If the children or grandchildren are still off school or the in-laws haven’t gone home yet, or just if you want to have some fun, the Heritage Centre is open as usual from Tuesday to Saturday this week. Youngsters love dressing up (a Roman centurion, anyone?) and building bridges out of Duplo (a buding Brunel?). For bigger people our Spitfire Simulator Experience is available every day – there are plenty of sessions available tomorrow Tuesday or Wednesday and Friday, and on Thursday afternoon. You can book online at https://maidenheadheritage.org.uk/spitfire-simulator/ or take a risk and just turn up and take off!
Christmas and New Year opening times
Our opening times for Christmas and New Year will be:
CLOSED from 23-28 December inclusive
OPEN 29, 30 and 31 December from 10am to 4pm
CLOSED 1-3 January 2022
OPEN 4-8 January from 10am to 4pm
Middle-earth comes to Bray
The iconic Bray Studios, which have just received planning consent for new sound stages and ancillary buildings, will be one of the locations for Amazon Studios’ new £700m Lord of the Rings series which begins shooting next year. Bovingdon Airfield near Berkhamstead will also be used. Bray Studios has 54,000 sq.ft of stages and a 183,000 sq.ft back lot with a huge open air stage. Photos below.
New studios are also planned at Marlow, Shinfield, Farnborough and Broxbourne (Herts). The exisdting studios at Shepperton are also being expanded. However it seems that the UK does not have enough film equipment or trained crew to supply this boom, created by the appetite for high-quality drama and films among subscribers to Amazon, Netflix, Disney and Apple.
Award for Heritage Centre
We are proud to announce that we have received a 2017 Certificate of Excellence from the worldwide travel website TripAdvisor. The Centre has been making a great effort to attract visitors from outside the Maidenhead area, especially some of the huge number of tourists who already come to Windsor, so the reviews that visitors post on TripAdvisor are really valuable to us. At the same time, figures released by Tourism South East show that Maidenhead Heritage Centre attracted 8% more visitors in 2016 than in 2015 figure, against an average for other museums and venues in the region of just 2%. The TripAdvisor award is a tribute to our wonderful volunteer team who make people so welcome and help them get the most from their visit.
Please come and see for yourself!
Found in the ground – in your garden perhaps?
A special finds identification day is being held at Maidenhead Heritage Centre on Saturday July 22nd. Many people have found mystery objects while out walking or digging in their garden: an old coin, an old bottle or a piece of pottery, or in the case of the Centre’s chairman a wedding ring whose owner was eventually traced!
At this special event being staged as part of the UK Festival of Archaeology, you can bring along your mystery object for expert David Williams (Finds Liaison Officer) to inspect and hopefully identify. Perhaps you have a real treasure.
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