Qualla: Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a doll's house in Peterborough Museum that fits in your hand. It is made from beef and mutton bones, scrap wood, and slivers of straw, and it was built by a Frenchman who could not go home. Between 1797 and 1814 the British government held tens of thousands of prisoners-of-war from the Napoleonic conflicts at Norman Cross, a few miles south of the city, in what is generally accepted to be the world's first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp. The men inside had time, no money, and bones from their dinners. Out of that they made miniature ships rigged with human hair, animated automata, lace-fine straw inlay, model guillotines, snuff boxes, and chess sets so detailed that two centuries on they are still the centrepiece of one of the most unusual museum collections in England.

Image: Cmglee | CC BY-SA 4.0

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: From a Society to a Museum

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Peterborough Museum began as the collection of the Peterborough Natural History, Scientific and Archaeological Society, founded in 1871. The Society's collection went on public display in 1880, originally in a single room on Long Causeway. It moved in 1887 to the Becket Chapel on...

Image: Immanuel Giel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: The Norman Cross Collection

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Norman Cross artefacts are the museum's most distinctive holding. Between 1797 and 1814 the camp held about 7,000 French prisoners at any one time, mostly soldiers and sailors captured during the Napoleonic Wars. Conditions were not gentle. Disease swept through the wooden ba...

Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: Jurassic Peterborough

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The other internationally significant part of the collection is the marine fossil holdings. Peterborough sits on Middle and Upper Jurassic clay, deposited when the area was a warm shallow sea about 165 million years ago. The Oxford Clay around Peterborough was extensively quarrie...

Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: The Peasant Poet

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Bryan, CC BY-SA 2.0. John Clare was born in 1793 in the nearby village of Helpston, the son of a thresher, and became one of the great English nature poets of the nineteenth century. He was called, in his own time, the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, a label that managed to be both descriptive and sli...

Image: Paul Bryan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery: 227,000 Things

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Giles Eccardt / After Jean-Baptiste van Loo, Public domain. The total collection comes to about 227,000 objects: Roman pottery from local kiln sites, Saxon material, medieval and post-medieval social history, paintings and prints from the seventeenth century to the present, and a thumb-sized portrait of George Montagu, Earl of Halifax, by...

Image: John Giles Eccardt / After Jean-Baptiste van Loo | Public domain