The Food Museum

Museum in Suffolk, UK

The Food Museum, formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life, is a museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk, England, which specialises in presenting the agricultural history of East Anglia through a mixture of exhibits and living history demonstrations.

The land was originally part of the Home Farm for the Abbot’s Hall estate. The estate dates from medieval times, when it was an outlying manor for St Osyth's Priory in Essex. It passed through numerous owners until it was purchased by the Longe family in 1903. Mechanisation in the 1950s and 1960s meant that England was in danger of losing long established skills, equipment, and buildings, if something was not done to rescue them. Local farmer Jack Carter, the Suffolk Local History Council, and other individuals worked to collect, preserve and display objects from rural East Anglia. After several years of temporary exhibitions, Vera and Ena Longe placed of farmland, Abbot’s Hall, its gardens, and 18/20 Crowe Street, in trust to be used as a museum. The Museum opened in 1967.

The museum was awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to renovate Abbot's Hall and Crowe Street Cottages. The project was completed in April 2012, and officially opened in June 2012. There are nine exhibition spaces exploring ideas of home and belonging in East Anglia, as well as space for temporary exhibitions. Crowe Street Cottages, which were occupied by workers at Abbot's Hall, have been displayed as they would have looked when the last owner lived there. Abbot's Hall is open year round, providing a permanent centrepiece to the museum. The Hall features a permanent exhibition of the life and works of Welsh folklorist George Ewart Evans.

Since 2011 the museum site has hosted the Stowblues Festival. The festival is organised in partnership with BBC Radio Suffolk. In August 2016 the Museum began hosting its biggest event to date, the annual East Anglian Living History Fayre run in partnership with Black Knight Historical.