Museums

Mansfield Museum named as best in country for families

Mansfield Museum has been named as the best museum for family visits in the entire country.

The Mansfield District Council run facility won the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award in a special ceremony at the offices of the Guardian newspaper in London on Thursday 7 April.

A panel of leaders in the museum world, chaired by Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, crowned Mansfield Museum as the winner of the award, which is the biggest museum award in Britain, and the only one judged by families.

The nominees were whittled down to a short list of six last month, with Mansfield Museum featuring alongside the Corinium Museum in Cirencester, The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent, the Kilmartin House Museum in Argyll, the Horniman Museum in London and the Abbey House Museum in Leeds.

The Leeming Street museum and its fellow finalists were anonymously road tested last month by undercover families representing award organisers Kids in Museums, a visitor-led charity working with museums to make them more family-friendly. The museum, which is free to enter, was one of more than 100 museums across the country originally nominated for the award by visitors.

Dea Birkett, Director of Kids in Museums said: “Mansfield Museum was a surprise to us. From a Guinea Pig trail to turning the museum into an old fashioned department store stocked with their collection of household goods, they’ve proved you don’t need an architecturally astonishing building or Egyptian mummies to entice and entrance families.”

Karla Lessingham, who visited with her son Aidan, 8, and her daughter Nadia, 5, as one of the family judges, said: “The museum has a happy family feeling.”

And family judge Jackie Shears, who went to Mansfield with her three children aged between eight and three, liked the low-tech interactives and that the kids could sit down and colour in every single room.