The Bath Postal Museum is in Bath, Somerset, England.
The museum was founded in 1979 by Audrey and Harold Swindells in the basement of their house. In 1984, it moved to a home in Broad Street. This was the site of Bath's main Post Office from 1822 to 1854 and the building in which the first recorded posting of a Penny Black took place on 2 May 1840. It has been designated by English Heritage as a grade II listed building.
The museum's collections include: biographies of key figures involved with the development of the Post Office and connected with Bath, such as Ralph Allen, John Palmer and Thomas Moore Musgrave; a history of the post from 2000BC to the current day and a history of the British postbox.
Artefacts on display included quills and ink wells, stamp boxes, post boxes, post horns, clay tablets, strip maps, model mail coaches and, letters and postcards. There was also a replica Victorian post office.
Due to vastly increased rent from 2003, the museum had to move out of the Broad Street building and on 7 November 2006 it reopened on a much smaller scale in the basement of the post office building at 27 Northgate Street.
Famous quotes containing the words bath, postal and/or museum:
“Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.”
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
“This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)