The Food Museum, formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life, is a museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk, England, which specialises in presenting the agricultural history of East Anglia through a mixture of exhibits and living history demonstrations. History of the Museum The land was originally part of the Home Farm for the Abbot’s Hall estate. The estate dates from medieval times, when it was an outlying manor for St Osyth's Priory in Essex. It passed through numerous owners until it was purchased by the Longe family in 1903. Mechanisation in the 1950s and 1960s meant that England was in danger of losing long-established skills, equipment, and buildings, if something was not done to rescue them. Local farmer Jack Carter, the Suffolk Local History Council, and other individuals worked to collect, preserve and display objects from rural East Anglia. After several years of temporary exhibitions, Vera and Ena Longe placed of farmland, Abbot’s Hall, its gardens, and 18/20 Crowe Street, in trust to be used as a museum. The Museum opened in 1967. In April 2022, the museum was renamed The Food Museum, a controversial move. Buildings The Museum has various buildings on its site, including: Abbot's Hall — each room explores a different notion of home and belonging in East Anglia. Home is defined in this exhibit as the physical place where we live, but also our sense of belonging to a place. Edgar's farmhouse — a 14th-century aisled farmhouse "discovered" in Combs, just south of Stowmarket, and incorporated into a much larger farmhouse dating from the Victorian era. Saved from demolition in 1970, it was the first historic building to be re-erected on the museum site. The first recorded owners were John and Ascelina Adgor, who in 1346 held nearly of arable land, of meadow, of pasture, a Rood of wood and three acres of alderwood in Combs. Evidence suggests that the Adgors survived the Black Death and prospered. The building is Grade II* listed. Crowe Street Cottages — the last pair of workers' cottages to remain as part of the Abbot's Hall Estate. Boby Building — features exhibitions of agricultural engines and individual craft workshops, a working printing press and a cinema. In July 1985, a team of apprentices assembled a Whitmore and Binyon horizontal condensing steam-engine in the building, which had previously been located at the mill of Reuben Rackham (1842-1924) in Wickham Market. It is believed to