Wimbledon Museum of Local History - probably not the place for which tourists travel to Wimbledon. But if, attracted by the fame of the area, it gets here, it is useful to go to the museum.

It is located in a very charming Victorian mansion built in 1858. The museum is considered to be public, because it belongs to society Wimbledon - a charitable organization founded back in 1903 to protect the local attractions. It is the society for more than a hundred years sends volunteers on weekends open the museum for visitors, provide free trips, take care of the collection.

Museum of the tiny, but has a collection of about 3000 exhibits - from flint arrowhead Stone Age to the digitized maps of the surrounding area. Wimbledon history is rich: it found mounds of the Bronze Age (III millennium BC), the fortified "Caesar's Camp" Roman times. As a separate reference to the ownership of the town in 1328 - he was under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, belonged to the crown, the transition to private ownership. In 1905, Wimbledon was granted city status. In the First World War there was formed a volunteer artillery brigade. During World War II the city was bombed, killing 150 people. There was a transit point for refugees from Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

This history, embodied in manuscripts, photographs, paintings, portraits, newspaper clippings and other artefacts carefully keeps a small museum. Here you can find, for example, nearly 300 items to help imagine what life looked like in other times - clothing, toys, umbrellas, combs, jewelry. Next - what we today call the appliances: spinning wheels, candlesticks, cutlery, pots. About 600 original documents to help introduce the business side of his former life: a payment document in 1354, acts of purchase of land by Lord Horatio Nelson, a local engineer diaries Victorian era of Henry Ford. And then - a collection of newspaper clippings about the social and business life of Wimbledon for the last forty years.

Very interesting collection of photographs depicting the history of Wimbledon for the last 150 years. But most, perhaps, a wonderful exhibit - "oral history": memories of old uimbldontsev recorded and digitized by museum staff.