Collections

Since the museum was founded in 1994, we’ve been collecting items which tell the stories of peacemaking in many different forms. Our 16,000 object collection is made up of banners, personal objects, campaign materials and artworks donated by people and organisations all over the world.

If you would like to donate an object to the museum, please fill out our object form here. Please note, we do not accept postal donations without prior approval.

About our collection

When the museum was founded, we put out callouts in newsletters associated with peacemaking and contemporary peace movements, and our collection grew from there. Initially, most of the objects we received were archival papers and ephemera from modern British peace movements. This included a large donation of almost 700 posters in 1994, which remains an important part of our collection today.

Over the years, we started to receive different types of objects from people and groups all over the world. As well as posters, we hold significant collections of more than 250 banners and over 800 badges.

Contemporary Collecting

Since 2016, we have been making a conscious effort to collect objects which reflect peace and peacemaking in communities that have previously been underrepresented in our collection, as well as objects related to peacemaking today. In recent years this has included objects related to the partition of India, the arms trade, and the LGBTQ+ community.

Digital collection

We are working on making our collection available online – you can see the first 100 objects we’ve digitised now: