The St Helena National Trust is working with the Museum of St Helena and others to establish an industrial style museum dedicated to a vital era of the Island’s history, the flax industry.

Where are we?

The Pipe Building is an early industrial building, with a Victorian Ruston steam driven fixed bed engine, and is being renovated to house the new museum. It is situated behind the Prison in Narrabacks; we share the building with the Rehabilitation Centre with our door facing up the street. The building has been made available to the Trust by the St Helena Government.

What’s been achieved so far?

• Grant money of £5,000 from the Bryan Guinness Fund, secured with help from the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum, has been used to renovate the inside of the building. External renovations to the brick work and circular window are still to be carried out with assistance from the Tourism Office.
• Donations have been gratefully received from four donors for interpretation ‘story’ boards which draw primarily on historical material and documents from Ken Denholm and Nick Thorpe.
• We also have a lot of photographs to display, a video shot in 1962, and the audio tape of the Fibre Musical performed by schoolchildren for Prince Andrew in 1984. Interpretation of these resources has been made possible with the procurement of audio visual equipment with a grant from Good Government Funds.
• Volunteer, Brian Turpin has worked hard to make replicas of two of the large machines used in the processing of the flax, a stripper, which stripped off the green non fibrous tissue leaving the fibre and a scutcher which removed any dry non fibrous material and short fibre, called ‘tow’. The materials for the construction were donated by Nick Thorpe and included original parts from the Fairyland flax mill.
• Ryan Moyce and Edward Baldwin have provided valuable assistance in the preparation of the interpretation panels.
• The Friends of St Helena have generously donated £1,000 to contribute towards the costs of installing electricity into the building, glazing the windows, constructing housing for the audio visual equipment and materials for the construction of a wheelchair ramp.
• Keith Hopkins kindly built the wheelchair ramp.
• Jamestown cubs and scouts happily gave their time to help to clean the Ruston engine.

We are extremely grateful to all the individuals and organizations that have helped to get us to where we are today.

Come along and see for yourself

We invite you to come along and take a look and find out more about this important piece of the island’s history which is within living memory for many Saints today.

We need your help to bring the museum ‘to life’.
The Museum is still ‘work in progress’ and there is still much to do to finish the exhibits and make it an informative and entertaining place to visit.

You can help by:

• Perhaps you have information, suggestions or ideas to make the displays or interpretation better.
• If you have experiences of life during the flax industry days we’d love to hear from you.
• We’d also love to hear from you, if you have any memorabilia from that era which you would be willing to be put on display.
• Perhaps you might like to share your experiences with visitors and be a guide when the Museum opens?

Or you might know something about the steam engine? Or have an interest in its restoration?

• BUT, most of all we hope you will come along and enjoy your visit!

Donations for the reconstruction of a stripper and the restoration of a rope-maker  would be warmly appreciated.

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