About
Haverhill Local History Museum occupies rooms inside Haverhill Arts Centre on the High Street, the town's late-Victorian former town hall, and is run entirely by volunteers drawn from the local history group that founded it. Its collections are strongest where a town museum's usually are weakest: in photographs. The archive runs to more than eight thousand images of Haverhill and the surrounding villages, the earliest dating from around 1860, and it is the reason most people come through the door — to identify a house, a shopfront, a factory floor or a face.
The town those photographs record has changed almost beyond recognition twice. Haverhill was a small Suffolk market town on the Essex border, badly damaged by a great fire in 1667 that destroyed much of the centre, and rebuilt as a modest place living off agriculture and, from the late eighteenth century, clothing manufacture. D. Gurteen and Sons, founded in 1784 and still in family hands for well over two centuries, made drabbet smocks and later a wide range of clothing, and for generations the firm was the town: its mills, its housing, its chapels and much of its civic life.
The second transformation came in the 1960s, when Haverhill was chosen as a reception town under the London overspill agreements and its population multiplied within a generation as families moved out from the capital into new estates and new factory jobs. That is difficult history for a museum to handle well, because the newcomers and the older inhabitants remember it differently, and the collection's oral history and photographic material lets both accounts be heard.
The centre also holds runs of local newspapers, family history resources, maps, documents and the group's own publications, including its Haverhill Through Time and A Glimpse Into series. Rotating displays draw on the collections a few themes at a time, and the volunteers are generally as valuable as the exhibits — several of them have spent decades assembling the archive and can place an unlabelled photograph in a street within minutes.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Opening is mornings only from Wednesday to Friday, with a slightly longer session on Saturday until 14:00.
- If those hours do not suit, telephone or email — the volunteers arrange appointment visits at other times.
- Bring any family photographs you want identified; the volunteers' knowledge of the photographic archive is the museum's real asset.
- The Arts Centre café is in the same building and keeps longer hours than the history centre itself.
- The group's own publications are sold at the centre and are often the only printed account of a particular street or trade.
- Family historians should say in advance which surnames and dates they are pursuing so the relevant indexes can be ready.
- Display space is small and exhibitions rotate, so it is worth returning if you visit the town regularly.
- Park in one of the town-centre car parks; there is no dedicated parking at the Arts Centre.
Highlights
Eight Thousand Photographs of a Changing Town
The photographic archive is the heart of the collection: more than eight thousand images of Haverhill and the surrounding district, the earliest going back to about 1860 and the sequence continuing through the twentieth century to the present. Because the town was rebuilt so comprehensively in the 1960s and 1970s, this archive is frequently the only surviving record of streets, shops, chapels and factories that no longer exist.
Visitors regularly arrive with a family photograph or a question about a house and leave with the street, the date and often the names identified by a volunteer.
Gurteens and the Drabbet Smock
D. Gurteen and Sons was founded in Haverhill in 1784 and remained in the same family for well over two centuries, making it one of the longest-running family firms in the country. Its early trade was in drabbet, a coarse linen twill made up into the smocks worn by agricultural labourers across the eastern counties, and the firm later moved into a wide range of clothing manufacture.
For generations Gurteens dominated the town's economy, employed a large proportion of its people and shaped its housing and civic life; the museum's material covers the cloth, the factory and the family.
The London Overspill Years
In the 1960s Haverhill was designated a reception town under agreements to move population and industry out of London, and within a generation its population multiplied several times over as families arrived from the capital into newly built estates and newly built factories. It is a story the museum handles carefully, because incomers and established residents remember the same decades very differently.
Photographs, documents, plans and recorded recollections allow both versions to be heard, and record a scale of social change that reshaped the town more thoroughly than anything since the seventeenth century.
The Great Fire of 1667
In 1667 fire swept through Haverhill and destroyed a large part of the town centre, including much of its timber-framed building stock and, according to contemporary accounts, its market house. The rebuilding that followed determined the shape of the streets for the next three centuries, and the fire remains the sharpest single break in the town's physical history before the twentieth century.
The museum's displays draw together what documentary evidence survives, and set the disaster against the run of seventeenth-century town fires — Northampton, Warwick, London itself — that reshaped English urban building.
Collections
The Haverhill Local History Museum's principal collection is a photographic archive of more than eight thousand images of Haverhill and the surrounding district dating from about 1860 to the present — in many cases the only surviving record of buildings and streets lost in the town's twentieth-century redevelopment.
Around it sit runs of local newspapers, maps, directories, documents, school and chapel records, and the indexes and transcriptions compiled by the volunteer group, all used heavily for family and house history research. Interpretation covers the great fire of 1667, the town's agricultural and market history, the clothing manufacturer D.
Gurteen and Sons founded in 1784 and its drabbet smock trade, and Haverhill's designation as a London overspill reception town in the 1960s and the rapid population growth that followed. Displays rotate through the collections a few themes at a time, and the group publishes its own local history titles.
Haverhill in Photographs
Rotating selections from the archive of over eight thousand images of the town and district from around 1860 onwards.
Cloth and Clothing
D. Gurteen and Sons, the drabbet smock trade and the town's dependence on clothing manufacture.
A Town Transformed
Haverhill's designation as a London overspill town in the 1960s and the social change that followed.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.