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The Merrin Collection

About

One family, one works, nothing thrown away.

The Merrins made table knives on Tenter Lane from 1868 to 1979 and lived next door to the works. When Dorothy Merrin died in 2009, she left the house, everything in it and the works to a trust.

A long bread knife with a worn beech handle and three brass rivets, lying diagonally on grey paper.

Bread knife

Merrin & Sons, Tenter Lane, 1931The kitchen, by the bread crockCost new: one and sixpence

Kept, not collected.

Nobody in the family set out to make a collection. They were careful people in a careful street, and the house filled up over a century with the things a household needs: a jug for the yard tap, a bread knife from the works, a satchel passed down three times.

Dorothy, the last of them, never married and never moved. When the house was cleared it held 4,126 objects, almost all of them ordinary and almost all of them used until they couldn’t be. The trust she set up opened the works as a museum in 2014, with the house’s contents in the old workshops and the archive in the counting house.

  • 4,126objects from one house
  • 1868the year the works was built
  • 61volunteers, most of them local
  • 38,000visits last year

What we do.

  • Show it

    Four galleries of the permanent collection, one changing exhibition, and labels written so that nobody needs a guidebook.

  • Keep it

    The archive holds the works’ wage books, the family’s letters and Ada Merrin’s accounts, open to anyone by appointment.

  • Lend it

    The spares go out on loan from the library of things, because a jam pan that never makes jam is only half an object.

Inside the works: whitewashed brick, timber beams and tall iron windows over the kitchen gallery.

The building

A cutlery works, still standing.

The Merrin Works is three storeys of red brick around a yard, with grinding hulls on the ground floor and the counting house over the arch. It was listed in 1995, the year after the last grinder left.

We kept what we could: the iron windows, the floorboards worn by the benches, the arch the carts came through. The lift and the heating are the only new things in it.

Who runs it.

Four staff, sixty-one volunteers and a board of trustees who live within a mile of the works.

  • Ruth Ashworth, director

    Ruth Ashworth

    Director

    Came to count the cutlery in 2013 and stayed to open the museum.

  • Imran Siddiqui, curator

    Imran Siddiqui

    Curator

    Writes every label, and made Made to Mend.

  • Nell Carver, archivist

    Nell Carver

    Archivist

    Runs the reading room and the Saturday darning table.

  • Winston Hale, library of things

    Winston Hale

    Library of things

    Forty years a toolmaker; now he lends the tools out.