Kent Museum of the Moving Image

The Kent Museum of the Moving Image stands in Deal, a seaside town in Kent. It occupies the top of Stanhope Road, on the site of a former care home. Across the road is the Astor Theatre, Deal’s main entertainment venue. The museum opened in April 2018 after being created by David Francis and his wife Jocelyn Marsh. David Francis had helped set up the Museum of the Moving Image in London. His wife’s father was the production designer Terence Marsh. The museum is worth visiting for its changing exhibitions that explore different aspects of moving images. One show traces 35,000 years of shadows in art and technology. Another looks back at Ealing Studios films from 1938 to 1958 through posters and film clips. A third displays vintage Vinten cameras and equipment donated by the Vinten family. Earlier displays included a review of Victorian London’s multimedia experiments at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Inside, visitors find three temporary exhibitions that change regularly. The shadow exhibition invites people to interact with light and projection. The Ealing retrospective shows how film posters shaped public taste. The camera display highlights equipment used on major productions. Each exhibition uses objects, images and texts to tell its story. The building itself, once a care home, now houses these modern displays.