Photo: Ian Taylor · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

South Ribble Museum and Exhibition Centre

Local history museum in the Tudor Old Grammar School behind St Andrew’s Church in Leyland, currently closed while the building is repaired.

Temporarily closed

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Temporarily closed. The museum has been closed since 2020. Repairs to the roof, windows and structure of the listed building were approved in 2024. No reopening date has been announced.

About the museum

The museum occupies the Old Grammar School in the corner of the churchyard of St Andrew’s Church in Leyland. A chantry endowed in 1524 by Sir Henry Farington paid for the town’s only school, and the surviving red brick building dates from between about 1580 and 1620. A schoolmaster’s house was added in the late eighteenth century. The school closed in 1876, after which the building served as a church hall and the house was let out until the 1950s.

The building fell into disrepair and was threatened with demolition to make way for a car park. It was saved and restored under a government job creation scheme, and in 1977 it opened as the South Ribble Museum and Exhibition Centre, an idea promoted by the Leyland Historical Society. It opened to the public on 9 December 1977.

When open, the museum had a permanent exhibition in three upstairs rooms, with local objects including many from the First World War and finds from the Roman settlement at Walton-le-Dale, as well as collections on archaeology, social history and industry. The large ground-floor schoolroom, with its big fireplace and carved ceiling beams, held changing exhibitions and talks. The museum closed in 2020 and has not reopened. In 2024 the borough council’s planning committee approved repairs to the roof, windows and structure of the Grade II listed building.