The rooms open to the public are all on the ground floor of the building and there is a small lift for disabled visitors to use in place of the steps down into the School Room. Below are some of the items that you can find on display.

School Room

This is the largest of the display rooms and was revamped during the winter of 2014/2015. Displays cover topics such as local industries (eg clock-making, engineering, aeroplane manufacturing, printing, milling, malting etc); trade and commerce; farming; warfare; the Town Mayoral robes; clothing; building materials; items from churches; education; the poor; leisure pursuits; medicine and dentistry; the home; and the poor.

The shop area

In addition to the shop items we have the original Beccles Town Sign and the model of Beccles - as it was in 1841 before the arrival of the railways and the town's modern expansion.

Special Display room

The temporary exhibition cabinet in this room is changed several times during the season, please see the separate page for details of this season's exhibitions.

Also in this room may be found information about notable characters of Beccles and a detailed display on the work of Dr Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who made a towering contribution to Twentieth Century medical science. Her research into the atomic structure of Penicillin enabled the mass production of synthetic Penicillin. She was the first woman and one of the youngest people ever to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964

River Post Room

In this room we have our archaeological and geological display and information about the River Waveney. The Iron Age River Post on display here was excavated from beside the River Waveney in 2009 and has been dated to 75BC. It is thought to have been part of a walkway or causeway across the marsh.