Vestry House Museum

This International Women's Day, we have one of the hidden treasures from the collection to share with you.

The Walthamstow Herbarium was originally collected by local resident Ms Parry in the 1840s. An amateur botanist, she collected and preserved over 70 plant specimens from the Walthamstow area.

Each specimen she recorded tells us what plants looked like hundreds of years ago, where and what month they were found, which can help pinpoint the changing patterns in plant life cycles over the years.

There are records of other herbariums being created in the same period by women across the UK, so creating local botanical studies may have been a popular trend at the time.

Little is currently known about Ms Parry, though we celebrate her dedicated work in creating the Walthamstow Herbarium. The curatorial team is currently undertaking research to find out more about her life.

🎉 Vestry House Museum – History in the Making has been awarded £99k from the Museum Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund.

To bring new perspectives to the collections and foreground the voices of under-represented communities from Waltham Forest within permanent displays.

This is part of the work going on behind the scenes for the museum reopening later this year, as a welcoming destination for everyone who calls our borough home and to visitors from further afield, whilst putting real people’s stories at the heart of what we do.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Vestry House Museum.

2026 is set to be a big year for your local history museum, and we'll be sharing all our updates with you here.

The history of Waltham Forest can be found in the huge array of pieces in our collection. Last December we considered fragments from deep time, and now we're looking at items from our living memory.

Pieces of Living Memory asks us what objects in the museum collection can tell us about life in our borough and how it's changed over the decades.

If you walk past us on Church Path you'll be able to see work on the new garden cafe through the railings, and the graphics inviting you to think about our living history.

The temporary graphics are by artist Verity-Jane Keefe, designers Wolf Hall and architects Studio Weave, in partnership with Vestry House Museum.

Vestry House Museum. Heritage in the Making, Since 1730. Re-Opening 2026.

Happy Halloween! 👻 The photo archive is full of spooky shots from around the borough, but we think this ventriloquist dummy is the most goosebump-inducing.

Taken at the Palace Theatre in Walthamstow (circa 1950s).

The production was Babes in the Woods, a traditional tale of two children abandoned in the woods, which was often a pantomime subject.

📷 Photograph by John Spinner (1916-1993)