Explore the Collection

What does the museum actually have?

There are thousands of objects in the care of Staithes Museum, from fishing equipment and photographs to paintings, fossils, books, ship models, domestic objects and things connected with Captain Cook.

The collection has been built up over many years, beginning with the objects collected by museum founder Reg Firth and continuing today through donations, bequests and loans from local people and beyond.

We are currently working on a major project to improve our catalogue and digital records. This means photographing objects, checking information, researching their stories and making the collection easier to search.

What's inside?

Staithes Lost Railway

Learn more about what's inside

Learn more about local history

Learn about the history of the collection

Read stories from our collection

Here are our latest blog posts with stories about the objects - and histories - stored in the Staithes Museum

“It was like going into a dream”: Anne King remembers growing up around Staithes

What was Staithes like when the village was still a close-knit fishing community, when chapels were packed on Sundays, families knitted and sang together, and the carnival could seem almost magical to a child who had never seen anything like it before? This is the sort of question behind a new oral history project at Staithes Museum, which aims to record the memories of local people: the everyday stories, memorable characters, customs, family traditions and little details tha

The Great Grandfather, the Gamekeeper and the Genealogist’s Nightmare

A family story, a shooting in the woods, a murder trial, a mysterious death – and four years of research in the archives of North Yorkshire One of the pleasures of working with an archive is discovering that the most interesting family history stories are the ones that start and end with questions that are left unanswered... Sometimes you get a photograph, a name, a date and a family story. Then you start pulling at the threads – and discover that the story is simultaneously

Explore Staithes with Bill Hinchley

Staithes has plenty of picturesque cottages, narrow lanes and lovely views — but look a little closer and almost every corner of the village has a story attached to it. Bill Hinchley was born in Staithes and has spent his life collecting those stories. In this heritage walking tour, created by the North York Moors National Park, Bill takes us around the village, sharing memories, local history, old photographs in our minds, and quite a few entertaining tales along the way. Th

From Toffee to Ghost Stories: Marie Lowden, the Toffee Crackle Lady of Staithes

For generations of people in Staithes, Marie Lowden was simply “the Toffee Lady”: the woman on the High Street who made and sold her own crackly toffee. But behind that familiar village memory was a woman who had already lived several lives before she began selling sweets — and who, in later life, became a remarkably prolific published writer. There are some people who become part of a place so completely that their names almost become attached to the landscape. In Staithes,

A Holiday in Staithes, 1927: The Roydsians Come to Town

" Youth with swift feet walks onward in the way, The land of joy lies all before his eyes." In 1927, a party of schoolchildren from Royds Hall School in Huddersfield came to Staithes for their summer camp. We don't know very much about the school from our own collection, but we do have something rather better: their school magazine, The Roydsian, in which the campers recorded their adventures. There is poetry about the cliffs and sea, an enthusiastic recommendation of Staithe

Staithes History for Beginners (Art and Heritage weekend countdown)

If you’re new to Staithes, it can sometimes feel as though every cobbled street, old building, brick and bend in the Beck has a story to tell. And, frankly, it does! Staithes has a remarkably rich history for such a small village. For centuries, its people made their living from the sea, the cliffs and the land around them. Fishermen ventured out into the North Sea, miners worked the cliffs for alum, jet and ironstone, artists arrived with their easels, and generations of loc

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The Staithes Museum