Sherri Steel, curator of social history at York's Castle Museum, with items from the Every Home Should Have One exhibition, which will will shortly be closing to make way for a new display on the Millennium

Visitors to the York Castle Museum have their last chance to see one of its most enduring exhibitions this month.

The Every Home Should Have One display, housed in the Chapel Gallery, features household appliances through the ages.

Everything from toilets to televisions, Victorian washing machines to Edwardian showers are on show.

But soon the 15-year-old exhibition will close for good. It is making way for the Castle Museum's Millennium exhibition about birth, marriage and death, called From Cradle To Grave.

This ambitious project will demonstrate how our attitudes to these three rites of passage have changed over the decades. At its centre will be a Victorian horse-drawn hearse, forming part of an 1870s funeral procession.

Every Home Should Have One will run until the end of October, allowing families to visit for a last time during half term.

Then Castle Museum staff will begin to dismantle it, although the gallery remains open to the public for another two weeks.

"The exhibits will go into store," said Sherri Steele, the museum's curator of social history.

"We are planning to create another gallery about domestic appliances in the future, with new items on show."

Josie Sheppard, curator of textiles, said work would begin soon to redecorate the gallery and install dramatic lighting for the Millennium exhibition.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.