About
Chertsey Museum is a charming and surprisingly rich local museum housed in The Cedars, an elegant Georgian townhouse on Windsor Street in the historic Surrey town of Chertsey. While modest in scale, the museum punches well above its weight thanks to the nationally significant Olive Matthews Collection of costume and textiles — one of the finest collections of historical dress outside London — which elevates this local museum into a destination of genuine importance for anyone interested in the history of fashion and dress.
The museum was established in 1965 to preserve and display the history of the Chertsey area, and its collections cover the full span of human activity in this part of the Thames Valley from prehistoric times to the present day. The archaeological holdings include material from the great Chertsey Abbey — one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in medieval England, founded in 666 AD and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537 — whose magnificent medieval tiles are among the museum's most treasured objects. The abbey was a major centre of religious, economic, and cultural life in medieval Surrey, and its story forms a compelling narrative thread through the museum's displays.
The Olive Matthews Collection is the museum's outstanding distinction. Olive Matthews (1899-1992) was a Chertsey resident who spent a lifetime assembling an extraordinary collection of historical dress, accessories, and textiles spanning from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The collection encompasses more than 4,000 items — gowns, suits, hats, shoes, underwear, accessories, and textiles — that document the full evolution of British dress from the elaborate formal wear of the Stuart and Georgian periods through the structured silhouettes of the Victorian era to the radical transformations of twentieth-century fashion. The quality and range of the collection makes it a major resource for fashion historians, costume designers, and textile researchers.
The local history galleries present the social and economic history of Chertsey and its surrounding villages with the depth and affection that characterise the best local museums. The Thames has shaped Chertsey's history, and its influence runs through the displays — from river trade and fishing to the pleasure boating and riverside leisure that made this stretch of the Thames a fashionable destination in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The museum also documents Chertsey's market history, its coaching inns, and the impact of the railway and twentieth-century suburbanisation on what had been a compact Surrey market town.
The Cedars itself is an attractive building that contributes to the visitor experience. This eighteenth-century townhouse retains a domestic scale and character that provides an intimate setting for the collections — the costume displays in particular benefit from being presented in rooms of appropriate period character rather than in the clinical environment of a purpose-built gallery.
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Highlights
The Olive Matthews Costume Collection
The museum's most significant holding is the Olive Matthews Collection — one of the finest collections of historical dress outside London.
Assembled over a lifetime by Chertsey resident Olive Matthews (1899-1992), the collection comprises more than 4,000 items spanning from the seventeenth century to the twentieth: gowns, suits, hats, shoes, underwear, accessories, and textiles that document the full evolution of British dress across four centuries.
The collection includes rare and beautifully preserved examples of Georgian formalwear, Victorian crinolines and bustles, Edwardian elegance, and twentieth-century fashion that together make this museum a significant destination for fashion historians, costume designers, and anyone fascinated by the history of how people dressed.
Chertsey Abbey — Medieval Monastery
Chertsey Abbey was one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in medieval England, founded in 666 AD and flourishing for nearly nine centuries before its dissolution by Henry VIII in 1537. The museum holds significant material from the abbey including its celebrated medieval floor tiles — magnificently decorated ceramic tiles that rank among the finest surviving examples of medieval decorative art in England.
The displays trace the abbey's history from its Saxon foundation through its medieval heyday, when it was a major centre of learning, worship, and economic influence in the Thames Valley, to its destruction during the Reformation and the gradual disappearance of its buildings.
Georgian and Regency Dress
The Olive Matthews Collection is particularly strong in Georgian and Regency dress — the formal and fashionable clothing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that reflects one of the most extravagant periods in the history of British dress. Silk gowns with elaborate embroidery, men's suits with richly decorated waistcoats, accessories including fans, gloves, and jewellery, and underwear that reveals the complex engineering of Georgian dressing are displayed in the intimate setting of The Cedars' period rooms.
The condition and quality of many of these items is exceptional, providing an unusually vivid picture of how the fashionable and prosperous dressed during this extraordinary era of sartorial display.
Victorian Fashion — Crinolines to Bustles
The Victorian section of the costume collection charts the dramatic evolution of women's dress during the longest reign in British history — from the wide crinolines of the 1850s and 1860s through the bustle silhouettes of the 1870s and 1880s to the more streamlined forms of the 1890s. Men's dress, which underwent its own transformation from colourful Georgian extravagance to the sober dark suits of Victorian respectability, is also well represented.
The collection includes both high-fashion items from wealthy households and more modest everyday clothing, providing a social as well as aesthetic picture of Victorian dress that goes beyond the world of the fashion plate.
Collections
The Olive Matthews Collection: Dress Through the Ages
The principal permanent display presenting rotating selections from the museum's nationally significant collection of historical costume and textiles, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
Chertsey Abbey and Medieval Chertsey
Displays exploring the history of Chertsey Abbey from its Saxon foundation to its Tudor dissolution, featuring the celebrated medieval floor tiles and material documenting the abbey's central role in local life.
Chertsey: A Thames Valley Town
Local history galleries tracing the development of Chertsey from its medieval market town origins through the coaching era and Victorian expansion to the suburban growth of the twentieth century.
Current Exhibitions
A temporary exhibition drawn from the Olive Matthews Collection exploring the clothing worn for weddings, mourning, court presentations, and other significant life occasions from the Georgian period to the mid-twentieth century.