Nottingham Castle became the home to the first municipal museum in the United Kingdom in 1878 but very little has been written or published about the castle’s history as a museum or the collections that the museum held during this time. 

This project will research the first fifty years of Nottingham Castle Museum and its collections, from its founding in 1878 to the retirement of the first curator in 1929. I shall be looking at why the museum was founded and the people involved, from curators to collectors, as well as how objects came to be part of the collection and place the museum and its collections within a regional, national, and international context.

Understanding the early history of Nottingham Castle Museum and how and why objects came to be in the museum is an essential part of the process to decolonise the collection.