The Land of Lost Content was a museum in Craven Arms, Shropshire, that collected everyday objects such as toys, magazines and packaging. [1] [2]
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The museum's name was taken from Poem XL in A. E. Housman's collection A Shropshire Lad .
The Land of Lost Content was a museum in Craven Arms, Shropshire, that collected everyday objects such as toys, magazines and packaging. [1] [2]
The museum's name was taken from Poem XL in A. E. Housman's collection A Shropshire Lad .
The museum was founded by Stella Mitchell, who had begun collecting everyday objects while studying art in Birmingham in the 1970s. [3] [4] She opened her first museum in 1991 with her husband Dave in West Sussex, before moving to Craven Arms in 2003. [3] Its final premises occupied the town's former market hall, constructed in 1888, which the couple bought for £165,000. [5] It contained 37 separate displays spread out over four floors. [6]
In 2018, the museum was threatened with closure because it did not meet modern safety standards. The owners retrofitted the premises with additional fire doors and extinguishers. [7]
In 2023, the premises closed following legal problems over co-ownership with Wayne Hemingway. [8] Two years later, the property was put up for sale. [9]
Objects in the museum included a variety of Chad Valley toys, bluebirds taken from the gates of the Blue Bird Toffee factory, [3] [10] tickets from the first National Lottery in 1994 and a Sinclair C5. [5]
The museum was run without any funding or sponsorship and relied on word of mouth to build a reputation for its collections and displays. [7] All of the museum's objects were popular and in everyday use at some point since the late Victorian era. [10] Though many items were mass-produced with no perceived value when collected by the museum, they have since acquired significance as they are attached to visitors' personal memories and a view to how people used to live. [3]
The Land of Lost Content has donated objects in its collections to various other museums and exhibitions. These include a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Festival of Britain in 2011, supplying 1930s posters to the Black Country Living Museum and furnishing a flat with contemporary objects in Balfron Tower as part of a National Trust display of Brutalist architecture in 2014. [3] [11]