This autumn, the traditional provincial tour took us to the English East Midlands. With the kind assistance of our member, Jonathan Maxwell, we made arrangements for the following visits.

We spent the Friday afternoon in Leicester to see two museums: After last year’s visit to the last remaining gas works in East Anglia, we now saw the Gas Museum (http://www.gasmuseum.co.uk), which, in a modest building, houses ‘the biggest collection of gas and gas-related artefacts in the world’. Then we went to the Abbey Pumping Station Museum (http://www.leicestermuseums.ac.uk), which is housed in a grand Victorian building with four magnificent steam beam engines, opened in 1891 to pump out Leicester's sewage. When it was closed in 1964, the site was preserved to house a museum for the industrial, technological and scientific heritage of Leicester. Our visit was disrupted by a fire alarm, but thankfully only briefly. We finished up in the storage shed that is normally only open to visitors during special events. At both sites we were privileged to have a guided tour from a knowledgeable curator.

On Saturday morning we went to Thurmaston, north of Leicester, for a guided tour of a modern lens-making factory. For over a century, Cooke Optics Ltd. (http://www.cookeoptics.com), (and in a previous form as Rank Taylor Hobson, and before that as Taylor, Taylor and Hobson), have supplied premier-quality lenses to the film making industry. This was a unique opportunity to see how lenses are designed and made...and it did not disappoint!

After a group lunch, we drove on to the City of Derby to visit the Silk Mill Museum.This had some local horological and mining instruments on display, as well as other technology such as Rolls Royce aviation engines and railway history. The building stands on the site of the world's first modern factory, John Lombe's silk mill, of which the foundation arches stills survive. The present mill, however, was built in 1910 after a fire destroyed the old one. Its new use was as a home for a manufacturing chemist and, later, as a base for the repair of electrcity meters. It has been the industrial museum for Derby since 1974 and is shortly to be refurbished... perhaps not before time. Then most of the party took the opportunity to visit the Derby Museum and Art Gallery (within walking distance), which has a room full of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby including the often reproduced 'The Lesson at the Orrery' and 'The Alchimist', as well as some instruments - telescopes, barometers and clocks, e.g. by John Whitehurst of Derby. The visit to Derby replaced the previously advertised excursion to the John Taylor Bell Foundry in Loughborough which went into administration two weeks before our event took place.

For this conference delegate rooms were reserved in the 3-star Belmont Hotel (http://www.belmonthotel.co.uk), which is pleasantly located alongside New Walk (pedestrianised for over 200 yrs) in a quiet conservation area in Leicester, not far from the railway station. We can recommend the hotel for its convenient situation as well as its ample car parking and the substantial breakfast.

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