Step into another world at West Norfolk’s most curious small museum. Captain Fawcett’s Marvellous Barbershop Museum is a magnificent personal homage to the ancient craft of barbering. Believed to be the world’s largest collection of its kind, this extraordinary tonsorial treasury is as much a salutation to the age of explorers, when amateur collectors displayed finds in cabinets of curiosities known as ‘wonder rooms’. Often those who owned these salons of oddities and ephemera, acquired while adventuring across the world, were more showmen than scientists, recounting astounding tales by candlelight, accompanied by music and refreshments.
Richie Finney is just such a gentleman. After 25 years in the British film industry, he founded an incredible Gentleman’s Grooming Emporium in King’s Lynn where this remarkable museum is housed, showcasing exceptional antiques dating back to the 1650s, epitomising the art of functional design. Amid First World War artefacts, hand-crafted razors and Edwardian gentleman’s dressing cases, perhaps most intriguing is a 17th century cutthroat razor, its blade inscribed with poetry. Found hidden behind a drawer in an antique cupboard with other long-lost keepsakes, what story might it tell?
This brilliantly eccentric collection will delight anyone with a passion for barbering, fashion and history, including students of industrial design, writers, researchers, photographers and all people of wit and style.
Morning coffee (Captain Fawcett’s own!) and afternoon tea are available by prior arrangement, so radio ahead! You’ll also be able to sample and purchase the full award-wining range of ‘First Class Gentleman’s Grooming Requisites’.
