting for a new purpose. That purpose arrived in 1936, when the Cambridge and County Folk Museum opened in the old taproom and snug. The 1933 Festival of Olden Times, organised by the Cambridgeshire Federation of Women's Institutes at the Cambridge Guildhall, had revealed a public appetite for everyday history that the university museums were not really serving. The museum was the answer. Queen Mary visited in 1938 and the following year donated a miniature table and a tea caddy. By 1939 the collection had risen to over 1,900 objects.
In 1947 Enid Porter became curator and held the post until 1976 - nearly three decades that defined the museum. Porter was a leading authority on Cambridgeshire culture, customs, and folk belief, and a pioneer of oral history at a time when the field barely existed. She recorded the speech, songs, and recollections of Fen people whose ways of life were disappearing, and she shaped the collection around them. Much of what visitors see today reflects her instincts: the wedding bonnets, the cottage furniture, the eel traps, the small mysterious objects of rural life whose use you would never guess without an explanation card. Porter believed museums should hold not only things but the memories that gave the things meaning.
The collection now totals more than 20,000 objects. There are costumes - from working clothes to christening gowns - and decorative arts, fine art, coins, medals, medical equipment, musical instruments, toys, textiles, and the everyday tools of trades long gone. Oil paintings by the Cambridge artist Mary Charlotte Greene (1860 to 1951) hang on the walls, alongside inn signs by Richard Hopkins Leach (1794 to 1851), another local painter. There are objects of law and order, hobbies, and small reminders of how Cambridge people kept themselves entertained before television. Look in the toy case and you can see what a child in 1880 played with on a wet Sunday afternoon.
The museum is an independent charity, governed by a board of trustees, and it has never quite been financially safe. It was longlisted for the 2006 Gulbenkian Prize. In 1988 it nearly closed for lack of money. By 2017 it was in trouble again. In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering visitor attractions across Britain, the museum launched a fundraising campaign with the support of Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner; in May 2021 it announced the campaign had succeeded and reopened to the public. Alongside the physical collection, the museum administers Capturing Cambridge, a website that crowd-sources local history, documenting stories and memories across the city street by street. The mission, in both forms, is the same: to keep the ordinary city audible.
Coordinates 52.21 N, 0.11 E, on Castle Street in central Cambridge, near the foot of Castle Hill where the Norman castle once stood. The museum is a few minutes' walk north of the Cam and the city centre. Cambridge Airport (EGSC) is about 2 nautical miles east. From the air, Cambridge is identifiable by its medieval college quadrangles and the green ribbon of the Backs along the River Cam. The museum building itself is a small timber-framed structure not visible from cruising altitude. London Stansted (EGSS) lies 25 nm south.