The Hockey Museum

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    • Address
      • 13 High Street, Woking, Surrey, GU21 6B, England, UK
    • Opening Hours
      • Tuesday and Wednesday 1000-1600, or by appointment
    • Access Information
      • All archived materials are available by appointment at curatorial discretion.
    • Photographs Allowed
      • Yes
    • Accessible
      • No
      • The exhibition space of the museum is accessible, but the archives and toilet are on an upper floor only accessible by stairs. Materials can be brought down into the exhibition or ground floor office space for viewing, but the closest public accessible toilet is in a nearby shopping centre or train station.
    • Archival and Other Holdings
      • The Hockey Museum has amassed the largest collection of hockey heritage material in the world, with over 1200 collections of varying size. These listings focus on our paper archives, but we also have a large range of other collections and objects, you can find out more about here: https://hockeymuseum.org/what-we-do/collections.
      • Our paper and digital archives include scrapbooks and press cuttings, rule books, match programmes, minutes, the records and accounts of national, regional, county and umpiring associations and many club records, as well as the playing records and statistics of national teams.
      • The museum also houses the worlds largest collection of hockey books from the 1890s to the present day in our library; a vast photography archive chronicling hockey's development; a diverse art collection including paintings and sculture, textiles, engraings and illustrations, and prints and posters; and an audio-visual collection with both digital and physical material covering highlights, coaching films, and oral history interviews.
      • There is also a vast range of clothing and textiles covering historical developments in hockey clothing, as well as caps, flags and pennants; a broad collection of equipment showing the evolution of hockey sticks and balls, goalkeeping kit, and the introduction and development of artificial playing surfaces; a collection of cloth and pin badges capruting players' hockey lives; a range of philately including both national and international stamps, and hockey postcards; and a range of hockey trophies and medals from all levels of competition.
    • History
      • Plans for a museum for hockey have been in place since the 1980s but challenges, particularly administrative uncertainties, and the closure of the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes, meant this did not come to fruition. Instead, the focus was on ensuring heritage materials weren't simply lost. Thankfully, volunteers managed to save the material, and England Hockey set up an Archives Steering Group in 2007.
      • In 2010, Mike Smith was invited by Woking Borough Council to curate a hockey exhibition for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Sensing an opportunity for something greater, he persuaded the Council to grant premises for a physical museum site. They offered offices in an old warehouse, and the world’s first museum for hockey opened its doors in October 2012. In late 2017 we moved into our third and current home, a town centre location Woking, re-opening in April 2018.
      • You can read more about our history here: https://hockeymuseum.org/our-charity/history-of-the-hockey-museum.