Gladstone Court Museum, Biggar

After the great fish and chips we sampled more of Biggar's delights. For a small place there's an awful lot going on. There are six museums, so we tried Gladstone Court first. It's a lovely little place - a recreation of a Victorian shopping street made from bits and pieces reclaimed from Biggar's actual high street. It's educational (great for schools) and full of local interest but also lovely to wander round no matter how old you are or where you're from. There's an old photographic studio, a bank, library, print shop, school, a bootmakers and lots more - see pictures. The nice thing about it is Biggar's modern-day high street is very well-preserved. It pretty much has one of every sort of shop you need and they're all family businesses handed down from generation to generation, so it feels like the right place to have a little treasure like this.

The Bakelite Museum, Somerset

There's a report of our visit to The Bakelite Museum in Williton, Somerset on Nothing To See Here. Probably the best museum ever. Photos on Flickr as usual.

The Radar Museum, RAF Neatishead, Norfolk

Another plug for Nothing To See Here, this time the Radar Museum in Norfolk which may be of interest to military historians/Cold War enthusiasts/Dr. Strangelove fans.

Gulls, Auks, Terns and Skuas

Ever since I railed about Kelvingrove Museum and Art Galleries being redeveloped and left lacking I've been on the hunt for something to replace the things-in-glass-cases mecca of my childhood. It's inevitable that with two kids (boys particularly) we spend a lot of time in museums - they're warm, they're free and on a good day they're interesting. So I've become something of a connoisseur over the past few months and am developing an obsession with stuffed animals, those fusty old charts showing the ages of man and museum labels. So much so that I've collected them all in an I Heart Museums Flickr set.

Before reporting back on this week's find I'll start with an old dispatch from the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh which deserves full marks for top class museumy-ness. It's a beautiful building for a start - stern and airy at the same time. And it's full of really interesting stuff which is mostly left on its own the way it should be (there are nods to interactivity at the Museum of Scotland end). The highlight for me was the Hall of British Birds - a spectacular time capsule of 1970s design - all hessian, earth colours and round corners. I sent some photos to Ace Jet 170 for Found Type Friday and he describes the Clarendon signage as "like a beautiful curvaceous woman". It looks like this is being gradually modernised too so enjoy it while you can. As there's currently a Pixar: 20 years of animation exhibition on there's an extra reason to go sooner rather than later.