This year Diss Museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of the day it opened in October 1975.

 

We've come a long way since it was just one room in the marketplace, with a few exhibits and one council employee answering phone enquiries.

 

But the story began a few years earlier. In 1969, a local resident, George Moss, gifted £1,000 in his will for a future museum to be created, where none existed.

 

It took a while for his wishes to come true. After its opening in the tiny Shambles building, it continued to develop with the aid of enthusiastic volunteers and trustees.

 

By 1993 it was ready to open in its current form, now two rooms with hundreds more exhibits on show and in the store-rooms. 

 

The first curator, Tim Holt-Wilson, wrote in the Diss Express: "The tiny Shambles building became a place where the town was especially aware of its past. It contained old things to do with Diss: objects on shelves and under glass, snapshots of past life – things to marvel at, to rouse one's curiosity, things loaned or given to the museum to start a collection with, precious as part of the lives of the people who put them there."