The Kilburn Museum Lab represents the integrating themes of Middlesex University: inclusivity, equity, enriching lives through culture and sustaining communities.

It offers the opportunity to truly make the museum experience a diverse one, even while being avowedly local in its orientation. Supported by a British Academy SHAPE Involve and Engage award, as well as by Middlesex University, and led by the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries’ Dr. Francesca Murialdo and colleagues, the project’s catalogue documents a unique scheme to bring to light hitherto unexhibited exemplars of the area’s diverse heritage. Looking forward, while also looking back, the project has embraced the breadth of artefacts and narratives that make up the material culture of Kilburn, in turn strengthening the dimension of community which derives from shared – and sometimes previously unshared – objects. In this way, the project incorporates research, facilitating the excavation of unconsidered trifles to reveal their importance – a common practice of museums. Yet it also draws its impetus from exchange of knowledge, simultaneously allowing communion through sharing while interrupting stories and objects that might have been taken for granted. This catalogue of the Kilburn Museum Lab project promises to influence, for some years to come, not only the understanding of what Kilburn’s artefacts entail, but also how museums can harness the diversity of their communities for the future.