Exhibitions – The Seaside Museum Herne Bay

Photographic competition 2022

The theme for our next photographic competition and exhibition is “Herne Bay Through the Year”, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Deadline for entries is 21 March 2022, for an exhibition from 2 April to 14 May. All photos entered will be on display, and visitors will have a chance to vote for their favourites for the next calendar.

Entries should be submitted as A4 landscape prints please, and the file kept for submission if your photo is one selected for the calendar/postcards.

We’ve had some fantastic entries over the past few years, and would love to see more junior entries as well as adult ones – why not encourage younger family members to try their hand and explore our town for interesting images?

Photographic competition 2020

Do you have 2020 vision? Why not use it to support our next photographic competition and exhibition?

The theme for the next one is “Built in Herne Bay”, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Deadline for entries is 7th January 2020, for an exhibition from 18th January. All photos entered will be on display, and visitors will have a chance to vote for their favourites for the next calendar.

Entries should be submitted as A4 landscape prints please, and the file kept for submission if your photo is one selected for the calendar/postcards.

This competition has now ended.
The 2021 calendar is now available.

Thanks for the photos (and votes!)

Last week it was time to say goodbye to the 2019 photography competition exhibits, as all the pictures were taken down and the votes counted.

This was our most successful competition and exhibition yet, with 62 total photos from 24 photographers – some familiar names and some new to us.
You all supported the exhibition by voting as well, with 226 voting slips submitted, giving a total of 1064 votes (we allowed 5 votes per slip, but not everyone used all of theirs!).

The top 12 photos will be made into a calendar for 2020, which will be available from our shop in late summer, so if your name is on the winner’s list we’ll be in touch to ask for the photo files please. Congratulations to all photographers whose photos were chosen – they’ll all be thanked with a free calendar once they’re available. The volunteer’s choice photographers also receive five free postcards featuring their photo.

A big thank you to all who supported the museum either by submitting photos or coming along to view and place votes.

THE TOP TWELVE
Herne Bay Pier at Sunset, by Colin Winch – Volunteer’s Choice
Colourful Beach Huts, by John Newell – Volunteer’s Choice
A Bird’s Eye View, by John Holland – Volunteer’s Choice
Reculver Morn, by Colin Winch
Shadows on the Beach, by Peter Riley
Snowed Inn at Hampton, by Barry Mount
Dusk Descends over Hampton Pier, by Steve Roberts
An Evening Stroll, by Peter Riley
Golden Day, by Eileen Wilkinson
Social Gathering on the Seawall, by Volker Jöttkandt
Sunset Flight, by Gemma Witts
Nature on the Beach, by Michael Langman

Next year’s photo exhibition will be on the theme Built in Herne Bay, with entry forms and Terms and Conditions available from our website.

The deadline for entries will be 7th January 2020, ready for the exhibition from the 18th January.

Photographic exhibition now open

We had a fantastic range of photos entered for our photographic exhibition and competition, possibly our biggest set so far, and they’re all on display in our front gallery. Come and admire them, and vote for your favourites to join the volunteer choices in our 2020 calendar, available from the museum shop from later summer onwards.

The last few of our 2019 calendars are still available at a reduced rate while stocks last.

Next year’s theme will be on architecture in and around Herne Bay (the Hampton/Reculver/Herne triangle). Why not take a wander around the town and see what gems you can spot?

Setting up the exhibition gallery with all the photo entries.

It’s changeover week!

Changeover week for the museum means that while the regular galleries are open as usual, the exhibition gallery is closed while the volunteers prepare for the next exhibition. This time round, it means we’ll be busy framing and hanging the photo entries for the Natural Herne Bay photographic exhibition and competition.

From Saturday, you’ll be invited in to look round the collection of stunning photographs and vote for your favourites. We’ll be putting the top 12 in a calendar for next year.

Don’t forget our photo competition!

Posters for our next photo competition will be going up around town soon! We are looking for photos that show off Natural Herne Bay.

We ask that your photos show some aspect of nature and can be identified as taken somewhere within the area of the Hampton/Reculver/Herne triangle.

Up to three entries per person, to be submitted as prints (preferably A4 landscape size) along with an entry form. Entries to be with the Seaside Museum by 15th January 2019.

Entries will form our January/February exhibition next year, and the top 12 entries (4 chosen by museum volunteers plus 8 chosen by public vote) will form our 2020 calendar.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

The Red Rover Exhibition

When, a couple of years ago, the Seaside Museum was left a maritime painting from the 1830s of a paddle steamer called the Red Rover no one realised the enormous significance it had for the development of Herne Bay. Before the 1830s, Herne Bay was a very small seaside hamlet where coastal sailing vessels unloaded goods primarily intended for Canterbury. In 1830, a group of entrepreneurs began to buy up land to develop one of the very first new towns in the UK and their plan depended on building a pier that would enable paddle-steamers to dock at any state of the tide. Herne Bay was conceived, designed and promoted to cash in the growth of the paddle-steamer trade between London and the North Kent coast and the Red Rover played a crucial role in their plans. The story of the Red Rover is the story of the foundation of Herne Bay.

