Salisbury Museum
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| Established | 1860 |
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| Location | The King's House, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England |
| Type | History museum |
| Director | Adrian Green |
| Website | The Salisbury Museum Website |
The Salisbury Museum (previously The Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum) is a museum in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. It houses one of the best collections relating to Stonehenge and local archaeology.
The museum is housed in The King's House, a Grade I listed building, where King James I of England was entertained in 1610 and 1613. Set in the surroundings of the Cathedral Close, the museum faces the west front of Salisbury Cathedral. Previously based at No 40-42, St Ann Street, where it had been founded in 1860 by Dr Richard Fowler, FRS, it transferred to its current location in the 1970s.
The original three-storey building with mullioned and transomed windows, ornate plaster ceilings and a fine oak-balustraded staircase, houses the main temporary exhibition gallery, with the ceramics gallery above. The arms of James I's eldest son, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, can be seen in a window in the Wedgwood gallery upstairs.
The Director of the museum is Adrian Green.
Summer exhibitions since 2011 have featured artists who share a close connection with the locality.
A £350,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) was awarded in August 2013, to help save the personal archive of Rex Whistler. The Salisbury Museum hopes to purchase the archive, which contains over 1,000 items and is the only substantial collection of material relating to the artist.
On 10 September 2012, a 90 kilograms (200 lb) meteorite, possibly the biggest to have ever fallen on the British Isles, went on display at the museum. For at least 80 years it sat near the front door of Lake House at Wilsford-cum-Lake near Salisbury. When the house was sold, the stone was confirmed as a meteorite by the Natural History Museum where it remained in storage for many years. Professor Colin Pillinger, known for his work on the Beagle 2 Mars spacecraft, had been studying a smaller meteorite from the Danebury Hill Fort in Hampshire and felt that there could be a connection between the two. The meteorite from Lake House was retrieved from storage and although the two objects were found to be unrelated, Professor Pillinger continued with his study of the larger meteorite.
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