PEOPLE have dusted off their valuables to help create a new exhibition at a city museum.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Museum of Oxford is encouraging residents to share objects that have an interesting story or local historical significance.

Details of the artefacts, from old pub signs and dancing shoes to wedding suits and parts of an old Keble College barge, will be uploaded to an online gallery.

The community engagement officer at the Town Hall museum, Antonia Harland-Lang, said: “As a local history museum we aim to tell the story of Oxford and its people.

“While at the museum we do a lot, it’s the people out there that are really the experts.

“It’s a bit of an experiment but we want people to think what they might have in their homes that reflects something about Oxford in the last 40 years.”

Items were registered, digitised and stored on a collecting day on Saturday.

All of them could potentially become one of the 40 objects chosen to be displayed in the exhibition which will run from September to February next year.

Marilyn Ching, from Summertown, came in with the yellow wedding suit she got married in at the St Giles register office in 1973.

The 64-year-old bought the outfit from the Campus store in High Street.

She said: “I walked into the shop and thought ‘I have to have it’.

“I think it was the bright yellow colour and navy blue extras. My husband Peter got married in a blue suit.”

The retired legal secretary, who has also worked for Oxfam and Blackwell’s, volunteers at the museum.

Val Pelletier, from Botley, bought in old bags and photographs from a 200-year-old record store in High Street that closed down in 2011.

Independent music retailer Russell Acott moved from its prime location – where All Bar One is now located – to Botley in 1998 before finally being run out of business thirteen years later.

The museum volunteer said: “The importance of this project is that if people don’t bring these sorts of things in the knowledge will die out.

“As people get older they get more nostalgic as well and we need to know about our history and learn from it.”

* To add to the exhibition contact the museum by emailing aharland-lang@oxford.gov.uk