Dawn Heywood, Collections Officer, The Collection
This year, The Collection in Lincoln celebrates its third birthday… ahead of the event, we met one of its curators, Dawn Heywood to find out how the attraction will be celebrating…

Compared to most cities, Lincoln has an extremely impressive sense of heritage, at one time one of the most important cities in the country, with an appreciation for its history that’s second to none. At the centre of this appreciation is a constant and concerted effort by the city and county councils to ensure that locals and tourists alike can find out more about the county’s heritage, and one of those responsible for delivering this goal is Dawn Heywood, one of the curators at The Collection which this year celebrates its third birthday.

“We’ve always tried to make The Collection as accessible as possible.” Says Dawn. “Everyone should be able to see and appreciate the area’s history, and we’re really happy that of the 90,000 visitors we receive each year, half consists of local people.”

With Lincoln’s population around the 89,000 mark, that means the equivalent of half of the city of Lincoln takes advantage of their ability to see the contents of The Collection each year, including school groups and those from across the county, making the £12m venue a brilliant investment for the city.

The other impressive fact about The Collection is that its artefacts are gathered from literally the whole of Lincolnshire, from sites across the county and from across many different periods of history, the oldest examples from the collection being a selection of flint handaxes over 250,000 years old which can be seen alongside Anglo-Saxon and Roman artefacts and other displays right up to The Collection’s cut-off period of the mid 1700s.

The Collection was created within the city's cultural quarter as a new home for the City and County Museum, and works in conjunction with the adjacent Usher Gallery, which housesthe city’s collection of art. The building itself is stunning, situated on a 1:8 gradient with ‘picture windows’ overlooking the cathedral and chronologically organised exhibits plus a separate gallery for temporary exhibitions.

Offering us a behind the scenes tour of the building, Dawn revealed that the city has over 2,000,000 individual finds of significant historical interest, and part of the team’s job is to maintain a regular