This Saturday, Watford Museum is holding a family fun day as part of its ongoing St Mary’s Tombs Project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to restore and celebrate Watford’s historic features.

“It’s going to be really good fun,” says Sarah Priestley, museum and heritage manager. “The project is about exploring and celebrating Watford’s history, so the fun day has that theme of heritage.”

There will be children’s art and arts and crafts activities – printmaking, because of Watford’s strong links to that trade, making suncatchers based on stories from St Mary’s Church and Watford, music making with musicians from Watford Folk Club, and face-painting. Throughout, visitors will be encouraged to explore both the museum and their town’s history.

The St Mary’s Tombs Project is a partnership between the museum and Watford Borough Council to restore 12 locally and nationally listed tombs in St Mary’s Church, just off the High Street.

In March, the council was awarded a grant of £80,300 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to restore them. The tombs are those of key people who helped shaped the development of Watford during the 18th and 19th Centuries, such as the prominent Dyson family, who were behind the historic Benskin’s brewery and who lived in the brewery house on Lower High Street, now home to the museum.

“The tombs are really beautiful but they’ve got into a terrible state of disrepair, so for the last few years they’ve had railings around them for protection, for the public as well as for the tombs,” Sarah explains. “The guys are out there as we speak, carrying out the restoration – they’re been working hard in all this hot weather.”

There is also a gravestone in the churchyard that Sarah and the team hope to raise awareness of.

“Edward George Doney was a former slave from Gambia,” Sarah says, “and it’s not so much that it’s in a bad state of repair, it’s more the fact that people just don’t know it’s there. What we wanted to do as part of the restoration project was to have better signposts towards our history, to help people unlock it so that if you’re walking through the churchyard, and it’s a really lovely, popular, open space, you’d be able to realise that you’re stepping back into the history of Watford, you’re surrounded by it.”

But Sarah explains that the project is not simply about restoration of these tombs.

“It’s also about using this as an opportunity to explore the town’s history. We recently produced a pocket-sized heritage guide to Watford and we’ll be holding a heritage open day in September, that will include Folk Day which Watford Folk Club will be involved in.”

There will also be talks, family history workshops at Watford Central Library, a film documenting the project by local and internationally-acclaimed filmmakers MewLab, which will be shown at the museum later in the year, and tours of the restoration site in the churchyard of St Mary’s.

“They’re all just different things to say to people ‘look around you, there are amazing things to explore in Watford’.”

  • Watford Museum Family Fun Day is at Watford Museum, Lower High Street, Watford on Saturday, August 3 from 11am to 4pm. Details: 01923 232297, watfordmuseum.org.uk