Windmills and warfare

Two slightly unrelated topics, except that they have formed a large part of our work over the last few months, which has just been made public.

I won’t go on about it, but as you probably know, our C. P. Davies Collection was used by the Restoration Man team to uncover the history of Reed Mill, the first restoration of the new series. The episode is available through Channel 4 on Demand.

That’s the windmills; the warfare is our Canterbury at War exhibition. Although the exhibition has a few more weeks to run (it officially closes on 31st January), we have now made the exhibition website live. To get a taster of the exhibition, or to follow the storyline once the exhibition has closed, have a look at the exhibitions section on our website.

We’ve also put together a new display in the Templeman foyer about Murder in the Cathedral – T.S. Eliot’s play, commisioned for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, which depicts the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, on 29th December 1170. If you happen to be passing, do take a look!

New for this term is an exhibition about Charles Dickens and the theatre, drawing on our extensive Victorian and Edwardian Theatre Collecitons – so watch this space for developments throughout 2012…

Special Collections on TV

As a welcome back after the Christmas break, we have some exciting news!

You may remember that back in June last year, Special Collections and the Cathedral Library were involved in filming for the series Restoration Man in an episode about  Reed Mill in Kingston, which has now been restored as a home. Parts of our C. P. Davies and Muggeridge Mill Collections were used in the filming, and we’ve since supplied several further images for the show.

This episode will be shown on Thursday 5th January at 9pm on Channel 4 and will launch the new series. I hope that you can watch it and enjoy it – we are certainly looking forward to seeing the finished product.

If you would like any information about our Mills Collections, please take a look at our website.

For more information about the restoration, please contact R J Gibbs & Sons Ltd.