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 displays on the Sir John Leman School and 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.

Special Display room

The special 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 the model of Beccles - as it was in 1841 before the arrival of the railways and the town's modern expansion, the Weston Missal pages and the bust of Nelson whose father was Rector of St Michaels Church and mother who lived at Barsham.

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.

This room also a computer which visitors can use to explore the museums extensive data archive. We have a computerised copy of the entire Rix Collection, which is a record of the town in the 19th C and consists of some 20,000 pages, there is also the Feoffee Archive, Tasks books from the 16th C to 18th C and much more. So if you are exploring your house or family history there is a treasure trove of information to help you with your research.