Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse is a truly unique museum. Visit its 50-acre site and discover the:

• Historic workhouse

• Museum of life on the land

• Traditional farm with rare breed animals

• Beautiful, unspoilt grounds

The museum is a great day out whether you want to learn about the lives of Norfolk people in the past or relax and have a good time with your friends and family. You’ll need a whole day to begin to discover all its wonders.

Use the navigation links to plan your visit, find out more about the museum and for details of events and exhibitions.

History comes to life!

This is an image Meet the Georgians on Bank Holiday Monday 27 May at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse with our new special event – History Alive!
Step back in time to the Georgian age – Gressenhall workhouse is brand spanking new; independence is on the way in America; revolution brewing in Paris; and a new era of democracy, literature and music is dawning.

Here at Gressenhall it is the ‘Age of Aristocracy’. Join the local gentry as they prepare for a sumptuous picnic with musicians and a storyteller providing the entertainment. Meet soldiers and their wives, tea dealers, Jacobite sympathisers, a barber surgeon and an abolitionist. Watch graceful performances by Norwich Early Dance Group and hear live music from the period.

For the rural poor, life is a little different. Meet the Mannered Mob down on the farm and find out about their lives. See women spinning and plaiting straw. Chat to a sailor and watch gamblers plying their ‘trade’. Don’t be too tempted by the yummy treats in the Mardlers’ Rest café though or you might need a visit from the travelling tooth puller!

Get creative this Half Term

This is an image See Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse in a whole new way this half term with Create! – a week of family fun activities for everyone to enjoy.
Join in the big weaving project, try your hand at different styles of art in Art Attack! and play the colours game around the museum. Locate the picture frames hidden around the site, follow the activities and join in the fun!

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, meet graffiti artist Mik Richardson. Inspired by the names engraved onto the workhouse buildings by inmates, design and create your own tag and add it to our special wall.

Create! runs from Saturday 25 May to Sunday 3 June, with the exception of Bank Holiday Monday 27 May, which is our special event History Alive!

For more information, please see the events calendar.

‘Archive Alive’ cinema tour comes to Gressenhall

This is an image On Sunday 9 June, Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse will proudly welcome the ‘Archive Alive’ mobile cinema tour, showing archive film footage within the unique setting of a 1960s vintage mobile cinema.
The cinema will be visiting the museum between 10am and 1pm and will be located next to the museum shop. Access to the cinema is free, and visitors are also welcome to use the Mardlers’ Rest Café, museum shop and toilets without charge.

This exciting and unique tour will incorporate the mobile cinema stopping at 17 locations across East Anglia to offer free screenings of local archive films from the last century aboard the 22-seater digital cinema. The Archive Alive tour will kick off on Sunday 2 June in Clacton-on-sea, Essex and will complete its journey in Hunstanton, Norfolk on Monday 10 June.

A full itinerary of its tour around Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk can be found on the Archive Alive website, which also showcases hundreds of digitised archive films from across East Anglia. This tour is part of the Digital Heritage Project run by Norwich’s Heritage Economic and Regeneration Trust (HEART).

Object of the Month

Each month, we pick one of the many fascinating items from our collection as our Object of the Month. With over 50,000 objects to select from, we are really spoilt for choice! You can find out more in our Collections Corner.

Find out all the gossip from ‘GressenhallFW’

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Keep up to date with all the news and gossip from the museum by following us on Facebook or liking us on Twitter.

Find us at

http://www.facebook.com/GressenhallFW

http://twitter.com/GressenhallFW

We would love to hear from you, so do drop us a message or send us a photograph!

Discover the Norfolk Nurserymen

Discover the story of Cannells and other Norfolk Nurserymen in our special exhibition for 2013. Nurserymen are people who grow and develop plants to sell on to gardeners and farmers. Explore the stories of four successful local businesses - the Taylors, Starks, Daniels and Cannells – in a special exhibition for 2013.

Norfolk Nurserymen is on display within the Collections Gallery, upstairs in the main museum building.

For more information, please see the exhibitions page.

Award winning sessions for schools!

Gressenhall Learning Team have won a Sandford Award for their sessions for schools. Congratulations to our learning team, who have just picked up an award for quality and excellence from the Heritage Education Trust. The Sandford Awards for Heritage Education are awarded annually following an assessment by a panel of independent judges.

The Trust believes that the experience that the visits that are made as children can inspire a lifelong appreciation of history. They said:

“Gressenhall Workhouse and Farm offers an active and fun schools learning programme for all ages, using the original workhouse buildings, room displays, working farm and farmyard, shops and homes from the past and fields, woodland and riverside. The hands on sessions engage and inspire school groups.”

To find out more about what sessions are available to schools, please visit the Gressenhall Learning webpage.

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse accepts Hudson’s Heritage Explorer Pass. To find out more click here>> or on the image.