Friday 16 September – Friday 21 October 10.15 - 11.45am £4 per child per session and £24 for a series ticket (includes refreshments) Join us for hands-on fun sessions for the under-fives. Explore the museum with stories, music and art and craft activities, whilst making new friends and creating memories in an engaging and family-friendly environment. With a different theme and activities each week. These sessions are for pre-school children (2-5 years) and their parent and carers. Booking essential as places are limited.

Art history lecture series Friday 30 September – Friday 21 October 10.15am - 12.15pm £6 per lecture or £20 for the whole series ticket (includes tea/coffee and biscuits) Enactment, the public display of theatre and makebelieve, have long been part of human social and religious interaction, fostering communal participation and understanding as well as different forms of interpretations and ways of seeing. Join us as we explore four distinctly different phases of public display and storytelling through the art historian’s eye. Our journey starts with the enactments of medieval mystery plays, halts at the Italian Commedia dell’Arte and its importance particularly for the arts of Rococo Europe, reaching its apogee in exploring how William Hogarth and Richard Garrick immortalized the theatre. Our final session will address the use of art in the theatre of war. Please note that this lecture series runs in conjunction with the current exhibition at Abington Park Museum which until December 2022 charts the history of Northampton’s Masque theatre group. Booking essential.

8 September - 15 December 2022 10.30 - 11.30 am £3 per talk, £24 whole series ticket. A series of talks on various subjects with tea/coffee and biscuits. Booking recommended.

Trainer trail Saturday 22 – Sunday 30 October During opening hours £2 Get your trainers on for a themed trail around the museum – find all the iconic trainers hidden around the building and some fun trainer facts to win a prize.

Saturday 29 October 10am - 12pm and 1 -3pm £4 per child In this workshop you will be supplied with all the materials to make your very own pair of cardboard trainers based on a pattern by designer Bobby Nangla. Create your favourite high-tops by decorating them with a distinctive design inspired by the trainers on display. Ages 7 – 12 years. Booking essential.

Art history lecture series Friday 4 November – Friday 2 December 10.15am - 12.15pm Our latest series of art history lectures takes its inspiration from our current exhibition strand exploring artists’ techniques and processes, which will be showing in Gallery 2 at Northampton Museum and Art Gallery until February 2023. If you have ever wondered what separates slipware from stoneware or how to tell an engraving from an etching, this lecture series is for you. Join us as we explore some of the creative processes’ artists have deployed over millennia and de-mystify the jargon surrounding techniques as diverse as pottery, medieval and modern sculpture, printing and tempera painting.