Our exhibition tells a fascinating tale of ambition, disaster and disappointment. Disaster because the Red Rover was sunk in a collision when she was barely a year old. She was raised by revolutionary techniques for the time and went back into service but eventually lost out to the coming of the railways to North Kent. The original investors fared no better and their concept of a high-class development for the wealthy did not work out well and most of them lost their money. If the railway spelled the end of the coastal paddle steamers it was the saviour of Herne Bay which took off after the line was opened in 1861.

Come to the Seaside Museum until July 22nd to find out more about the founding of our town.

Photography competition and exhibition – Natural Herne Bay

2020 is a long time away! But we’re already thinking about it.

The 2018 exhibition, Leisure and Pleasure in Herne Bay, is now over, and we’re in the process of putting together a calendar from the winning entries. This will be available to buy in our museum shop from around September-time, and makes an excellent present.

2019 will see our next exhibition and competition, with the theme Natural Herne Bay, and the winning photos from that will go forward into our 2020 calendar.

While January 2019 is a long way away, we want to give you plenty of notice so that you can take some fantastic photos over the next few months. So we’re already releasing the entry forms, and look forward to receiving your entries.

We’d like to see photos that show some element of nature within the Hampton/Reculver/Herne triangle (ideally there would be something within the picture that shows the location).

Photo Competition Entry Form 2019

Photo Competition Terms and Conditions 2019

Dambusters Bouncing Bomb Exhibition now open

Seventy-five years ago, this year Herne Bay was at the centre of preparations for one of the most dramatic operations of WWII. The first hint came on 11th April 1943, when the coast from Margate to Herne Bay was declared a restricted area and sealed off by police. Only those authorised by the Director of Boom Defence were allowed in of which two were a comparatively unknown aircraft designer, Barnes Wallis, and a much decorated bomber pilot Wing Commander Guy Gibson.
Sharp-eyed and sharp-eared local residents would have been aware of some new sounds and unfamiliar shaped aircraft flying from Manston and repeatedly making runs at low level out at sea from Minis Bay to Reculver. These were the converted mosquito, Wellington and Lancaster bombers that were taking part in the final trials of the remarkable weapon, which came to be known as the ‘Bouncing Bomb’.
As the prospect of the Second World War loomed, the British Air Ministry had identified the dams of Germany’s heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley as key strategic targets supplying drinking water, hydro-electric power and water for steel-making and the canal transport system. No aircraft of the time was capable of carrying a bomb big enough to destroy a major dam but a smaller explosive charge might work if it could be exploded directly against the dam wall below the surface of the water.
The challenge was that the major German dams were protected by heavy torpedo nets stretched across the reservoirs to prevent just such an attack. Barnes Wallis came up with a plan to overcome the obstacle of the nets with a drum-shaped bomb spinning backwards and dropped at exactly the right low altitude, at the correct speed and release point which would bounce across the surface of the water and over the nets before reaching the dam wall. The spin would run the bomb down the side of the dam to its underwater base where a specially designed fuse would explode it.
Few of the top brass in the Air Ministry had any confidence that Wallis’s idea would work but he persevered and finally won approval for the trials of his ‘Bouncing Bomb’ that took place just along the coast from Herne Bay. The trials lasted from April 9th 1943 until the final trial with the only ‘live’ bomb to be dropped in the trials on May 13th 1943 and a safety drop of an unfused one on May 15th. These two tests were 5 miles off Broadstairs. All the others were off Reculver and were of inert concrete filled ‘bombs’. The trials were a resounding success and, on May 16th, Squadron 617, the famous and courageous DamBusters, took off on their history-making raid that breached the Mohne and Eder dams and damaged the Sorpe dam causing considerable damage to Germany’s war-making capacity but from which many were not to return.
To commemorate the anniversary of these events, and to chronicle a story of ingenuity, of overcoming difficulties in a very short time and the courage of those who pressed home an attack with the realisation that many of them would not return, the SEASIDE MUSEUM, Herne Bay, is putting on a DamBusters exhibition. In addition to many pictures and videos, visitors will be greeted with the unmistakable roar of those mighty Merlin engines that we have heard at so many flypasts in Herne Bay. There will be examples of the ingenious bomb-sights and the height adjustment lights that people will be able to try out and test how they would have done if they had been the pilots or bomb-aimers.

There will also be two evening talks. The first will be on April 23rd, by Peter Rix from the Barnes Wallis Foundation who will show some little seen film and tell us of the work of that engineering genius, Barnes Wallis, who designed far more than the Bouncing Bomb. The second on May 14th, will be given by one of the museum volunteer team who put the exhibition together and which will fill in more detail than the exhibition has room for. It will cover local connections and the bravery of those concerned in Operation Chastise, as the Dam Busters Raid was officially known.
The exhibition opens on March 24th and ends on May 19th 2018. The museum is open Tuesday- Sunday 11.00 am to 4.00 pm. There is ample parking along the Sea Front and in nearby carparks.

Leisure and Pleasure Exhibition now open

The new exhibition is now open – a photographic display of Leisure and Pleasure in Herne Bay. There’s a great selection of photos, four of which will be available as postcards, and we’re asking you to vote for your top three from the rest. The most popular eight photos will join the volunteers’ choices in next year’s calendar.

Please note that next year’s exhibition will be something along the lines of “Natural Herne Bay”, so start taking photos for it now!

There’s also the chance to see the entries for the children’s Deco Dress Design competition.