Lifting the lid on looting, exchange and trade
First opened in 1984, York Army Museum is home to one of the UK’s largest and most notable collections of regimental artefacts. If you’re a resident of York or the surrounding areas, chances are that you’ve already made a visit to this gem of a museum (if you’re yet to head down, Your Local Link would highly recommend it!) – but have you ever wondered how and why these objects came into its possession?
A new exhibition, opening on 23rd October, will explore the different ways in which historical artefacts from around the world have found their way into our city’s world-famous regimental museum. From the deliberate and systematic looting of captured territories, to the exchange of gifts and trade between allies, ‘Object Journeys’ investigates the complex, rarely examined motivations for military collecting.
Highlights of this illuminating York Army Museum exhibition include three beautifully crafted medieval ewers (lidded jugs), which made an extraordinary cross-continental journey from Europe to West Africa, eventually ending up at the royal palace in Kumasi (then the centre of the Asante Kingdom, now situated in modern Ghana), where they were seized by British soldiers in 1896. Two of the ewers were subsequently purchased by London’s British Museum – including the Asante Ewer, the largest surviving Medieval English bronze jug – while the other is currently housed in the collection of the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire, first formed in 1958 as a merging of The West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own) and The East Yorkshire Regiment (The Duke of York’s Own).
The exhibition loans on display in York have been supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow historically significant works of art and artefacts from larger national collections.
Given the exhibition’s focus on objects claimed as part of the UK’s arguably murky colonial history, York Army Museum is now starting to work with local Ghanaian communities (in tandem with the British Armed Forces) to give voice to alternative interpretations of the objects’ journeys. This is already opening up new and important conversations surrounding the meaning and implications of non-European objects in the wider framework of military organisational culture.
Major [Ret’d] Graeme Green, a curator at York Army Museum, said: “We are extremely grateful for the Weston Loan and Art Fund grant, which has made this exhibition possible, and look forward to welcoming visitors to discover ‘Object Journeys’ from 23 October
onwards.”
The exhibition opens at 3pm on Thursday, 23rd October, and runs until Saturday, 21 February 2026. Head over to www.yorkarmymuseum.co.uk/exhibitions-events to find out more, or call 01904 633830 to get in touch with York Army Museum.
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