Blandford Town Museum   

Founded: Not sure        Governance: Independent Trust        Scope: Local history    Visited: Summer 2016

The volunteers on duty at Blandford Museum weren't sure how to answer my gentle enquiries about the history of the nice old building that houses it. One said it used to be a stables, the other that it was the workshop of the Bastard brothers, the architects chiefly responsible for rebuilding the small Dorset market town after the catastrophic fire of 1731. Of course it could easily have been both, but I was surprised they couldn't just reel the answer off. 

The collection is pretty much the usual sort of thing one would expect (including a serpent! It doesn't get any better than that) with the exception of the little display about the Gurkhas and Nepalese culture which you discover tucked away into a far corner of the upper floor: Blandford owes that to the Royal Signals  Corps who are based over the hill from the old town centre. The museum is all amiably random although I thought the medieval corner and the nicely grim archaeological stratigraphy display had a great deal of flair to them.