We have a range of exhibitions, drop-in activities and exciting events that take place in the museum and gardens.
Events and Activities
We have a range of events and activities throughout the year, both inside the Museum and out in the Walled Gardens, see below for details…
Asha + the Troll
Saturday June 1st – 10:30am
Asha + The Troll is a theatre performance for 5–8-year-olds and their families in which storytellers unfold a world of forests, friendship, puppetry, percussion, and… trolls! Follow Asha as she meets an unlikely friend and learns to love their differences.
Adults’ tickets are £3.50, and children go free! This event does have a limited capacity, so please do book a free ticket below for every child who will be attending.
This performance will be held in our Walled Gardens.
Asha + the Troll Workshop
Saturday June 1st – 11am
Join Asha + The Troll’s creative team for 45 minutes of storytelling and performance activities! Participants will enter the Troll’s forest to create their own stories and explore elements from the show. The workshop is free, but you will need to book a separate ticket to guarantee your spot.
Book for the workshop hereExhibitions
We have a temporary exhibition space that is regularly changing with items uncovered from our stores, we also have seasonal displays, work made at our events, or show large collections donated to us.
Games..Games..Games!
Discover our new display, which showcases a range of games uncovered from our stores, including Snakes & Ladders, Spy Trap, Penalty! and Kan-U-Go. It also features, The Harlow Game, a board game created by the Harlow Development Corporation in 1980. As players moved through the game they could follow the development of the new town, from 1947 to 1979. The red squares gave insight to interesting events that happened, including the opening of the Odeon cinema in 1960. But blue squares sent the player back spaces, for reasons including rises in unemployment or even trees being vandalised. The first player to reach the end was the winner. Do you remember playing The Harlow Game with your friends or family?
Coming Soon… Harlow Cricket through 25 decades
Saturday 27th April – Saturday 31st August
There will be an exhibition at Harlow Museum to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Harlow Cricket Club. It will showcase the history of the oldest organisation in the town, with photographs, artefacts and archives from Harlow Cricket Club. The exhibition will run alongside events held at the Cricket Club.
Technology and Communication In Harlow
Our exhibition features technology and communication over the years. Highlighting how the various devises, like TVs, cameras and radios, have all lead to the smartphone which many of us now carry around in our pocket. Did you know that Charles Kao and George Hockham discovered that data could be transmitted along glass fibres at STL in Harlow? This provided the groundwork for fibre optic telecommunications, which forms the backbone of the modern internet.
Museum at Home
If you’ve enjoyed your visit to the museum why not download one of our free printable activity sheets you can do at home.
Make Your Own Pin Hole Camera
In the 16th century, some artists used a ‘camera obscura’ (Italian, meaning ‘dark room’) with a small opening, and later a lens which would project an image of the brightly lit outside scene into the camera. A pinhole camera uses this same principle on a much smaller scale, ask for a work sheet if you are interested in making one at home.
Download here
Binary Code Challenge
Decode a message written in Binary code, and even write your own coded message. Binary code is how computers use and transfer data. Invented in 1689 by Gottfried Leibniz, it is still essential to programming today.
Download here
Make Your Own Telephone
Make a simple telephone and communicate using vocal vibrations.
Download here
Be a Digital Camera
Did you know that digital photographs are made up of coloured pixels, and the colours that they are are coded in binary? Use binary code to colour the pixels in the image, what do you see when you have finished? could you make your own pixel image?
Download here
Make a Movie
Enjoy watching your own moving image by making a zoetrope, experiment with your own image ideas.
Download here