05/09/2026
The Novium Museum regularly welcomes students from Schools, Colleges and Universities on short term work experience placements. Whilst on placement the students are given the opportunity to curate their very own small-scale exhibition. This project titled ‘Object in Focus’ sees the students pick an object, research their chosen item and create object labels. Their final task, with the help of museum staff, is to pull all their work together to creating their very own display.
We have recently installed our latest exhibition curated by Georgina Lehmann from the University of Brighton’s MA Curating Collections and Heritage course. Here’s what she has to say about her chosen objects for this project:
Dusty old shoes may appear to be an unpopular focus for an exhibition, but these shoes are far more mysterious and interesting than they seem. I chose these objects for my display because they are believed to be, in fact, anti-witchcraft charms. It has been an exciting opportunity to be able to work with a tangible artefact, especially one that is part of the history of local superstition, witchcraft and folk customs, an area of research I centred my undergraduate studies around and have been fascinated by since childhood.
Concealed shoes are a UK wide phenomenon of shoes being discovered in historic buildings, deliberately hidden under floorboards, in and around chimneys and fireplaces, under front doors and in attics. The shoes are always well worn with signs of repair and are often discovered as individual shoes rather than a pair. It is theorised that the shoes represent an individual. Leather shoes mould to the unique shape of the wearer’s foot over time. It may have been believed that this would confuse witches and evil spirits into believing the shoe was the wearer themselves and would direct their ill intentions onto the shoe by mistake, leaving the wearer unharmed by magical influence. Since the shoes are often uncovered in chimneys and under doorways, areas that it was believed evil spirits or witches could enter the house, the shoes may have also been intended as spirit traps, capturing the supernatural before it could enter in the first place.
