Visit Discover DeCrypt

Welcome to our cafe space

Enjoy Fairtrade coffee and tea, and a snack in the Schoolroom.

Relax with the paper or a good book.

Children can play, read or get creative at the art table.

Lots to do for all ages

Come to an event: storytelling, poetry, music, art, drama.

See our events programme for details.

Parents and toddlers welcome

Drop in to one of our Saturday morning toddler play sessions (11.00am-12.30pm) or try our storytelling morning (Wednesdays 11.00-11.30am).

Relax with coffee and chat

If you want to talk, stop by on a Friday morning (11.00am-12.30pm) for Coffee, Cake and Conversation.

Explore a Medieval Church… and a Tudor Schoolroom

Follow the Rose Petal Trail and find the hidden stories of Gloucester’s past.

Use our talking pens to discover more…

Meet a host of characters

Jemmy Wood

See the tomb of banker, Jemmy Wood, the ‘real’ Scrooge from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. He preferred to walk rather than pay for a carriage and scavenged bits of coal for his fire off the ground at the docks. But was he really as miserly as people said?

George Whitefield

George Whitefield, evangelist preacher and co-founder of Methodism, famous in colonial America for his ‘trumpet voice’. He preached to thousands in America and Britain and crossed the Atlantic seven times. See the pulpit where he preached his first sermon and find out what he got up to here as a schoolboy.

Joan Cooke,

Hear the story of Joan Cooke, the formidable woman who started the first ‘free school of grammar’ in Gloucester in 1539.

Robert Raikes

Learn about Robert Raikes, owner of the Gloucester Journal, prison reformer and a leader of the Sunday School movement. Can you find his initials scratched into the wooden panelling from when he was a schoolboy here?

Explore the world of a Tudor classroom…dress like a Tudor…try writing with a quill pen, learn how to make ink and guess what Tudor schoolboys did with a piss pot and a pounce bag…search for graffiti from the 18th century and see what archaeologists found under the floorboards

Visit Discover DeCrypt