Museum of Lincolnshire Life

Such a quantity of bygones is assembled here that you begin to wonder whether the people of Lincolnshire have anything much over twenty years left in their houses at all. Their former possessions are guarded in a red-brick fort of 1857, originally a barracks for the Royal North Lincoln Militia, whose badge is above the gate. In the 1960s a local arts organization moved in and the Lincolnshire Local History Society, which had meanwhile been gathering material for a folk museum, saw an opportunity. By 1969 the local historians had successfully infiltrated the building and in 1974 the county council took the whole thing over as a museum of social history for Lincolnshire. The collection, which is almost entirely from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comes from the local history society plus numerous items donated since.