Whitby Museum

Whitby Museum has been run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, a registered charity, since the Society's founding in 1823, with no local authority or national funding behind it. The current building in Pannett Park opened in 1931 and holds one of Britain's strongest collections of Jurassic fossils alongside Whitby jet jewellery, ships' models and material relating to Captain Cook's Whitby-built vessels. Among the stranger objects on display is a Hand of Glory, the pickled hand of a hanged man once believed to ward off evil. The photography archive includes glass-plate negatives by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, who documented the town's fishing community in the late nineteenth century. Volunteers and trustees drawn from the Society still oversee the collection today.