 The Heritage Centre 
Discovering the Heritage of Henley
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Recommendation added: 08/05/2007 09:02
By: dewberry (YSUK rating +1061)dewberry has been thanked 8 times for this contribution
"During a day visiting relatives in Henley in Arden we were on the High Street when my mum announced she wanted to go and take a closer look at the church she could see further along the road. I was not in the mood for a) walking, b) churches or c) any more small talk with Uncle Ted so I made a snap decision that I instead wanted to visit the Henley in Arden Heritage Centre I'd spotted just moments earlier but for them to carry on to the church and I'd catch them up. My ruse worked and I had a much needed half an hour of peace and quiet, while mooching around in what I hoped would be interesting local history.
The Heritage Centre is actually a huge converted house which in part dates back to the 1300's and makes it one of the oldest buildings in Henley in Arden. Disregarding for a moment the contents of the Centre, the building itself was enough to keep me absorbed for the first few minutes of my visit. Although the rooms now have the feel of a visitors centre/museum, the original structure of the house remains as it did centuries ago and it's understatedly beautiful - rural, but olde worlde enough to bring the history of the place to the forefront.
The fact that this building was once a fairly large house is evident from the layout of the modern Heritage Centre. The large wooden beamed reception room is obviously where the owners of this house in centuries gone by would have greeted their guests, and the rooms these guests would have used are still there in structure with just the least alteration possible to make the rooms useable in a Heritage Centre setting. And they've managed to pull it off beautifully, using modern techniques to create interesting displays while losing none of the charm of the fabulous building.
There are two floors which make up the Heritage Centre and while the ground floor has been adapted to fully accommodate wheelchair users, the first floor is completely inaccessible to anyone who's mobility isn't good enough to climb a fairly steep flight of stairs. I doubt my asthmatic mum could have managed to get up the stairs and then still have the energy to walk around the exhibits. This lack of access is definitely a shame as the most interesting display of the centre, Home Life, is up here but I'm sure if they could improve access they would and it's mainly down to limitations imposed by the age and structure of the building itself.
The Heritage Centre has attempted to redeem itself somewhat for the fact that it can't be fully accommodating to its disabled visitors and screens a kind of virtual tour video in the downstairs Reading Room. I listened in for a few minutes and it's a nice descriptive video showing a selection of the more interesting pieces from the collections on the first floor, nicely narrated with details of key dates in Henley in Arden history and what its residents would have been doing at the time.
The Reading Room is also, as you may expect, the place where you can browse through the towns historical documents and look at intricate hand drawn maps of the area before major development arrived. You can see pictures and photographs of Henley in Arden through the ages as well as read through some (long winded!) written wartime memoirs of people living in the town. I was struck by a photograph displayed in the Reading Room which showed the High Street 100 + years ago - the place has not changed one bit! Honestly!
My favourite room on the ground floor was the Medieval Henley collection. This is basically arranged to visually document the history of Henley in Arden from its early days as a temporary settlement, through it's farming background and Henley's transformation to a thriving market town. I liked the way large information signs are displayed alongside actual exhibits so us visitors can find out something 'extra' about the period, not just cooing at old chain mail and rock samples. There's a display centred around the Channel 4 Time Team visit to Henley where they spent time unearthing Beaudesert Castle, a medieval castle which was abandoned and left to ruin - this was, I thought, a really interesting display as I was immediately curious as to how a CASTLE can be left untended and unnoticed for so long that grass grows over it???!
Going up to the first floor I saw it was laid out in a very similar way to downstairs, with the rooms kept as authentic and unchanged as possible. Upstairs the beam work is even more lovely as the beams holding up the main ceiling seem that little bit more intricately worked together. This makes the large empty spaces above your head seem cosier and generally more comfortable.
The Home Life display is well worth a look. Henley fashions through the years are displayed on well shaped mannequins, outfits which would have been worn by servants and grand folk displayed side by side to show off the vastly differing styles of dress depending on your social status. I love looking at historical clothes and although the display here was small it was varied and an interesting collection. Also grouped in Home Life was a selection of children's toys which I thought was lovely. The great thing was how well used these toys look, they've been cherished and played with through the years not kept dust free in a box somewhere. A balding teddy bear with no eyes is of much more historical interest (to me anyway) than a pristine porcelain doll which has been kept in a vault for years.
I had a very quick look at the School Room which looked pretty bare, just rows of wooden benches with a teachers desk and bookcase. It's as a standard school room would have been in Victorian times and when school parties visit the Heritage Centre a 'teacher' is drafted in to give the kids' a real taste of the Victorian education system.
There were a couple of rooms I simply didn't have time to look at properly and for this reason I'll definitely visit the centre again. I'd just had an ice cream next door at the Henley Ice Cream Parlour and I would have liked to have spent a bit more time looking at the display dedicated to Henley's history of making ice cream. The main focus of the collection that I could see was a display of photographs and paintings of the work that Henley people put in to the fledgling ice cream industry, powerful black and white images of men both working and when having a crafty fag on the factory floor!
The Heritage Centre is a small operation so don't expect an exhibition on the scale of The National History Museum. What it lacks in size and quantity however, it makes up for in enthusiasm and charm. I get the feeling that the centres ultimate aim is to create a potted history of Henley in Arden, and this is exactly what they've done. They've used only the most interesting items to create their displays and have given brief explanations for the inclusion of this specific item in the overall collection. Some of the larger items have had backdrops specifically created for them so they can be shown as they would have been at the time, while the very smallest parts of the collections have been grouped together in eye catching and interesting ways.
The Heritage Centre is free to visit so if you're in the area there's really no reason not to pop in and take a look. I have no connection to Henley in Arden other than the fact that my relatives retired here years ago so I possibly didn't have quite the same level of interest as I do in these smaller museums based on Birmingham life, but if you live actually in Henley in Arden or its surrounding towns and villages then do go and see the place for a bit of local (to you!) history.
As far as opening times go it looks to be kinda erratic with the centre being open only 6 months of the year and different opening hours on different days, I'd definitely recommend calling ahead to check whether the Heritage Centre is going to be open before making your way to Henley in Arden. The High Street is very easy to find, in fact by following the signs for Henley in Arden from any direction will bring you onto the A3400 which will lead you onto the High Street. Parking is available a couple of hundred yards away and the short walk back to the Heritage Centre (and next door ice cream parlour) is an enjoyable one along a gorgeously historical street.
Henley in Arden Heritage Centre
Joseph Hardy House
150 High Street
Henley in Arden
Warwickshire
B95 5BS
Tel: 01564 795919"
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