Welcome To The Porch Museum Godmanchester

The Museum is housed in the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, a Grade II listed building situated in the heart of the historic town of Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire. We are an independent museum and a part of the Friends of the Queen Elizabeth School a registered charity. The museum is run by a small team of enthusiastic volunteers who work together to record the town’s history and its people. We receive no government funding and rely on funds from various organisations, donations and the generosity of our visitors to fund our projects.

One of the Porch Museum aims is to produce and show short films devoted to the history of the town.  We want to capture, through the memories of some of the oldest members of our community, as clear a perception as we can get of the way life was in this lovely town during the first half of the 20^th century.

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Godmanchesters Roman Mansio... Reconstructed with Lego!

Godmanchesters new mayor Cllr Richard "Dick" Taplin visits the Porch Museum to take a look at the Lego built roman mansio.

Lines Written on The Godmanchester Town Pump 1869

The men we have chosen for wisdom and wit
For the good of the town, in council to sit,
By some strange delusion did all of them jump
To the hasty conclusion “We must have a pump”

A cart we have bought, for flushing the drains,
For fear of them stopping in three or four lances
A horse in the river with that tab at its rump
Will be ruined for ever – We must have a pump.

A pump “yes” say some, we must have on a hill
For many who come there, their buckets to fill
But women are wiser, for old Mrs Grump
Says the water wont lather that comes from a pump

The pump by the way, with its high and white post
All passers-by say it looks like a ghost
And on the frame round it, if two men do jump
By filling the barrel, they empty the pump

Tis a sure sign of wisdom our folly to own
They all now agree the pump must come down
It cost thirty pounds, we may say by the lump
All rate payers say, down, down with the pump.

Tis useless, a frightful disgrace to the town
A fatherless pauper, so let it come down
But the platform might stand for an orator’s stump
And on it be written” Remember the Pump”

BASILICA The Stiles

Reconstruction by Professor Stephen Upex.

Mrs. Rachel Thurley, whose house in The Stiles today stands on the site of the Basilica, was used to her young son, Simon, and his friends digging up Roman objects in Godmanchester. Throughout the last century, children and adults all over town were acquainted with this excitement. Indeed, her friend, the late Gerald Reeve, used to take naughty children with him to dig in order to steady their behaviour and to help them concentrate.

At that time, in the 1970s, the family lived in Chapel House next door to her current home. One day a child who was staying came in from the garden and brought her part of a hunt cup appliquéd with the figure of a huntsman. The huntsman’s bow and his quarry, the deer’s antlers, were done in fine barbotine work. She took away the trowel. She says, “It was obviously a fine piece, better we waited until Michael Green came. We knew there was something there in our garden space. After all, we lived on the Roman road.” The family lived on Roman Ermine Street, the main arterial link between London and Hadrian’s Wall which still crosses Godmanchester. It is now a small road or pathway and known today as The Stiles.

In his newly published book, Durovigutum, the late Michael Green’s entry for the discovery of the Basilica is dated 1971. He had seen the pillar fragment in Mrs. Thurley’s house and then found a third century major town building. It was massively constructed of Barnack ragstone and flint masonry with a pillared portico. It is suggested by Oxford Archaeology East that the capitol pillars in the Porch Museum, lent by them and found at Rectory Farm, were originally robbed from the Basilica in the late 4^th century.

Read more: BASILICA The Stiles