About the Museum
Ipswich Museums Service is run by Ipswich Borough Council and consists of two sites. Christchurch Mansion and Ipswich Museum.
Ipswich Museum was established as a private subscribers’ museum in 1846 and has been funded by Ipswich ratepayers since 1853, when it transferred to Borough ownership. It moved to its current purpose built building in 1881 located in the high street. This represents 150 years of continuous local authority service, making it one of the earliest provincial local authority museums in the country. Today the museum houses ethnographic, archaeological, egyptian, botanical, zoological, geological, and local history material relating to Ipswich. Natural history displays include the orginal Victorian Natural History Gallery and the Suffolk Wildlife Gallery, which includes a life size model of a woolly mammoth. Archaeological displays include Roman Suffolk and the early Saxon town of Gipeswic. Anglo-Saxon material is a particular strength in the collections as Gipeswic was the trading port for the kings burried at Sutton Hoo making Ipswich one of the oldest English towns in the country. The ethnographical collections include objects from many cultures around the world, reflecting Ipswich participation in the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentith centuries. Other galleries cover the history of Ipswich and Ipswich at War, the homefront during World War II .
Christchurch Mansion is a Grade I listed building dating from 1548 set in a historic park a few minutes walk from the town centre. Throughout its long history, the house has been lived in by only three families, the Withipolls, the Devereux and the Fonnereaus. In 1892 it was bought by Felix Thornley Cobbold who gave it to the town, and it opened as a museum in 1896. The Mansion houses the fine and decorative arts, furniture and costume collections. The collections are displayed in a series of room settings reflecting periods in the Mansion’s history. Collections exhibited include English furniture dating from the 16th to the 19th Century, British pottery, porcelain and glassware and fine art by Suffolk and East Anglian artists from the 17th Century to the present day. Most notable of which are a number of early paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, who lived in Ipswich from 1752-1759, and the largest collection outside London of early oil paintings by John Constable. Other Suffolk artists on display include George Frost, John Moore, Alfred Munnings, F.G. Cotman, Philip Wilson Steer plus contemparary artists. The house has two temporary exhibitions spaces, the Wolsey Art Gallery, a prestigious exhibition space hosting a lively programme of contemporary art shows and the Room Upstairs, a smaller intimate space ideal for one man shows.
To visit our website, click on www.ipswich.gov.uk/tourism/guide/museum.htm