As I mentioned yesterday, I went to Sheffield at the weekend.
While we were there, we went to the Fire & Police Museum:
Located in one of the UK’s first purpose built combined Fire and Police Stations in the centre of the Steel City, Sheffield, it’s the perfect place to step back in time and FIRE your imagination. Come face to face with some of the most amazing and rare Fire & Police vehicles around!
Opened in 1983 with just 2 Fire Engines and a few small exhibits and only 2 of the buildings 46 rooms open for the public to view, the museum has grown and grown year by year. Now with over 30,000 exhibits and 29 display rooms and not forgetting many more exhibits and vehicles currently in storage ready to be displayed we are still getting bigger and bigger.
There are fire engines and police cars and stuff:
(I didn't really take any decent photos of the fire engines on display, so I've used this picture from Flickr, taken by someone called Jeff Powell to illustrate this section)
You can even sit in some of them! Not all of them though:
At some points, it was a bit unclear whether something was an exhibit or not:
They also have what was once the longest fireman’s pole in the country, but apparently they had to shorten it by fifteen foot to fit it into the museum. If you pay a donation, a member of the musuem staff will slide down the pole as a demonstration. That’s no fun. I wanted to have a go on the pole myself, unfortunately, that is not allowed. However, they do offer rides in a fire engine for £1.50. It only goes round the block once, but it was worth it. So far this year, I have been in a fire engine and a police car. I have about six weeks until the end of the year to ride in an ambulance to collect the full set.
The musuem is housed in an old building. Opened in 1900, it was originally a combined fire and police station (one of the first in the country). One room in the museum shows what the bedrooms of the firemen who worked there would have looked like. You can also see what the police cells would have looked like when it was originally built. Obviously, with a building like this, there are still echoes of the past:
You can judge how good a museum is by the quality of its mannequins. The Fire & Police Museum in Sheffield has good mannequins:
It also has a display showing little models of “policemen of the world”:
And look! A dog!
Look at his tongue! What an idiot.
Some of the displays in the police section of the museum aren’t quite so nice though. There’s a big information board about Peter Sutcliffe:
And Harold Shipman:
And Dennis Nilsen
And an actual murder weapon:
That’s a bit creepy.
The Fire & Police Museum is open on Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays from 11am until 5pm, with last entry to the museum at 4pm. Admission is £4 for adults and £3 for Children. Children under three get in free.
