Plan your visit

Our museum is small, but with a lot to see.

The views below give you the idea, and a diagram of our floor layout is here - you can have a copy in the museum, along with the text that goes with it.

What will you find inside?

Use the digital interactive display 'kiosk', still under development but with a number of photos of Rickmansworth and the villages around us, as well as maps of the area from different periods and some audio - touch the screen to start, and then touch again to delve into the folders and the images they contain.

The chronology boards allow you to follow the development of the district over the last thousand years or so. And some of our exhibits have QR codes to give you an audio recording describing and expanding them.

You'll see the 'butcher's pay booth', which allowed the cashier in a Chorleywood butcher's shop to deal with the customers' money separately from the meat. Many of our visitors remember using one! But this one is set up to let children (and adults too, if they wish) to go inside and explore the sorts of things they'd have found in a shop fifty or sixty years ago. Just let the steward know you want to do that.

You can use a magnifying glass to look more closely at some of our fossils.

And younger children might like to dig in our sandbox and see what they can find: dinosaurs? fossils? stone age tools... ?

If you want to research the story of the area, we have a wide range of books, papers and journals to consult. We don't really have a reading room, but the steward will be able to show you where you can sit to read. We're not able to let our reference material leave the museum, though.

You'll see that we present a number of items in the open, not in glass cases. These don't have great value, and they're not really vulnerable, but we would ask that visitors respect them - we'd rather they weren't handled.

And we'd be grateful for your donation to our work! You'll find collecting boxes in the museum.

We don't, sadly, have either a toilet or a cafe in our small museum, but the steward may be able to direct you at need.